On Friday, the Canadian prime minister and former governor of the Bank of England was forced to deny allegations he copied 10 passages of text for his 1995 doctorate.
The allegations are a blow to his election campaign. He faces a knife-edge vote on April 28 after calling a snap election against the backdrop of an aggressive trade war with Donald Trump.
Passages of his thesis from his doctorate in economics from Nuffield College were published appearing to show verbatim quotes, paragraphs or lightly amended excerpts from previous works without proper attribution.
Geoffrey Sigalet, from the University of British Columbia said: “He’s just directly repeating without quotations. That’s what we call plagiarism.”
The examples of plagiarism were sent to Mr Carney’s campaign team, who described the allegations as an “irresponsible mischaracterisation” of his work.
Mr Carney is accused of presenting sentences from the economist Michael E Porter as his own in his thesis. Mr Carney does cite Mr Porter’s 1990 book The Competitive Advantage of Nations at different points, but is accused of failing to do so in others.
In one paragraph, Mr Carney wrote: “There are three reasons why domestic profitability is not a good indicator of true international competitive advantage.”
The original sentence in Mr Porter’s book read: “Domestic profitability is not a good indication of true international competitive advantage for three important reasons.”
Margaret Meyer, his doctoral supervisor at Oxford, previously claimed in an interview that Mr Carney finished his thesis “remarkably quickly,” in less than two years.
However, she defended the Liberal Party leader on Friday, saying she saw “no evidence of plagiarism” in the passages published by Canadian newspaper The National Post.
Ms Meyer told the National Post: “It is typical that overlapping language appears” when sources were “frequently referenced in an academic text”.
“For example, over the course of this more than 300-page thesis, the Michael Porter book … is cited dozens of times. Within his thesis, Mark acknowledged, cited, scrutinised and expanded on this piece,” she said.
Later in his thesis, Mr Carney is accused of virtually duplicating an excerpt from Jeremy C Stein’s 1989 article “Efficient Capital Markets, Inefficient Firms: A Model of Myopic Corporate Behaviour”.
In his article, Mr Stein said: “In a steady state signal-jamming equilibrium, managers will borrow a constant amount each period from the next period’s earnings, and the market will correctly anticipate this borrowing.”
Mr Carney appears to have made little amendments to the wording other than shortening the sentence: “In the steady state equilibrium, the managers will borrow a constant amount each period, and the market will correctly anticipate this borrowing.”
In another case, Mr Carney duplicates another author’s sentence with minor changes by replacing “for example” with “e.g”.
In a recent interview with a CBC radio programme in Toronto, Ms Meyer said: “The fact that he could get to grips with much more material than most students typically do in a shorter time and produce a longer thesis pretty much set him apart.”
Mr Carney’s Liberal Party has enjoyed an unexpected bounce in opinion polls after he and his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, stood up to Mr Trump over tariffs and trade.
The anti-America message landed with voters who are increasingly offended by Mr Trump’s threats to turn Canada into America’s 51st state. Mr Carney’s party trailed the conservative opposition by some 25 points but is now leading polls.
Mr Carney shared his first call with Mr Trump on Friday, with Mr Trump appearing to praise his counterpart for “extremely productive” trade negotiations and thanking him for his “attention”. During the call, they agreed to meet after Canada’s upcoming snap election.
Mr Carney has repeatedly stood up to the US president, telling voters on Thursday that Canada’s close relationship with its neighbour was over and throwing into doubt an order of a fleet of US-manufactured F-35 fighter jets.
Mr Carney began an illustrious banking career after completing his PhD, eventually becoming governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
He previously held a British passport but said he would renounce his citizenship after becoming prime minister.
Source: Telegraph
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