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Mark Carney has significant financial interests in nuclear power.

The Prime Minister wants to encourage a sector in which he has significant financial interests through Brookfield.

Anne Caroline Desplanques, Monday, September 22, 2025, https://www.journaldemontreal.com/2025/09/20/mark-carney-a-dimportants-interets-financiers-dans-le-nucleaire

The Prime Minister wants to encourage an industry in which he has significant financial interests through Brookfield, the company whose board he chaired until January.

“Should we accelerate the development of nuclear energy in this country?” asked the moderator of the French-language leaders’ debate during the election campaign.

“Yes, absolutely,” candidate Mark Carney replied enthusiastically, before indicating that Canada had “great advantages” in this area, particularly “CANDU and Westinghouse.

Brookfield acquired the American company Westinghouse Electric Company for US$4.6 billion from the Japanese firm Toshiba in 2018. The company, headquartered in Pittsburgh, USA, states on its website that it is the world’s largest provider of infrastructure and services for nuclear power plants.

In 2022, Brookfield sold it to its own entity, Brookfield Renewable Partners, which was then headed by Mark Carney, who was responsible for investments in the energy transition sector within the firm.

Since then, Brookfield Renewable has owned 51% of Westinghouse. The remaining 49% belongs to the Canadian mining company Cameco, a global uranium giant. The Prime Minister still holds options to purchase 409,300 Brookfield shares.

Nuclear power, a solution to achieve carbon neutrality

At the time of the transaction, he stated that “any credible trajectory towards carbon neutrality relies on significant growth in nuclear energy.”

But economist Jack Gibbons of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance counters that this position ignores the management of radioactive waste, materials that remain a danger to people and the environment thousands of years after their use.

For him, a pan-Canadian electricity transmission line harnessed to hydroelectric dams and solar and wind farms should be the priority and a national emergency, given the acceleration of global warming.

As for the argument that nuclear power is a more stable source of energy, not subject to the vagaries of the weather, he indicates that this is a false belief.

“The Darlington nuclear reactor has been offline for one hour out of every five hours since it was commissioned for maintenance,” he recalls. “No energy source can guarantee a 24/7 supply.”

September 24, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized