NightOwl

In this 2021 book Value(s): Building A Better World For All, Carney tried to persuade us to believe in the free market---not just its merits, but its capacity to self-regulate, to be persuaded to do the right thing, to adopt "enlightened values," to develop a kinder and gentler capitalism to meet a brutal moment.

This is the same Carney who played a key role in bailing out Canada's banks during the global financial crisis.

The move ushered in more than a decade of cheap money, which in turn helped fuel a long-term, record-setting growth in the wealth gap while giving rise to financial bubbles and dodgy investments, driving up household debt, and exacerbating the housing crisis.

The asset-management firm Carney chaired, Brookfield, is another clear example of the fundamental inconsistency in believing the free market---perhaps led by the gentlest of hands by the state---is the way forward on climate.

The firm is a dirty-energy behemoth, investing billions in fossil fuels.

It has "one of the biggest portfolios of dirty energy in the world," says climate finance activist Jason Mogus, who worked with the Sunrise Project. "And they continue to expand it."

Perhaps the PPF's most notorious effort was in promoting the five-year $595 million newspaper bailout announced in 2019, which was recently extended for another five years until 2029 with increased tax credits for publishers. The PPF helped to start the subsidies flowing with its 2017 report The Shattered Mirror, which proposed federal funding of $300-$400 million a year for what it called a "Future of Journalism and Democracy Fund." It painted such an exaggerated portrait of woe in the newspaper industry, however, as to bring guffaws from those who study it.

The resulting subsidies have done little more than help to keep hundreds of millions in debt payments flowing to the US hedge funds that own 98 percent of Postmedia Network, which publishes most of Canada's largest newspapers, such as the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald and Vancouver Sun. Postmedia now subsists mostly on government handouts, which have helped it send more than $500 million south to its hedge fund masters since 2010, as I showed in my 2023 book The Postmedia Effect. Postmedia has greatly increased its grip on our press in the past decade to collect more and more subsidies, taking over the Sun Media chain in 2015, the Brunswick News chain in 2022, and last year the SaltWire Network chain that dominates Atlantic Canada. It replaces local news in the papers it devours with paid propaganda for Big Oil and its CEO has ordered editors to make their content more favourable to Conservatives. Meanwhile, National Post columnists such as Conrad Black and Jordan Peterson spew hatred for our country and promote its takeover by the US.

For months, columnists at outlets like The Globe and Mail and The National Post have been normalizing government policies that strip people of their autonomy and force them into treatment---all under the guise of compassion.

Some of these opinion pieces come from individuals with ties to private clinics---which stand to profit from forced abstinence policies---who fail to disclose their obvious conflicts of interest.

Despite decades of evidence showing that involuntary treatment increases harm and fails to support long-term abstinence, several provincial legislatures are proposing to forcibly "treat" people for drug use.

Research has shown that people in long-term treatment do best when they enter voluntarily and that there is no sound evidence to support coercion.

So why is the public hearing a chorus of calls to expand this failed approach?

With the increasing visibility of poverty across Canada and a toxic drug crisis that shows no signs of ending, several provincial legislatures are resorting to policies like forced treatment to deflect attention away from their own failures that created these crises in the first place.