Written by Matt Morgan, Editor at The Daily Bell:
On October 20, 2024, the Mayor of Beijing held two private meetings at the Annual Conference of the Financial Street Forum. The first was with Philipp Hildebrand, Vice Chairman of BlackRock. The second was with Mark Carney, then Chair of Brookfield Asset Management. The Beijing Municipal Government’s own English-language readout of the meetings records that Mayor Yin Yong “encouraged Brookfield Asset Management and BlackRock to seize opportunities, tap into their strengths, and increase their investment and business presence in Beijing.” Carney, the readout records, “expressed strong confidence in the development prospects and growth potential of investing in China.”
Two weeks later, on November 5, 2024, Bloomberg reported that Brookfield had secured a fifteen-year onshore loan of 1.96 billion yuan, or about $276 million, from the state-owned Bank of China. The loan refinanced a 2019 Shanghai office tower acquisition that had collapsed in value as Chinese commercial real estate cratered. The annual interest rate was around four percent. A Brookfield spokesperson declined to comment.
Six weeks before the Beijing meeting, on September 9, 2024, Justin Trudeau had appointed Carney to chair the Liberal Party’s Task Force on Economic Growth. Carney was, at that point, simultaneously Chair of Brookfield Asset Management and the senior economic advisor to the sitting Prime Minister of Canada. Three months after the Beijing meeting, in January 2025, he resigned from Brookfield to run for the Liberal leadership. In March 2025 he succeeded Trudeau as Prime Minister. In January 2026, on his first official visit to China, he signed a “strategic partnership” with Xi Jinping that lowered Canadian tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles from 100 percent to 6.1 percent.
This is the timeline.
The first defense is that Carney has placed his Brookfield holdings in a blind trust. He has. The trust does not change the fact that he holds the holdings. Stock options and deferred share units continue to accrue value during the term of the trust, and Brookfield’s Chief Operating Officer Justin Beber confirmed to the parliamentary ethics committee that such instruments benefit holders “whether during employment or following employment.” A blind trust hides what a person knows about their holdings. It does not eliminate the holdings.
The second defense is that this is a routine commercial loan from a Chinese bank to a Western asset manager. It would be, except for the timing. The Brookfield loan was negotiated while the firm’s Chair was, in Beijing, in a private meeting with the Beijing mayor, telling that mayor that Brookfield had “keen interest” in further investment in China. The loan was secured two weeks later from a state-owned bank operating under the direction of the same political system the mayor represents. The Chinese state was the lender, the host, and the regulator. Its own press confirmed in writing what had been discussed.
The third defense is that Carney was acting in his capacity as Chair of Brookfield, not as a Canadian official. This is technically true and substantively misleading. Carney had been the senior economic advisor to the Prime Minister of Canada for six weeks at the point he sat down with Mayor Yin. He was, in any meaningful sense, two people in one chair: the head of a private investment fund seeking a loan from a Chinese state bank, and the architect of the economic platform of the governing party of a G7 country whose relations with that same state had been the most strained of any G7 member since 2018. The Chinese officials he met with knew this. So did the bank.
The argument is not that Carney did anything illegal. He did not. The argument is that the structure of his career has produced a consistent foreign-policy direction. As Governor of the Bank of England in 2013, Carney signed an agreement with the People’s Bank of China to internationalize the renminbi, describing it as a “global good.” As Chair of Brookfield from 2020 to 2025, he oversaw the expansion of the firm’s Chinese real estate and renewable-energy holdings to over three billion dollars. As Prime Minister, less than a year into office, he has lowered Canadian tariffs on Chinese imports and signed the partnership that the Chinese Foreign Ministry called a “reset” in relations. Each role pointed in the same direction. None of them required the other.
A parliamentary ethics committee report tabled in April 2026 recommends that Carney, and all future prime ministers, be required to sell their investments within sixty days of taking office. The report is the work of a Conservative-chaired committee, and one might discount it on those grounds, except that the underlying facts are documented in non-partisan sources. The Beijing meeting readout is on the Beijing Municipal Government’s own website. The loan is reported by Bloomberg. The September 9, 2024 appointment to the Task Force on Economic Growth is on the Prime Minister’s Office’s own website archive.
The line between public office and private portfolio has stopped meaning anything. When the same person moves between the Bank of England and a global asset manager, between a private fund chairmanship and a sitting Prime Minister’s economic task force, between a meeting with the Beijing mayor and a $276 million loan from the Bank of China, the standard categories of “Canadian interests” and “Chinese interests” stop being able to describe what is happening. The interests being served are the interests of the class of people who occupy both chairs.
A free society treats the public and the private as distinct domains, separated by rules about which decisions one is allowed to make from each chair. A society in which the same individuals rotate between both has stopped doing this. The blind trust, the ethics screen, and the post-hoc disclosure are the procedural ghost of a separation that no longer exists in substance. That is what the Brookfield file documents. Not a scandal, really. A description of how the system now works.
