Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the newly appointed leader of the Liberal Party, faces a storm of controversy as accusations of plagiarism have emerged. This scandal comes at a critical time with snap elections scheduled for April 28th, a move intended to leverage the Liberal Party’s recent upswing in the polls after a long period of trailing behind the Conservative opposition.
The National Post has uncovered at least 10 instances of supposed plagiarism within Carney’s 1995 doctorate thesis from Oxford University. According to reports, Carney allegedly used “full quotes, paraphrases, or slightly modified quotes from four previous works without proper acknowledgement or attribution.”
The Liberal Party is in disarray, accusing Geoffrey Sigalet, the scholar who reviewed the evidence, of bias due to a $288 donation he made to the Conservative Party back in 2022.
The Telegraph reported:
“On Friday, the Canadian prime minister and former governor of the Bank of England was forced to deny allegations he copied 10 passages of text for his 1995 doctorate.
The allegations are a blow to his election campaign. He faces a knife-edge vote on April 28 after calling a snap election against the backdrop of an aggressive trade war with Donald Trump.”
Geoffrey Sigalet from the University of British Columbia stated, “He’s just directly repeating without quotations. That’s what we call plagiarism.”
Carney’s campaign team has labeled the accusations as an “irresponsible mischaracterization” of his scholarly work. The passages in question reportedly involve sentences from economists Michael E. Porter and Jeremy C. Stein, which Carney allegedly presented as his own work in his thesis.
Margaret Meyer, Carney’s doctoral supervisor at Oxford, has defended him, claiming, “I saw no evidence of plagiarism. It is typical that overlapping language appears.”
Mark Carney is a mirage. Plagiarism accusations only the latest evidence he’s been oversold.
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre)
March 29, 2025
As the Canadian political landscape braces for these unexpected developments, the election campaign will undoubtedly be one to watch, with significant implications on the ongoing trade discussions with the United States.
