For me, this is simply a case of what position Carney was holding at the time. It is very difficult to place a value on sovereignty that is not your own. Would any one of us, if working for, say, the Italians, place a high value on Italian sovereignty? Would we not be inclined to look at the numbers, evaluate the risk in a conservative fashion, and play safe?
When you are employed as a central banker by a foreign government (in this case The UK), a country where the whole political establishment is extremely favourable to EU membership, then, even though you are technically independent, you are not likely to praise an insurgent movement. Granted, the comparison that he made between UK GDP and German GDP was a statistical sleight of hand that was transparently fraudulent to anybody who understood economics, but it might have looked quite convincing to those who didn’t. But back then, everybody “knew” that ALL economists opposed Brexit and Bank of England Governors are not supposed to go out on economic limbs and isolate themselves.
By the time that the minor effects of Brexit were completely obscured by the exogenous shocks of Covid and Ukraine, Carney was not around to be shown up as having been wrong in his dire predictions. It doesn’t mean he failed to notice that he’d been wrong; that would have been stupid, and he’s not stupid.
It would be strange if he had not noticed the newly released UK outperforming France and Germany up to the unfortunate arrival of the Labour government and its anti-growth policies. Perhaps therefore, he reassessed the extent to which separating a nation from the chains of a monolithic neighbour was necessarily a bad thing.
And then you find that the bulk of the Canadian people are revolted by Trump and his attempts to force Canada into an association with the backward US social system, (no universal health care, neo-imperialist economic policy, genuinely imperialist foreign policy etc.), and you go with the flow. It helps if your main opponent has backed the wrong horse, and if you couldn’t see that political opportunity, you would never see any. You discover that sovereignty is quite valuable when your large neighbour is obnoxious.
I don’t think you you have to backtrack sufficiently to discover the EU is obnoxious too. After all, they’re on the receiving end of Trump’s idiocies also, and my enemy’s enemy is, at least for the time being, my friend. In a world where the hegemon is busy shooting at everything that moves, including both of his own feet, you need all the friends you can get.
Time enough to make more sober judgements when (or if?) sanity is restored.
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