FIRST READING: Liberal promises just keep happening to intersect with Carney's business interests

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter that throughout the 2025 election will be a daily digest of campaign goings-on, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. TOP STORY After Liberal Leader Mark Carney announced that Canada’s future lay in “prefabricated and modular housing,” online critics noted that his former company just happens to be a major player in the modular housing industry. This week, Carney provided more details of his plan to start a new government agency, Build Canada Homes, tasked with constructing 500,000 homes every year. As Carney told reporters on Tuesday, most of those homes would be prefabricated. “Prefabricated and modular housing will catalyze a productivity boom,” he said. Until he quit just four months ago to run for the Liberal leadership, Carney was chair of Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world’s largest investment firms. In 2021, the firm spent $5 billion to acquire Modulaire Group, a major manufacturer of modular buildings. While the company currently operates in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Modulaire’s website notes that they are specialists in the realm of “rapid urbanization.” And this has been happening a lot. Brookfield’s investments are so vast and its interests so wide-ranging that with many Liberal announcements, the company could potentially be indirect beneficiaries. After zeroing Canada’s consumer carbon tax last month, Carney unveiled a climate plan which promised to “improve subsidies for heat pumps to make home heating more affordable.” In 2023, Brookfield spent US$5 billion to acquire HomeServe, a British home repair multinational that has leaned hard into heat pump refurbishments. Carney’s links to HomeServe have gotten him into trouble as recently as October, when Britain’s The Telegraph reported that Carney had been actively lobbying the British government to increase heat pump subsidies on Brookfield’s behalf. “Mark (Carney) is working on our behalf in government and he did have a meeting on this with (Chancellor of the Exchequer) Rachel Reeves,” HomeServe founder Richard Harpin told The Telegraph. Carney’s newly released Canadian climate plan also promised to “increase financial incentives for energy efficient homes.” Brookfield Residential, the $6 billion property development arm of Brookfield Asset Management, is already a major builder of energy efficient homes in both Ontario and Alberta. They just opened Seton, a planned community outside of Calgary that advertises itself as a model of sustainable building. “When you live in a home in Seton, you can rest easy knowing you’ve made a sustainable choice,” reads promotional literature. In 2022, Brookfield partnered with Trane Technologies “to offer decarbonization-as-a-service for commercial, industrial, and public sector customers.” Last week, Carney said he would maintain the Trudeau government’s 2019 Impact Assessment Act, the so-called “No New Pipelines Act” due to its much higher regulatory burden on new resource projects. This is despite rising support for a fast-tracked east-west pipeline that would reduce Canadian dependence on U.S. oil infrastructure. A recent Bloomberg-commissioned poll found that a record 77 per cent of Canadians supported such a project. While Carney has said it would make sense for Quebec to use Canadian oil instead of American, he said he would only support such a project “where we have the support of First Nations (and) we have the support of all the provinces, obviously including Quebec.” At the same time, Brookfield is closing in on a $9 billion deal to acquire the 8,850 kilometre Colonial Pipeline in the United States. Running from oil-rich Texas all the way to New York State, the Colonial Pipeline is basically an American equivalent to any future Alberta-to-Quebec pipeline. The potential conflicts of interest presented by Carney’s Brookfield ties have been an issue ever since Carney first took a job in September as an economic advisor to then prime minister Justin Trudeau. As Conservative opponents noted at the time, Carney was employed through the Liberal Party rather than the Prime Minister’s Office, which dispensed with the usual ethics disclosures that would accompany such a position. Upon becoming prime minister, Carney put his assets into a blind trust and said he was working with the ethics commissioner to put “screens around certain issues” in which his business interests might intersect with his policy decisions. Carney is required to disclose his assets within 120 days of becoming prime minister, a deadline he won’t hit until after the election. Although he is not volunteering them before then, Brookfield’s own disclosures show that Carney holds options in the company that were worth US$6.8 million as of December. On Wednesday, Conservative candidate Michael Barrett — previously the party’s ethics critic — renewed his frequent accusation that Carney is backing policies poised to directly enrich his Brookfield interests. “Mark Carney’s $1B heat pump plan could deliver BIG profits for him & his friends at Brookfield. But he still refuses to disclose his assets & financial interests,” Barrett wrote in a post to X. Carney is one of the wealthiest figures to ever become Canadian prime minister, and he has compared his situation to that of Paul Martin, who prior to entering politics was the CEO of the shipping juggernaut Canada Steamship Lines. In 2003, just prior to becoming prime minister, Martin sold the company to his sons, bowing to criticism that merely putting his shares in a blind trust would not be sufficient to avoid conflicts of interest. “I want Canadians to know that my only business … would be the public’s business,” Martin said at the time.

• What Carney said to a heckler who shouted: 'There's a genocide happening in Palestine!'
• John Ivison: Carney’s rosy energy promises meet the Liberals’ dismal record

LET’S POLL Polymarket — an online prediction market where you can bet on electoral outcomes — is now heavily favouring a Liberal victory in the election. The question “Next Prime Minister of Canada after the election?” has attracted more than $40 million in bets, and is now at 78 per cent likelihood for Liberal Leader Mark Carney, and 23 per cent for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. The question “Which Party wins most seats in Canadian election?” has attracted more than $10 million in bets, and its ratios are similar: 79.1 per cent for the Liberals, 21 per cent for the Conservative Party. GAFFETERIA The Trudeau government was extremely conciliatory to the anti-Israel crowd in the months following the October 7 massacres in Southern Israel, to the point where they were once directly thanked by the leadership of Hamas. Nevertheless, they never endorsed the claim that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted a “genocide.” So it’s notable that when a heckler at a Mark Carney event accused him of ignoring the “genocide happening in Palestine,” Carney replied “I’m aware, that’s why we have an arms embargo” — an apparent reference to Canada’s suspension of military exports to Israel. When asked about this later, Carney said he didn’t hear the word “genocide,” and just thought the heckler was shouting about “the situation” in Gaza. Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter here.