Brash entitlement and vested interests on display in Ottawa

Canadians are coming to recognize Prime Minister Mark Carney and the style of governance he has now established in Ottawa, in many ways reflecting the global-banker-turned-prime minister’s own character, insensitive to the real-life struggles playing out around Canadians’ kitchen tables. His government also reflects his I-am-the-smartest-man-in-the-room ego; there’s an arrogance and condescending air that is underlining every exchange where Carney is pressed to explain his government’s actions. One needs only to look at a few news stories out of Ottawa these past few weeks to gauge just how entitled and calculating the prime minister and his inner circles are.  

The most egregious example illustrating the prime minister’s sense of entitlement was a shockingly insulting news item last week that the government-subsidized mainstream media did not, would not cover. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) released records obtained by an access to information request that found Carney had set a personal inflight catering record of over $175,000 during one of his global jaunts. CTF federal director Franco Terrazzano had to take to social media to get the news to Canadians. During a 10-day international trip to China, Qatar, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2026, Carney and the prime minister’s entourage spent $175,248 on airplane food. Putting this into context, $175,248 is the total amount an average Canadian family will spend on groceries over nine years. 

The CTF released the in-flight catering menus which included beef tenderloin with demi-glace sauce, veal escalope with lemon and capers, veal blanquette with cream sauce, truffle risotto, seabass fillet, Caprese salad with burrata and pesto, and for dessert: panna cotta with berries, crème brûlée, blueberry cheesecake, and chocolate mousse (sidenote – no mention of Normandy butter). Those flying with the prime minister were enjoying taxpayer funded dining worth $300 per meal service. The CTF also provided a direct comparison between Carney’s and former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s inflight catering service. On a single trip to Italy in 2024, Trudeau spent $43,000 on airplane food while, in 2025, Carney spent more than double that amount – $93,000 on his inflight meals. 

The CTF has reported that Carney has spent about $1 million on airplane food since becoming prime minister. So, while he is telling Canadians that his economic plan will require families to “take some sacrifices,” Carney and his advisors are enjoying a jet-set lifestyle with truffle risotto and crème brûlée. And this fact is especially insulting given recent reports that document the serious issue of food insecurity in Canada:  

• A third of Canadians (31 per cent) skip meals due to grocery costs (up 27 per cent from last year) and young adults aged 18-34 are skipping or reducing meals a startling 41 per cent (Salvation Army’s 2026 Poverty and Socioeconomic Analysis).
• Food bank visits have soared across Canada to 2.35 million per month in 2026, which is a 117 per cent increase from 2019 (Food Banks Canada’s Hunger Count 2026). 
• There have been 4.1 million client visits this year to the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto and, in the city, 1 in 8 children now rely on the food bank; Daily Bread is providing 1 million meals a week in a city of 2.9 million citizens (Daily Bread’s Who’s Hungry 2026). 

With food insecurity and food bank data this grim, it takes a special kind of deftness by the Canadian prime minister and his aides to be setting records for inflight catering expenses. 

Another news story of brash entitlement – an outrageous case of nepotism – broke in Ottawa in the last few weeks and mainstream media has squelched all commentary that criticizes the Carneys. With kudos to Juno News and individual efforts in social media, Canadians have come to learn that Liberal MPs blocked any parliamentary review of the appointment of the prime minister’s wife Diane Fox Carney to a position and an office that the Carney government has committed more than $1 billion dollars towards. Carney selected his wife to be Canada’s “Ocean Envoy” (a position the prime minister created) and then the prime minister put $1.2 billion towards a yet-to-be defined set of “ocean protection” initiatives. Diane Fox Carney has already begun conducting government business, meeting with Innuit leaders on arctic issues (while headlining a Liberal fundraiser) and planning 2027’s Our Ocean Conference in Halifax along with a Global Indigenous Summit. When the Conservatives moved a motion to have the government make public the new ocean envoy’s scope of work, Liberal MPs shut down debate and closed the door to any parliamentary discussions of Fox Carney’s activities and her budget. Conservative MP John Brassard stated in the House of Commons last week, “The government is not a family business. It’s not The Sopranos.” The MP’s line would be humourous if it did not describe how Ottawa is now operating under Carney’s watch. 

