Mark Carney is a mirage — a reasonable facsimile floated by honeymoon-period hopes and, for now, a whole lot of wilful blindness to his past. It’s to our great detriment that a large swathe of Canadian media simply can’t see it for what it is.

The illusion can be traced back as far as 1995: Carney, then an Oxford economic PhD candidate, wrote a thesis that, when given a close read, contains 10 cases of apparent plagiarism. Several of these were repetitions of quotes, sometimes slightly modified, from other works that went unattributed. It’s the kind of mistake that university students are constantly warned against doing — and yet, he powered through. (Carney’s PhD supervisor maintains he did nothing wrong.)