2025-07-09

Mark Carney is Your Nightmare Boss

Undercover Boss

Years ago, there was a reality show on cable TV called *Undercover Boss*. I only ever caught it a few times, but I remember really enjoying it.

In my memory at least, the episodes went something like this: some higher-up in a company - the CEO, plant owner, someone in upper management, etc - wants to learn about the day-to-day operations of the business. Maybe they're looking for 'efficiencies', maybe they think their employees are slackers, or maybe they just want to see first-hand the unvarnished truth of how things get done at the place they run.

With hidden cameras recording, they walk into the workplace posing as a new trainee, and their new 'co-workers' start to show them the ropes. It's all based on subterfuge, which makes the whole thing kind of creepy; part of me suspects the show's creators wanted it to be a subtle warning to employees everywhere: *watch what you do at work, because your boss might be secretly watching you!*

But more often than not, the end result is something wonderful: the undercover boss, confronted with their own complete ineptitude, begins to appreciate how much hard work and skill these jobs really demand, and how knowledgable, dedicated, patient, and helpful the workers are.

And sure, it's a shame the boss needs an entire production team to come in, plant cameras everywhere, and give them a fake identity and backstory, before they're able to have this kind of genuinely humbling experience. But it makes for good TV!

* * *

This last weekend, the cable news stations all ended up airing various short clips from PM Mark Carney's less-than-expert attempt at flipping pancakes at the Calgary Stampede.

Watching a politician mangle food prep for 30 seconds is all in good fun, but it doesn't tell you much. What was far more revealing was the full 5-minute segment aired by CPAC:

Plenty of politicians would be out of their element in this situation. In Carney's case, this would be an understatement. From the moment he's handed the flipper, you get the sense this man hasn't cooked a meal, swept a floor, or cleaned a bathroom in decades. At points it's almost as if he has no lived experience of Newtonian physics.

Look, no one's surprised that Carney isn't good at this. And in fairness, he doesn't have to be. I could care less if one of Canada's other party leaders - *cough, Poilievre, cough* - looks like he spent hours practicing some dorky pancake routine for the occasion. [1] How well these people perform the manual task of flipping pancakes has nothing to do with how well they can perform their role in the House of Commons. No one cares about the pancakes.

The real value of these situations is to get a sense of who this human being is, and seeing how they relate to people. And unfortunately, Carney's version of the ol' goofy-grin, crack-a-joke routine feels less like his way of projecting humility, and more like his way of staying aloof, of maintaining a mental distance from performing work that he feels is beneath him. This is uncomfortable for Carney. He's a serious man, not some *commoner* like you and me!

Not-so-undercover boss

As a matter of fact, the very first thing he says in the video is, "I'm more management [than worker]". And if you think he's joking, well, in his next breath he's criticizing the cleanliness of the tool he's been given. Andy, the chef, quickly replaces it for him, even though it really only needed a quick scrape and wipe.

Fast-forward twenty seconds, and Chef Andy is offering to clean off the globs of uncooked pancake batter that the PM has already managed to get all over the flipper. Carney doesn't let him, saying "no no, I'll take responsibility", and then does the exact opposite of taking responsibility, immediately using the flipper - still covered in raw batter - to transfer the pancakes into the covered pan.

At which point, the careful viewer can see Chef Andy wondering how he's going to to discreetly throw away the two dozen perfectly cooked pancakes already in there, that this absolute ding-dong has just contaminated.

Carney attempts another joke or two, and then pours more batter onto the flat top while letting the crowd know that it's not his fault - Chef Andy made the previous ones too big, that's why he had trouble flipping them. To be fair, these ones *do* go a little better - at least until the "Big Ottawa Flip" moment where Carney deftly launches a fully cooked pancake high into the air and onto the ground by his feet.

Ha ha. The thing here is, Carney doesn't even make it *look* like he'd be willing to pick it up and throw it out. As far as he's concerned, that pancake vanished in a puff of smoke the moment it hit the concrete. Chef Andy dutifully bends down and gets it, while the PM looks away, mugging for the cameras.