Each week there are numerous stories in Ottawa that go unreported or underreported. Liberal ministers and MPs follow the lead of Carney in obfuscating the facts on their activities while a passive mainstream media (who appreciates the hand that feeds them) are not asking the obvious questions to hold the government to account. Canadians would be kept in the dark if it were not for independent journalists and social media. Consider these news items: 

• The Carney Liberals are playing with the government books to introduce rogue accounting that has factored almost a trillion dollars of Canadian pension funds as assets. Newmarket-Aurora MP Sandra Cobena explains that they are doing so to use a smaller (fabricated) national debt figure to justify borrowing $733 billion more. 
• Carney recently announced $2.5 billion in new money to Indigenous emergency management and fire protection plans, more than $630 million extra for First Nations policing, and $260 million extra for workforce training. No explanation was given how this money tops up the already billions provided to Indigenous groups for these very matters, nor how it supplements the federal government’s own program spending on emergency disaster response. Media did not ask for an accounting of the billions promised. 
• As a sidebar to the Canada-EU Summit, Carney pledged another $800 million loan to Ukraine (described as a first installment). Canada has now given over $26 billion to the Ukraine war effort. Independent journalist Karla Treadway asks where has the money gone, “There has not been a single audit of that spending. We do not know whether the money we are sending is even reaching military purposes, and on the current record we will never know.” 

There has been multiple stories that should raise alarm bells for Canadians if only legacy news sources would be responsible in tracking down the facts of what is taking place in Ottawa. Consider these underreported stories: 

• Carney’s close friend Dan Goldberg, CEO of Telesat, was given a sole-sourced $2.3 billion military satellite contract for arctic defense (while Telesat already was awarded a separate $2.14 billion repayable federal loan to build its Lightspeed satellite network). 
• Carney announced “a landmark investment” of $1.6 billion into a Toronto-based AI company, Cohere, a move that economic analyst Charles Lammam in The Hub states is “a major red flag” and “a totally inappropriate role for government,” and investigative journalist David Simieritsch labels it another “big scam.” The current question is why Liberal MPs are averse to having this prime minister’s deal scrutinized? 
• In this past week David Simieritsch published an informative commentary that shows how the prime minister’s recently announced MOU with Alterra will funnel Canadian tax dollars directly into Brookfield funds – the Brookfield Catalytic Transition Fund and Brookfield Global Transition Fund II (initially set up by Carney when he was with Brookfield). Simieritsch asks the question legacy media will not, “Where’s the RCMP?”

And why is it that no legacy media is questioning the fact that Carney has constructed a parallel administration running separate from Ottawa’s bureaucracy, and outside of Ottawa’s ethics checks and balances? News commentator Mario Zelaya (119,700 followers on X), lists the cronies from Carney’s rolodex who he has put in place to run national operations: Build Canada Homes CEO Ana Bailão, Major Projects Office CEO Dawn Farrell, Defence Investment Agency CEO Doug Guzman, Digital Transformation Canada CEO Patrick Pichette, Invest in Canada new CEO plus chair Dominic Barton. And JayGenXer (95,000 followers on X) has issued the dubious scorecard for Carney’s new federal offices, “Major Projects Office: 14 months, 1 project designated, Build Canada Homes: $13B, about 2,300 homes under construction, Canada Strong Fund: $25B promised, no launch date, no CEO named, and Defence Investment Agency: one more agency inside federal procurement.” One can add in Digital Transformation Canada, no office yet, and Invest in Canada, no new investment attracted.

By the time this column is published Canadians will know the details of the government’s second federal budget. They will know whether parliamentary budget officer Annette Ryan was correct in her assessment that the Liberals have blown through their own fiscal anchor, whether they followed through on their sleight-of-hand plans to adopt creative accounting, listing pensions as assets and renaming billions of dollars of expenditures as investments. In her latest report, Ryan predicted rising debt-servicing costs could result in the government falling into “a danger zone;” Canadians are paying $1 billion of interest payments per week on debt servicing charges. The sustainability of the Carney government’s fiscal plan is highly suspect – and the PBO calls them on it where legacy media are rationalizing and finding excuses for the government. All the post-budget positive headlines in the legacy media, and the pundits regurgitating Liberal speaking notes, should signal to Canadians that “accountability” and “transparency” are just hollow words in Ottawa these days.   

Over the past 18 months Carney has adeptly positioned himself beyond reproach. Where previous administrations would have been seized with addressing their questionable actions, today there will be no parliamentary overview or scrutiny from the subsidized national media when it comes to the prime minister’s high travel habits, his wife’s work, or the performance of the many underachieving friends he has surrounded himself with. And Carney knows it. Such is the current state of affairs in Carney’s Ottawa.