Given Joseph Stiglitz’s existing tax opinions, he hardly seems like the right person to be setting up the International Panel on Inequality. So where does Canada stand on the IPI proposal? Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images

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I believe it is accurate to say that Canada has not reached a point where income and wealth inequality are top concerns among Canadian voters and political leaders. Aside from the NDP’s Avi Lewis, leftist journalists and academics, calls to tax-the-rich out of existence are few and far between. There has been little Canadian uptake of the California-based proposal to impose an annual five per cent tax on the wealth of billionaires.

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No surprise, then, that Prime Minister Mark Carney has so far failed to publicly respond to a request that he enlist Canada into a major UN campaign to launch an international policy initiative to end an inequality crisis described as “both large in scale and dangerous in trajectory.” The invite came from Joseph Stiglitz, famed Keynesian economist and political activist.

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Stiglitz is the leading economic light behind a G20 plan, now making its way through the United Nations, to create an International Panel on Inequality (IPI). In a commentary last week in The Hill Times, Stiglitz asked Carney to take up the cause. “Prime Minister Mark Carney has a pivotal opportunity to help lead the global fight against extreme inequality by championing the rapid establishment of an IPI. We look forward to his support and that of Canada.”

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No indication so far that Carney is ready to join the leadership team, and there have been no signs that any reporters have contacted the PMO to find out what Carney’s attitudes are to such an ideologically-charged effort. Nor is Canada mentioned in IPI’s official history, which includes support from the World Economic Forum and a small group of nations, including Spain, Norway, Brazil and South Africa. But no Canada.

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The IPI concept is modelled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a global operation that Carney has been closely associated with for many years. Commenting in 2021 on the rising risks of climate change, Carney said an IPCC report that year “shows there is no time to waste. All financial institutions should now join GFANZ and deliver the financing needed for the transition to net zero. If you’re not part of the solution, you are the problem.”

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Four years later, GFANZ — the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero that Carney helped create and chaired — nearly collapsed after high-profile banking members began to abandon the climate panic as a misguided effort based on unworkable ideas. Is Carney ready to become the leader of an inequality crusade based on climate change models?

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According to Stiglitz, the global inequality crisis deserves an urgent IPCC-scale effort. The IPI would produce “scientifically rigorous” assessments of the magnitude and changes taking place in inequality. The panel would explore “the drivers and consequences, and the success and failures in addressing it around the world.” The IPI research would be used to shape government policies to reduce inequality and deploy funds to shape and improve economic development.