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Let’s do a thought experiment.

Back in 2014, when he was Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney attended a private dinner at Buckingham Palace hosted by Prince Andrew. The Palace confirmed Andrew personally paid for the event. It was a gathering of senior bankers and hedge fund executives — an elite, closed-door dinner in the middle of a palace.

At the time, Prince Andrew was already facing mounting questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein — the disgraced financier who would later be charged with sex trafficking minors and die in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial.

Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, was later convicted in a U.S. court for helping recruit and groom underage girls for abuse. She is now serving a lengthy prison sentence. 

Fast-forward to today. Prince Andrew has just been arrested amid renewed scrutiny connected to the Epstein files.

And that palace dinner doesn’t look like just another networking event anymore. Then there’s the photo.

A widely circulated image shows Carney at a British music festival standing alongside Ghislaine Maxwell. Not a distant crowd shot. A clear photograph. A social setting.

Now pause and ask the obvious question.

If a Conservative prime minister had: 

• Attended a private palace dinner hosted by Prince Andrew
• Appeared in a social photograph with Ghislaine Maxwell
• And that same Prince Andrew had just been arrested in connection with the Epstein scandal

Would the media response be this restrained? We all know the answer. There would be nightly panels dissecting the optics. There would be investigative timelines. There would be relentless “What did he know?” coverage.

To be clear: appearing in a photograph or attending a dinner does not prove wrongdoing. But Epstein’s network wasn’t a minor social embarrassment. It involved the exploitation of underage girls, allegations of abuse that reached into elite political and financial circles, and a global scandal that exposed how power can shield predatory behavior.

Associations matter. Judgment matters. Transparency matters.

Yet when the person involved is Mark Carney, the intensity evaporates.

And here’s an uncomfortable reality layered on top of all this: the mainstream media in Canada increasingly rely on government subsidies, tax credits, bailout programs and regulatory protections — funding structures that were expanded and entrenched under Liberal governments, including the one Carney now leads.

Newsrooms that depend on federal programs to balance their books are, at minimum, in a conflicted position when aggressively pursuing the very government that helps finance their survival.

That doesn’t mean every journalist is compromised. But it does mean the incentive structure is distorted.

No saturation coverage. No moral outrage cycle. No sustained pressure campaign.

If scrutiny depends on party affiliation — and if financial dependence blunts the instinct to dig — then it isn’t scrutiny.

It’s selectivity. And Canadians are capable of noticing the difference.