Carney Refuses to Sell Brookfield — Then Liberals Kill the Committee That Caught Him

Parliament's ethics committee recommended this week that Prime Minister Carney must sell his Brookfield assets within 60 days. Liberal MPs rejected the report. Now the Liberals are seizing majority control of the very committees designed to hold government accountable.

On April 23, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics tabled a sweeping review of the Conflict of Interest Act — a report containing 20 recommendations, many written specifically to address Prime Minister Mark Carney's unprecedented tangle of financial conflicts.

The central recommendation: the Prime Minister of Canada should be required to sell all controlled assets within 60 days of taking office. Not hide them in a blind trust. Sell them outright. The committee heard from governance scholars, ethics lawyers, and senior public servants before reaching that conclusion.

"Individuals with greater decision-making authority should be held and must be held to higher standards," said Conservative MP John Brassard, the committee's chair.

The Liberal members of the committee signed a dissenting report, rejecting the recommendations. Liberal MP Linda Lapointe, the committee's vice-chair, was blunt: "This is a very partisan report that was created to target a single person. We will not let it go through."

The Liberals will use their House majority to vote it down.

The Brookfield Problem, Explained

Carney served as executive chairman of Brookfield Asset Management — the Wall Street–linked firm that oversees more than US$1 trillion in global assets. When he became Prime Minister, he placed his holdings in a blind trust rather than selling them. That trust still contains options and deferred shares tied to Brookfield's performance.

The problem isn't subtle. As Prime Minister, Carney sets policy on carbon markets, infrastructure investment, financial regulation, and land conservation — every one of which directly affects industries and asset classes in Brookfield's portfolio. His government has deployed Canada's assets and policy levers in ways that align, often precisely, with Brookfield's strategic interests.

The conflict-of-interest screen managing Carney's recusals now covers more than 100 corporate entities. The screen is so extensive that even Privy Council clerk Michael Sabia — one of two senior officials running it — chose to sell his own Brookfield shares to "better manage" the Prime Minister's screen. Sabia could see the conflict clearly enough to act. Carney has not.

Seizing the Watchdog

That conflict-of-interest story alone would be damaging. What makes this week's developments something more is what happened in parallel.

As the ethics committee tabled its report, Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon announced the Liberals are tabling a motion to take majority control of all House of Commons committees, including the very Ethics Committee that produced the Carney conflict report.

MacKinnon framed the move as ending "silly partisan games." Opposition parties — Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois — called it what it is: a power grab.

"These are important committees where the opposition does the work on behalf of Canadian taxpayers and voters, to shine a light, to go through line by line spending, to find out who got contracts and how decisions were made," said Conservative House Leader Andrew Scheer.

Ethics committee chair John Brassard was more specific about what's at stake. These are the same committees, he noted, that exposed the ArriveCAN scandal — the $54-million app that should have cost $250,000. The same committees that surfaced the Winnipeg National Microbiology Lab security breach, in which fired scientists were found to have shared research with the Chinese military. Both scandals were suppressed by government until parliamentary committees with opposition majorities forced them into the open.

"Without a majority on those committees," Brassard warned, "it will limit and handcuff the ability to expose corruption, to expose cronyism, to expose the type of scandals that we've seen in the past."

The Pattern Is Unmistakable

The timeline matters. The ethics committee released a report challenging Carney's conflict of interest on April 23. The Liberals announced their committee majority takeover the same week. Conservatives have proposed an amendment that would at least preserve opposition control of three specific watchdog committees — Government Estimates, Public Accounts, and Ethics. The Liberals have shown no interest in that compromise.

MacKinnon said he didn't consult any opposition party before tabling the motion, and dismissed the Conservatives' concern as a reason he didn't need to negotiate.

What Canadians are watching unfold is a Prime Minister with over 100 active conflict-of-interest screens on his investment holdings — a PM who refuses to simply sell those holdings and end the ambiguity — now backed by a government moving to strip the institutional tools designed to flag and publicize exactly those conflicts.

This is not a partisan interpretation. These are the documented facts, from committee records, House of Commons proceedings, and the Privy Council's own disclosures.

Canadians should ask: if the blind trust is adequate and the conflicts are well-managed, why work so hard to neutralize the committees checking the work?

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