There's some more awkward conversation while his final pancake of the day cooks, and Carney is desperate to have one of these stupid freaking things turn out well. Trouble is, he's also decided that he can judge the cooking time of a pancake - using this batter, and on this cooking surface - more accurately than the professional chef standing right beside him, and lets the first side cook for *way* longer than he should.

Of *course* it's burnt when he finally flips it, how could it not be?

* * *

This was all extremely embarrassing to watch. But I also found myself getting genuinely pissed off. To recap, in the span of just five minutes, Carney:

- criticized the chef;

- blamed the chef for his failures, instead of his own lack of skill/expertise;

- ignored/rebuffed the chef's attempt to maintain food safety;

- created a mess, made no attempt to clean it up or even pretend he'd be willing to;

- ignored the chef's expertise and burns a pancake because he thinks he knows how to do the job better than the pro.

And I have to say: I worked in the food service industry for around 15 years, at least half of which was as a line cook in restaurant kitchens. If someone had walked into one of those places as a new hire - an 'undercover boss', say - and acted like the PM did here, every other cook on that line would have been apopleptic by the end of the shift.

Nightmare Boss

"Very sharp and dismissive. When everything's going well, he seems very confident and it's all lovely. But, when things are not going so well, in a one-to-one personal situation, he's quite prickly. And his reputation inside the bank was quite authoritarian.” Carney was reported to have earned some infamy among bank staff. According to BNN Bloomberg, “Being on the receiving end of sudden flashes of fury became known as 'getting tasered.’”[2]

This Prime Minister demonstrates no respect for working people. He's your nightmare boss, someone who arrogantly assumes he can walk into the place you work and do your job better than you can. He's fully convinced that your expertise can be replaced by an AI chatbot [3] and can't wait to find a reason to fire you. He won't take suggestions or feedback. He sets wildly unrealistic performance expectations [4], and then imposes wildly unrealistic deadlines to meet them.[5]

Carney is a man who respects hierarchy above all else, holding emergency meetings on tariffs with the CEOs of auto manufacturers, but never with the unions representing the workers, who have the most to lose.[6] He's the first PM in over 100 years to not have a Minister of Labour.

And never mind *workplace* democracy - this guy repeatedly demonstrates a hostility toward democracy *in general*. Mark Carney, whose entire pitch was that he's a brilliant fiscal manager, has found the time to table massive bills that, in the case of Bill C-5, shift power away from our elected parliament and into his cabinet [7] and make a mockery of treaty obligations [8], or, in the case of Bill C-2, that ramp up the surveillance state [9] and undermine the rights of migrants and refugees [10] - but somehow can't manage to produce a budget that the public (or our representatives!) can scrutinize.

The examples of Carney's authoritarian, toxic boss tendencies are everywhere. He frequently gets testy with women journalists, angrily interrupting them, like when asked about his millions of dollars in undisclosed stock options [11], or when questioned about his cabinet picks.[12]

We hear consistent rhetoric about consultation and partnership with Indigenous leaders, but when the rubber hits the road, these consultations prove to be an afterthought.[13]

Canadians were told that this Liberal government would end the practice of hiring consulting firms, and maybe they have a point here: why outsource all the fun parts to McKinsey when you can just as easily make the DOGE-style demands for massive, across-the-board budget cuts of double-digit percentages in-house?[14]

Plus, the very same day, some anonymous "government and Liberal insiders" conveniently leak to the press that Carney is threatening to shit-can top civil servants should they fail to carry out their orders to hack and slash their own departments to pieces.

Nightmare boss.

* * *

We're in real trouble here folks: this is not the person that most Liberal voters imagined they were electing. Mark Carney is proving nearly every day that he's more ruthless and destructive than even his most vocal critics expected. No matter what he might have said in his book, this is not a man who understands humility, and he hasn't shown us even a glimpse that he's willing to learn. We're gonna have to make that happen ourselves.