canada should seek to avoid doing things like selling airport or oil infrastructure to foreign investors, which mostly means arab investors. when a country doesn't own it's own wealth, it loses it's sovereignty. this idea was doublethinked and politically correctified over during the first part of the post cold war era of american hegemony / globalization. there was nothing scary about letting foreigners buy up your resources and take control of your wealth. that's racist.
but as american hegemony has unfolded, the dangers of this kind of thinking have made themselves apparent. deindustrialization and the offshoring of wealth has created tremendous problems in developed economies. the next step is dealing with the social and political ramifications of having your economies controlled not just by foreign states, but by repressive and authoritarian and theocratic foreign states.
if i had to choose, i would rather join the united states than be taken over by saudi arabia. the latter is no solution to the problems posed by the former.
so, yes, canada should be trying to keep control and ownership of it's own resources in canada. the era of american hegemony is probably not over, but the era of globalization that required the projection of american dominance has taken a hit and may not recover. the americans no longer seem to be interested in protecting free markets within the structure of an american empire via overwhelming american force, but seem to be shifting towards using that military hegemony to advance their own interests, at the expense of their client states, which they now see as competitors. without the protection of american military dominance, the idea of selling our resources to anybody at all - even european countries that seem friendly today but have horrible recent histories - seems perilous, and the idea of selling them to the arabs or chinese appears flat out stupid.
i would not have proposed what carney is proposing. as mentioned, the details are thin. it's a very homo economicus approach. i am no advocate of free markets and i know what happens when you try to democratize via dividends. is there even going to be a guarantee that canadians are buying into it, or will it be open to the rest of the world? by making share ownership difficult to track, it may do the opposite of what's being suggested - it might backfire and result in difficult to understand, measure or regulate and increased foreign ownership of the resource economy. or maybe that's actually the point.
the liberals are famous for campaigning on the left and governing on the right. today, they seem to be campaigning as economic nationalists and governing as globalists. we should not have expected anything different.
i would prefer to see these projects funded via the bank of canada and set up as crown corporations. i've been calling on this for over ten years but the liberal party seems to have some deep ideological opposition to it, and it's not likely to develop. there was a clause in trudeau's platform in 2015 about a green infrastructure bank as a part of the bank of canada that i strongly supported and that the liberal party hierarchy has violently prevented. it would upset certain large investors, who don't want to unravel the nixon shock.
most of what i'm calling for was supported by pierre trudeau and torn down by brian mulroney, then side-stepped during the chretien years, put off for later, and now forgotten about. some time after the martin purge, the liberals became violently opposed to their own legacy and deadset on destroying it. the liberals have run on these ideas because they know they get votes, but they won't implement them until something changes at the top of the party or a real left-wing alternative gets elected.
as it is, carney seems to be trying to be a nationalist and a globalist at the same time and is likely as tied into the doublethink as anybody. i expect that the globalism will overpower the nationalism, to the detriment of canadians.
i'm not interested in canada buying up resources elsewhere, although canadian companies certainly own large mining and mineral resources in africa and latin america. a canadian sovereign wealth fund as it exists in norway would look something like nationalizing canada's substantive foreign mineral holdings, which carney would not contemplate doing for ten seconds. that would be interfering in the private sector and deeply un homo economicus. it would be a heresy against the church of free market economics.