The Mark Carney Plagiarism Scandal

On Friday, Catherine Lévesque at The National Post published an article highlighting plagiarism allegations against the current Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney.

Mark Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister on March 14, following the resignation of former PM Justin Trudeau. The resignation came just one and a half months before a new election, in which the Conservative Party hopes to gain seats in Parliament and reclaim the Prime Ministership, which they last held in 2015.

According to the allegations, Carney plagiarized multiple parts of his 1995 dissertation, which he submitted to Oxford University as part of the requirements for his doctorate in Economics, which he received that year.

While we’ve seen many stories like this one in the United States and Europe, this is one of the first from Canada.

This begs a simple question: How serious are these allegations?

The answers, as they usually are, are complicated.

Disclosure: Lévesque originally contacted me to be a source for this article. Unfortunately, due to technical issues and scheduling conflicts, I was unable to get my reply to her until after the article ran. However, I have provided other thoughts that may be used in a later article.

Understanding the Allegations

The allegations center on Carney’s 1995 doctoral thesis, The Dynamic Advantage of Competition. The document is roughly 300 pages long, not including works cited.

According to the allegations, ten passages from the dissertation overlap with prior work. The original work is usually cited, but the passages are not in quotation marks. In some examples, Carney allegedly pulls from a source different from the one he attributes (or a different part of the same source).

In total, the allegations amount to just over 200 words in Carney’s dissertation. While I’m unable to get an exact word count, the dissertation has well over 100,000 words. This amounts to roughly 0.21% of the total dissertation.

This leads to the first major problem with these allegations. The amount of content is extremely low. While no amount of plagiarism is good, even if we accept all these alleged examples as egregious plagiarism, it’s less than one-quarter of one percent of the entire work.

That is hardly proof that the dissertation is the product of copying and pasting.

But even that small amount is dubious. Many examples deal with extremely short passages that could be a coincidence. However, even those showing clear signs of copying cite the source. While quoting is not indicated, and that is a problem, it suggests that the issue was likely not intentional.

Back in October, I discussed the Dark Ages of Academic Plagiarism, which lasted from the mid-to-late 1990s to the mid-to-late 2000s. This was a period when the Internet was widely available, but plagiarism-detection software was not widely used.

During that time, many academics made mistakes when interacting with outside content. Some improperly mingled original and outside content. Others attempted to edit outside material to paraphrase it, an inappropriate and ineffective technique.

While these are all bad things and point to a degree of slopiness or problematic writing, they don’t suggest that this dissertation was wholly or in large part a work of plagiarism.

The Spread of Weaponized Plagiarism

Over the past year and a half, I’ve talked a great deal about the weaponization of plagiarism. It’s about using plagiarism and plagiarism investigations to target political or ideological opponents.

In the United States, this has manifested as a series of allegations targeting university officials associated with diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Those allegations have ranged in merit from nearly frivolous to those with more serious issues.

However, we’re no strangers to political plagiarism scandals here, either. President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, Senator John Walsh, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden all faced allegations of plagiarism.

To be clear, those allegations range wildly in sincerity and severity. However, they all captured headlines at the time.

While this isn’t the first Canadian plagiarism scandal, it’s the first to follow this formula. A person hoping to find plagiarism investigates the work of a political figure and reports their findings directly to the media.

However, the allegations are dubious and inflated. While there is enough truth to raise some legitimate concerns, the severity is vastly overstated.

That seems to be the case here. While some passages clearly show issues with paraphrasing and uncited text, the quantity of copied text and presence of citations mitigate the severity.

As with other cases, this can more likely be chalked up to sloppiness, poor paraphrasing and sourcing mistakes rather than malicious plagiarism.

But, even then, we’re only talking about a tiny fraction of a percent of the total work. Even if we assume the worst, there simply isn’t much here.

Bottom Line

To be clear, there’s no “good” or “acceptable” amount of plagiarism, and some passages are problematic. However, a correction rather than a retraction would address these issues. Revoking a degree would be an extreme overreaction.

Oxford has not commented on the case and is unlikely to do so. This dissertation is 30 years old, and the evidence presented isn’t likely to warrant a formal response.

Personally, I would like to see schools investigate these cases and ensure that there are no other issues in the dissertation. However, we’ve seen schools quickly dismiss more substantive arguments. As such, I wouldn’t expect Oxford even to acknowledge this case, barring some kind of formal complaint or other request.

In the end, there are enough issues here to say there are a few problematic passages. However, the person making the allegations is trying to inflate the severity. Between the dubious examples and the limited quantity, there’s not much here.

Ultimately, this is another example of the weaponization of plagiarism, this one north of the US-Canada border.