Dude that’s crazy. As I said I didn’t vote for the guy but be realistic here. Asking someone to pay money to become PM is not a good precedent. Especially when we are talking about one of the world’s most prominent economists, taking a position like you have just makes you seem like you hate the person and nothing will make you happy.
What solution would you suggest?
His reaction isn’t great and agreed he should find a way to placate people who see it as a problem but IMO his reaction is separate from whether unvested stocks are an issue or not. When he took the job, taking a loss on his unvested stocks wasn’t part of the ethics screen, so presumably he’s annoyed at the goalposts having moved after he took the job.
The only equitable solution I can see is if the taxpayers wanted to pay Carney his unvested stocks at current market value (or as they were valued the day he took office), and then sign ownership of the stocks themselves over to the public. I can’t see that going over well with anyone so it just looks like a lose-lose situation.
If there are other solutions that don’t end up in such a quagmire I would like to understand them, but so far all the solutions sound worse to me than the problem
I disagree. I think drumming up outrage over this is a ploy to manufacture outrage over him being rich. We all already know he’s richer than any of us could ever dream of. I just want the government to focus on keeping Canadians safe and stable while our former ally wages economic war against us. This is a distraction at best.
Pierre not having a security clearance on its own is odd and disappointing, but fine on its own. The problem is that he used not getting a security clearance as a way for him to spread conspiracies about the things he could not know without clearance, but would know about with clearance. It was a bad faith argument.
If Pierre wants to go get a job and succeed to the point where he gets stocks, good luck and more power to him.
IMO this hasn’t really been an issue in Canada before because generally we elect lawyers or career politicians. If we want a higher bar for divestment then let’s get that into law so that it applies either later in Carney’s term or for the next PM. In the meantime I am happy that Carney has fulfilled the requirements of the ethics commissioner and don’t believe that we have any clear mechanisms today to deal with unvested stocks owned by our politicians.
It is IMO very unlikely that a large percentage of Carney’s net worth will be from (currently) unvested stocks. He’s entered everything that can be into a blind trust and once vested these currently unvested stocks will go to the blind trust. Until that happens this grey area seems like much ado about nothing.
And to be 100% clear I did not vote Liberal in this latest election.
He could I guess, but it’s pretty standard stuff so the outrage over it seems manufactured to me.
When they vest? Generally stocks vest to a schedule like x% per month over 4 years from when they were issued.
As soon as they vest, they are entered into the blind trust and Carney will have no knowledge or input into what happens with them
Unvested stocks can’t really be part of a blind trust because the holder can’t do anything with them until they have vested, and the vesting schedule being known means that the “blind” isn’t there in the blind trust
It’s a blind trust. Maybe they’ve already been sold. He doesn’t know. And because it’s in a blind trust, if he did want them sold he:
- Doesn’t get to tell the person managing what to do (buy or sell)
- Couldn’t be told by the manager whether they had been sold
This is as stupid as the excuses to not get a security clearance
What exactly do you want done with unvested shares?
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We are going in circles now, but keep in mind that we are talking about unvested stocks. In my opinion the only way to have an equitable solution is to find a way of transferring the current market value of the unvested stocks into Carney’s blind trust. I can’t think of how to do this in a way that I would be happy as a taxpayer and he would be happy as a (former) shareholder, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution.
The complexity of the problem is one of the reasons why I don’t feel it is worth solving immediately.