Last week, the Liberal line of defence of Mark Carney’s high-finance Brookfield background came out through the media: Pierre Poilievre is just as bad.

It’s a light years-long stretch, the logic being this: Carney, former chair of Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) and vice-chair of Brookfield Corporation (BN), stands to benefit from Brookfield’s success — but so does Poilievre, because he keeps some of his investments in an exchange-traded fund named Vanguard FTSE Canada Index ETF (VCE), which is invested in many Canadian companies, a small fraction of which includes BN and BAM.