Liberal Party of Canada leader Mark Carney, who became prime minister upon Justin Trudeau’s resignation two weeks ago and will run as his party’s candidate in the April 28 snap election, has been accused of plagiarism in his 1995 thesis for a doctorate in economics from Oxford University.
The National Post on Friday pointed to ten clear examples of Carney using “full quotes, paraphrases, or slightly modified quotes from four previous works” in his 1995 thesis without “proper acknowledgement or attribution.”
The National Post printed the allegedly plagiarized passages from Carney’s thesis in their entirety, along with word-for-word quotes from the original material, and in each of the cited cases they were nearly identical.
The article ominously noted that “social status hasn’t stopped universities from revoking degrees” when infractions such as plagiarism were uncovered later.
“Many European ministers have had to resign following allegations that some of their university work was plagiarized or after having been stripped of some of their academic credentials,” the National Post recalled.
The Liberal Party was enraged by the National Post story, although it struggled to refute any of the allegations, and evidently could not dispute the accuracy of the ten instances highlighted by the paper. Instead, the campaign brought forth its own expert — Carney’s doctoral supervisor at the time his thesis was written, Dr. Margaret Meyer — to assert that nothing in the thesis rose to the level of actionable plagiarism.
Meyer told the National Post it was “mischaracterizing” the work, which she said included no “unusual academic practices.”
“When pieces are frequently referenced in an academic text, it is typical that overlapping language appears,” Meyer wrote.
“Mark’s thesis was evaluated and approved by a faculty committee that saw his work for what it is: an impressive and thoroughly researched analysis that set him apart from his peers,” she concluded.
The Liberal Party sneeringly dismissed the National Post as an “American-owned” publication and accused it of ignoring exculpatory evidence to condemn Carney “based on the ‘analysis’ of a Conservative donor and activist.”
The National Post marched out its own experts, one of whom was an Oxford graduate who preferred to remain anonymous “out of fear of being sued by Carney” to argue that Carney’s thesis absolutely does meet Oxford’s publishing standards for plagiarism in numerous passages.
“When you have something lifted verbatim from a source, in there without quotation marks or citation… that constitutes plagiarism,” the anonymous professor contended.
“He’s just directly repeating without quotations. That’s what we call plagiarism,” said the analyst quoted in the National Post article, Geoffrey Sigalet, an assistant professor and member of the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) advisory committee on student discipline.
Sigalet said some of the examples of potential plagiarism cited in Carney’s thesis were clear, while others fell into a “grey area” under UBC’s standards known as “patchworking” — a somewhat careless practice in which citations are not provided in close proximity to quoted material, but are included elsewhere in the text.
Sigalet went on to observe that Oxford’s standards for such practices are considerably tighter, so Oxford would normally have censured Carney for minor infractions that UBC might have ignored.
The National Post pointed out that Sigalet’s duties include policing student submissions for plagiarism, so he would seem to be an informed analyst. He is presumably the expert the Liberal Party thought should be ignored because he is a “conservative donor and activist.” The Liberal Party did not care to divulge Meyer’s political contributions, or state whether her opinions should be ignored on the basis of partisan activity.
Some commenters noted that Meyer has an implicit conflict of interest beyond political considerations, since it would be embarrassing for her to concede that she approved Carney’s paper while ignoring multiple instances of plagiarism under Oxford’s standards.
The Conservative Party seems thus far content to let the plagiarism story simmer in its own juices, although Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre did share a link to the National Post story on Friday morning, without adding comments of his own.
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