Here is an excerpt taken from a review about current Canadian PM's book online It's called Value(s) and seems to espouse a sort-of nothingburger argument about how monetary values get conflated with societal values - a platitude at best, that bitcoiners seem well aware of. However, this is the section where you learn for sure that he's not a bitcoiner (in case you had any doubts).
By far the most negative and critical chapter in the book is about cryptocurrencies. These are apparently evil incarnate. Carney basically has nothing good to say about them. They are not authorized, not regulated, not bound by nations, central banks or governments. They offer no guarantees, no oversight and no submission to rules other than their own. They don’t scale and aren’t universally available. They will never replace currencies, which do offer all of the above, and anyway, today’s currencies are more and more global and digital every day, so cryptocurrencies offer little or nothing over central bank-issued real money. A crypto coin from a central bank offers nothing for Mark Carney. In his own words:
“must improve fairness by increasing financial inclusion and promoting solidarity. New forms of money and payments must make good on their potential to democratise financial services by opening access to all. That means dramatically lowering the costs of payments, banking and cross-border transactions including remittances. And it means promoting competition for customer services. All network externalities in new forms of money should accrue to the benefit of the public…New payment systems must be scalable. After all, money is a social convention, a network. The more people that use it, the more useful it is. To be effective, the forms of money must be at least as efficient at large scale as they are at smaller ones. At present, this is a marked deficiency of most crypto-substitutes. “Once they are brought into the regulatory net – as all forms of money eventually are – their attractiveness to many of their core users will cease.“ (emphasis mine)
It feels like in the first half he is almost describing Bitcoin, until he talks about customer services (?). I have not read the book, but from the context of the review, this section seems to be making the case for CBDCs, only to straw-man bitcoin (a crypto-substitute) by saying that, (a) it doesn't benefit from being widely used, and (b) regulatory clarity will relegate it to its deserved abhorrence.
The review is quite long and scathing of Carney, and may be worth the read if you want to skip the book. It finishes:
I was rather hoping Value(s) would be a seat at the central bankers’ table. It is everything but. And flat to boot.
Anyway, leaving this here for the Stackers to have their fun with. Carney seems to be staying mum about Bitcoin for now, but it should be known where he stands.