Did Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney write "Western society is morally rotten ... corrupted by capitalism" in "Values", his 2021 book? No, that's not true: a book reviewer characterized Carney's views that way in an opinion article published by The National Post. Then, a social media post incorrectly attributed to Carney phrases that were actually the reviewer's.
The quotes have appeared in numerous social media posts, including an April 29, 2025 post on X (archived here) on the@TheoFleury14 account under the title "MARK CARNEY IS INSANE". It opened:
His own words people
'Western society is morally rotten, and it has been corrupted by capitalism, This requires rigid controls of personal freedoms, industry and corporate funding. This is not a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better but temporarily worse. This will be a world of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience
and temporarily more poverty. Assets will be stranded, Gasoline cars will be unsellable and inefficient properties will be un-rentable'
This is what the post looked like on X at the time this fact check was written:
(Source: X.com screenshot by Lead Stories)
Using an archived copy of the book found on the Internet Archive, Lead Stories searched the text for key phrases from the social media post and found they do not appear in the book.
For instance, the search tool on the Internet Archive found no instances of the phrase "morally rotten" in Carney's book.
Similarly, the Internet Archive's search tool found no instance of "...it has been corrupted by capitalism".
(Source: InternetArchive.org screenshot by Lead Stories.)
The search tool does find Carney wrote several times about stranded assets, but not in the context of the long phrase attributed to him by the social media post:
Manually searching the June 5, 2021 review of Carney's book in the National Post, shows the social media post lifted sections of the review and misattributed the reviewer's words to Carney, as seen in this example:
(Source: NationalPost.com/Opinion screenshot by Lead Stories)
Read more Lead Stories fact checks about Carney here.
