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At the beginning of June last year, just over a month after being elected in a stunning victory, Mark Carney went into a meeting with oil and gas executives and showed his weakness as a leader.

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He listened to their concerns, their proposals to boost Canada’s economy, he agreed with them frequently and then let them down.

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“Yes, but you know I have a caucus to deal with,” is what several attendees of that Calgary meeting quoted Carney as saying.

Despite saying he wanted to grow Canada’s economy quickly and hearing ideas on how to do that, Carney didn’t want to upset the environmentalist zealots within his own Liberal Party.

These MPs in the Liberal caucus who opposed working with these oil and gas executives would all have been unemployed if it weren’t for Carney taking over the leadership of the Liberal Party. They owed their current jobs to him, and yet he was telling these oil executives that they called the shots.

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That same Mark Carney showed up again this week on the issue of the American and Israeli attacks on Iran’s brutal regime.

While Carney’s initial statement on Saturday was strong, he is now trying to distance himself from the morally righteous hit on the Iranian regime. When you listen to Carney in full, you realize that his initial gut response to the strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran take the right position.

“Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security,” Carney’s statement from Saturday read.

But then Carney retracts from statements like that by stating that the strikes on Iran are illegal.

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“It appears that these actions are inconsistent with international law,” he said while adding that meant Canada could not have participated if we had been asked to do so.

There was no need for the PM to go down this road, he had already made the case that the regime running the Islamic Republic of Iran was a horrific one that needed to go. He pointed out that this is a regime that had violated international law itself and killed many Canadians.

“If I went through the serial violations of international law by the Islamic Republic of Iran over decades, and all the efforts under the international system to contain those using international frameworks and international law. It is a failure of the international system that this country repeatedly violated international law, terrorized the entire region and through extension the world, including the murder of Canadians,” he said.

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He’s already acknowledged the evils of the regime, he’s pointed to their flagrant violations international law, he points out the international order has failed over several decades to deal with this cancerous regime.

There was no need for Carney to weigh in on this and declare the strikes on Iran as violations of international law. This is a man who is clearly bending to the will and protests coming from the left wing of his party, people who want to draw a moral equivalency that does not exist.

The reason this is so frustrating to watch is because Carney’s first instinct on this file – the one he showed Saturday, and the one he returned to several times on Wednesday during his news conference – is the right one.

“Let’s be realistic. This is a regime that is the biggest exporter of terror in the world, that has for decades terrorized the Middle East, that has killed scores of Canadians, murdered scores of Canadians, tens of thousands of its own citizens, repressed women,” Carney said.

For all of those reasons, Carney’s first instinct was right.

True leadership from the PM would have seen him make the moral case for striking the regime. If he had done so, many Canadians would have opened their eyes and followed him.

Instead, Carney has abandoned his leadership role and just like last June on another file, he is following the whims of his caucus, the people he should be leading.

blilley@postmedia.com

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