My first (and only) job in politics was working in opposition research (for that party that was neither the Liberals or the Conservatives). That’s what they called it at the time: Opposition Research.

I remember one of my first training days. A woman not much younger than I showed me an internal database, where the party tracked vital details about their own candidates. History, personal relationships.

And she’d said, very deliberately, “because we do that,” to make the point, so she was sure I knew, in case I didn’t.

Of course the research wasn’t just internal, but extended to the other side.

And for the past few days I’ve been occasionally thinking of those opposition research folks currently working for the Conservative party, who’d apparently been trying to dig up any dirt they could on Mark Carney.

I imagine they’d gone through the sea of podcasts and long-form interviews and been like, “Gee this guy is a free market capitalist whose interest in fighting climate change is driven (at least in part) by the theory that it will make investors money. Why couldn’t we get him to run for our side?”

Who was it, I wonder, who thought, “Hey, let’s look at his Ph.D. thesis from 30 years ago. I’ll bet there’s something there.”

Apparently they actually went beyond the abstract. Because if they hadn’t, they would have hit another, ego-crushing road block: “The Dynamic Advantage of Competition? Seriously! What the hell! Why couldn’t we get him to run as a Conservative?”

But they didn’t stop at the abstract. And it seems that 29- or 30-year-old Mark Carney, with 7 years already at Goldman Sachs, rural NWT and small city Alberta likely already a distant memory, was sloppy.

Reading the National Post report (a right-leaning outlet, let’s remember) my suspicions were confirmed. It’s an apparent case of misattributing, or failing to attribute, several quotes in the paper.

(Let’s remember again that a Ph.D. thesis is the size of a book. It is not something you can skim on a coffee break.)

This was 1995. Plagarism was wrong then, as it’s wrong now. I was doing my (first) undergraduate degree in Political Science in Canada at this time, when Mark Carney was apprently trying to shore up his academic credentials while simultaneously building a career (across an ocean) in the private sector.

It was drilled into me, as an Arts undergrad, that you had no original ideas. Even if you think you’ve come up with something new and brilliant, someone else has already said it before. So you had to cite everything. Every stray thought you stuck in a paper had to come with a footnote.

(I even remember the citation rules, 30 years later).

That said, sloppiness is not the same as a deliberate attempt to deceive or pass off others’ work as your own. And writing a thesis is stressful. And Mark Carney didn’t go on to have an academic career, where he would continue to produce documents like these and sloppiness would not be tolerated.

I have a collection of undergraduate degrees, with a few long papers to my name. I’ve never done graduate work, but distinctly remember my friend’s descriptions of burgeoning hallucinations as she spent hours alone in her apartment, hiding from her roommate, trying to bang out her M.A. thesis that was years overdue (she kept getting extensions on her graduation).

So writing a thesis, apparently, can drive you fucking nuts.

No, it doesn’t excuse it. But it does show that the Conservatives are pretty desperate.

(Why isn’t he running for the Tories again?)