Here lies the Carney paradox: his critique of market fundamentalism has always been more radical than his remedies.

Prime Minister Mark Carney knows what’s broken in capitalism. He wrote the book on it.

In Value(s): Building a Better World for All, he exposed how markets discount the future, reward environmental destruction, and prioritize short-term profits over long-term well-being. He called for a moral reset of capitalism, one grounded in resilience, responsibility, and intergenerational justice.

Yet his mandate letter to cabinet and Throne Speech deliver the same conventional growth strategies: removing trade barriers, speeding project approvals, boosting “competitiveness.” Climate is an afterthought. Health is absent. Reconciliation gets a passing mention. The speech promised to deliver “an economy that serves everyone” while proposing the same trickle-down economics that work best for those at the top. Where are the bold, systems-thinking ideas Carney the philosopher championed?

This is no ordinary moment: climate breakdown, inequality, and authoritarianism are on the rise. The global economic order is being rewritten. These overlapping crises demand more than nudges and voluntary commitments. They require structural change.

Here lies the Carney paradox: his critique of market fundamentalism has always been more radical than his remedies. He exposed a system where profits are privatized while health and environmental costs are pushed onto workers, the public, and future generations. And yet where in his political agenda is the structural reform his diagnosis calls for?

Carney wrote, “we value what we measure,” critiquing how our economy rewards destruction and calls it growth. When wildfire smoke blanketed Ontario in 2023, costing $1.2-billion in health impacts in a week, this registered as prosperity. Sick people and timber clear-cuts are GDP gains, health and ecosystem degradation are invisibilized. To lead on well-being, Carney’s government must move beyond GDP. While Trump dismantles the “social cost of carbon,” Carney must go the other way and institutionalize measuring what matters.

Carney warned of the “tragedy of the horizon”—the way economic and political systems systematically discount the future in decision-making. At standard discount rates, the welfare of someone living 200 years from now is worth nearly nothing in today’s decisions. Carney rightly called this “a violation of any plausible ethical standard.” If he takes this seriously, intergenerational justice must become a governing principle. A Well-being for Future Generations Act, like the one in Wales, would give unborn generations a legal voice so their futures aren’t mortgaged for short-term gain.

Carney was a thought leader on how “stranded assets” in fossil fuels would cause a “carbon bubble” and catastrophic warming, and he argued that most reserves must stay in the ground. Yet the market solutions he has championed—voluntary disclosure, industry pledges—have fallen flat. His Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero is unraveling, and RBC is ditching its climate targets altogether. Instead of coming clean, companies are exploiting the very amendments to the Competition Act that we at the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment helped secure to address rampant greenwashing. This shows that binding rules—like the proposed Climate-Aligned Finance Act and a robust green taxonomy—are urgently needed to enforce standards and accountability.

Carney understands that climate change isn’t about consumer choice: it’s systemic. He’s called it the greatest market failure of our time. But pollution isn’t a failure: it’s a cost-shifting success for those who offload harm onto others. An economy that serves everyone must confront these moral hazards and ensure polluters pay their share.

The polycrisis we face demands more than tweaks. It requires rewriting the rules: placing health and sustainability at the centre, investing in a just transition, and ending perverse incentives to pollute. The new federal Cabinet Committee on Quality of Life and Well-Being is a promising first step. Now it must be given the mandate to advance transformative policies, from implementing alternative indicators beyond GDP to ensuring health and environmental costs are reflected in prices.

Some will say these ideas are too ambitious. But continuing with business as usual as climate, health, and inequality crises mount is the real fantasy. We are seeing Carney the banker, but where is Carney the philosopher? Where are the values he championed? Or are we just getting the same technocratic pragmatism that has failed to solve the crises he diagnosed so clearly?

History won’t remember how well he managed the status quo. It will remember whether he dared to change it.

This op-ed by Leah Temper, director of CAPE’s health and economic policy program, was originally published in The Hill Times on June 3, 2025.