Mark Carney, the Liberal who will lead Canada
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include Mark Carney’s election as leader of the Liberal Party, and thus Canada’s new prime minister.
IN JULY A polling firm showed 1,989 randomly selected Canadians a photograph of a stern-looking gentleman wearing a dark-blue necktie and a darker jacket. Only 7% could identify him as Mark Carney. Now, though, the former central banker is on the verge of becoming prime minister.
Canadians still don’t know much about Mr Carney, but they have been speed-dating him since January, when he launched his candidacy to lead the country’s governing Liberal Party. Polls suggest that, at an anxious time for Canadians, a growing number of voters are impressed by his CV, if not his charisma-free campaign style. On March 9th Liberal Party members chose him to succeed Justin Trudeau as the party’s leader. He will be sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister a few days later. His main challenges at first will be to defend Canada from Donald Trump’s economic onslaught and to prepare the Liberals for an election that must be held this year. At a time when voters in Western countries are giving increasing support to Trumpish politicians, Canada may be about to choose a leader who is nothing like the American president.
Mr Carney bills himself as an outsider. He piloted the Bank of Canada through the Great Recession in 2008-09 and the Bank of England through Brexit. He thus has the economic credentials to confront Mr Trump, who threatens to use “economic force”, in the form of punishing tariffs on Canadian goods, to coerce his northern neighbour into becoming the 51st American state. Mr Carney also casts himself as a dissenter: the Liberal most sceptical of Mr Trudeau’s unpopular government and best positioned to correct its economic mistakes.
Mr Carney set out his stall in a televised interview on January 13th with Jon Stewart, an American political comedian. “In a situation like this, you need change,” he said. What sort? “You need to address the economy.” As for Mr Trump’s threat to annex Canada, Mr Carney was deftly dismissive. “We find you very attractive, but we’re not moving in with you,” he quipped. Suddenly, the sepulchral central banker known only to finance geeks was cracking wise with the mordant arbiter of American political cool. The video has been viewed 3.7m times so far.
Three days later Mr Carney launched his leadership campaign. Family members, boyhood chums and a chorus of supportive Liberal MPs filled the small room that day even if the candidate’s personality did not. His dearth of dazzle would become a bit in his campaign rather than a bug. “I’m not the usual suspect when it comes to politics, but this is no time for politics as usual,” he says.
Mr Carney was born almost 60 years ago in the remote Northwest Territories hamlet of Fort Smith, but grew up in Edmonton, capital of the oil-producing province of Alberta. His father was a teacher. Mr Carney played hockey and regularly attended mass (he is still a practising Catholic, listing Pope Francis among his heroes).
Canada’s Conservatives, suddenly nervous after holding a double-digit lead in opinion polls for more than a year, mock the idea that Mr Carney is an outsider. He attended Harvard and Oxford universities, worked for Goldman Sachs on Wall Street and has been a regular at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a globally-minded gathering of honchos. Mr Carney’s riposte to Conservatives who brand him a representative of a gilded global elite: “If I’m so terrible, why did they try to get me to run for them?” Stephen Harper, a former Conservative prime minister who now says that Mr Carney claims too much credit for steering Canada through the recession, asked him to be finance minister in 2012.
Mr Carney is not a political neophyte. In whispered conversations amid the Gothic arches and marble pillars of Parliament Hill in Ottawa, politicos have talked of his ambitions for a dozen years at least. He came out as a Liberal at the party’s convention in 2021. Two years later he endorsed Rachel Reeves for the job she now holds, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer. Six months ago he agreed to lead a task force that would advise Mr Trudeau’s government on economic growth.
Mr Carney has shown guile in positioning himself to inherit Mr Trudeau’s mantle while shaking off inconvenient bits of his legacy. He alone among the four contenders to lead the Liberals has strongly criticised Mr Trudeau’s profligate spending. Mr Carney, until January the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, has long championed Canada’s carbon tax, a signature policy of the Trudeau government. But Conservative attacks have helped make it unpopular; Mr Carney no longer supports it.
He benefited from a rumpus in December, when he accepted an invitation to become finance minister—which prompted Chrystia Freeland, who then had that job, to noisily quit the cabinet—then dramatically turned it down. The tumult led directly to Mr Trudeau’s resignation. The affair thus both distanced Mr Carney from Mr Trudeau’s record and opened up his job. (Ms Freeland is now Ms Carney’s main rival to lead the Liberals.)
Keeping the prime ministership in an election will not be easy. His French is laboured, which may hurt the Liberals in Quebec. He will be up against the Conservative Party’s leader, Pierre Poilievre, a lifelong political brawler who can seem a little Trumpian in a Canadian sort of way. Six months ago a limousine Liberal like Mr Carney would have had little chance. But now Canada’s sovereignty and economy are under threat. Populism looks less like a refreshing change from Mr Trudeau’s wokeism and more like an American disorder. Mr Carney’s globalist gravitas seems more appealing. He can thank Mr Trump for that. ■