Canadian PM Mark Carney accused of plagiarism in his Oxford University thesis

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been accused of plagiarising parts of his Oxford University thesis on the economy just weeks before voters will decide whether he should continue in his role.

The accusations were reportedly made by three academics chosen to assess the liberal leader’s 1995 theses for his doctorate by the conservative newspaper the National Post.

The three academics identified 10 “potential” incidents of plagiarism, according to the paper.

One of them, Geoffrey Sigalet, a member of the University of British Columbia’s student disciplinary committee, said he felt Carney had inappropriately used others’ work in his 300-page thesis entitled “The Dynamic Advantage of Competition”.

“He’s just directly repeating without quotations. That’s what we call plagiarism,” Sigalet told the Post.

One of the other three academics agreed with Sigalet, but did not want his name revealed in the article because he was fearful he could be sued by Carney.

Carney’s thesis supervisor defended his work.

“I believe you are mischaracterising this work,” Margaret Meyer, an American economist and an economics fellow at Nuffield College in Oxford University, told the National Post.

“As an academic of nearly 40 years, I see no evidence of plagiarism in the thesis you cited, nor any unusual academic practices,” she emphasised.

“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,” Meyer said.

A spokesperson for the Liberal campaign, Isabella Orozco-Madison, called the allegations an “irresponsible mischaracterisation” of Carney’s work.

Carney’s office has yet to comment on the accusations.

Carney frequently referred in his thesis to a 1990 book The Competitive Advantage of Nations.” But the critics brought in by the Post claimed he didn’t sufficiently credit it.

Carney was also accused of using some exact phrasing and some full sentences from the book, as well as parts of phrasing from three academic articles.

Meyer defended the inclusion of the phrases, saying it’s “typical that overlapping language appears” when sources are “frequently referenced in an academic text.”

Carney, from Edmonton, Alberta, graduated with a degree in economics from Harvard before obtaining a Masters degree at St Peter’s College at Oxford, and a Doctorate at Nuffield.

Carney was sworn in earlier this month as Canada’s prime minister, replacing Justin Trudeau amid a hostile trade war and Trudeau’s increasingly acrimonious relationship with President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly denigrated the northern nation as the 51st state of America and mocked Trudeau as a mere governor.

Trump and Carney shared their first phone call on Friday, and both men said they planned to soon begin trade negotiations.

Trump characterised the call as “productive” and dropped his belittling public comments about Canada becoming an American state..

In a surprisingly dramatic reversal of his tone about the neighbouring nation in the recent past, Trump said: “I think things will work out very well between Canada and the United States.”

The Independent