Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is accused of plagiarizing parts of his Oxford thesis

 

By Andrea Widburg

America’s Trump/MAGA/America haters have been absolutely thrilled that Mark Carney is now Canada’s new prime minister. That sentiment about his inherent worth was perfectly summed up in a meme that many of my leftist friends (gathered during a lifetime spent in leftist enclaves) shared on Facebook: “Canada picked a guy with a PhD in economics. Mexico chose a woman with a degree in physics and a PhD in energy engineering. The U.S. handed the job to a carnival-barking senior citizen with multiple felonies and six bankruptcies under his belt.”

Internet meme.

Ignore the silly insults a bout Trump (who has a bachelor’s degree from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania), who used bankruptcy as a reorganization tool on his way to becoming a multi-billionaire, and whose felony convictions were political hit jobs. Focus, instead, on that reverence for credentialism.

Canada’s Mark Carney, who got a Master’s and PhD at Oxford, attended that institution in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it was already transitioning to leftism. However, one could colorably argue back then that it was still a legitimate institution and not just a playground for leftists. His degrees, therefore, should have value. But do they? Well, maybe not.

YouTube screen grab (cropped).

Britain’s media are reporting that Carney’s specific PhD degree may not have any value at all because he may have plagiarized chunks of it. Per The Telegraph:

Passages of his thesis from his doctorate in economics from Nuffield College were published appearing to show verbatim quotes, paragraphs or lightly amended excerpts from previous works without proper attribution.Geoffrey Sigalet, from the University of British Columbia said: “He’s just directly repeating without quotations. That’s what we call plagiarism.”

Mr Carney is accused of presenting sentences from the economist Michael E Porter as his own in his thesis. Mr Carney does cite Mr Porter’s 1990 book The Competitive Advantage of Nations at different points, but is accused of failing to do so in others.

Carney, through his spokespeople, is vigorously denying the charge that he plagiarized Porter’s work, but it’s hard to deny that the unattributed language is remarkably similar.

Thus, in 1990, Porter wrote, “First, government intervention can impede international competition and artificially support domestic profits.” Five years later, Carney included this unattributed sentence in his thesis: “First, government intervention can impede international competition and artificially support domestic profits.”

Other sentences were similar, albeit “tweaked”:

In one paragraph, Mr Carney wrote: “There are three reasons why domestic profitability is not a good indicator of true international competitive advantage.”

The original sentence in Mr Porter’s book read: “Domestic profitability is not a good indication of true international competitive advantage for three important reasons.”

In addition to those weird echoes of Porter’s work, Carney also had some sentences that almost precisely echoed (without attribution) the work of a 1989 Jeremy C. Stein article, “Efficient Capital Markets, Inefficient Firms: A Model of Myopic Corporate Behaviour.” Stein wrote, “Maximising the present value of their income will be the same as maximising the following utility at each time t,” and Carney echoed, “Maximising the present value of their income will be the same as maximising the following utility function at each time t”.

When writing a long and complicated document, mistakes happen. But at a certain point, things cease to be mistakes and have an odor of deliberation about them. Or, as Ian Fleming memorably wrote, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

I can’t say that I’d be surprised to learn that Carney’s “mistakes” weren’t mistakes at all. Despite a life spent at elite schools followed by a career amassing wealth (without ever creating value), Carney is a leftist at heart and, as we saw a few years ago, leftists have no compunction about plagiarizing, with everyone from academics to Kamala Harris standing accused.

The reason leftists are so willing to appropriate others’ work is that every leftist has a very personal spin on Marx’s mantra about “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” As leftists see it, when their needs outstrip their abilities (including their intellectual abilities), what’s yours is theirs.

Indeed, whenever I think of leftists, I think of Frozone, in The Incredibles, trying to explain to his wife that he needs to save the world. Her response is leftist to the core:

In other words, every leftist (seemingly including Mark Carney) is his own “greatest good.” Under that rubric, if Carney needs to steal someone’s intellectual property, so be it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/canadian_prime_minister_mark_carney_is_accused_of_plagiarizing_parts_of_his_oxford_thesis.html