Mark Carney must keep an expansionist America at bay
As Mark Carney celebrated his crushing win in the race to succeed Justin Trudeau as leader of Canada’s Liberal Party—and thus soon the country’s 24th prime minister—Canadians would be forgiven for wondering which version of their former central banker they will get.
The bookish Mr Carney has at times struck the pose of a defiant brawler during his campaign. That is fitting for a former hockey player—and someone preparing to go into battle on two fronts. At home, he will need to convince Canadians to vote again for a Liberal party that has spent the past decade in power. An election could be called within days, and the Conservative opposition has until recently been rampant in the polls. Just as dauntingly, he will need to best a foe not running in the election: Donald Trump.
In his victory speech, Mr Carney said that he believed the American president’s threat to annex Canada was credible. “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” he told his audience. “If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.” As a result, he said, Canada’s initial volley of C$30bn ($21bn) of tariffs on imports crossing its southern border would remain in effect until “the Americans show us some respect”.
In many ways it is remarkable that the normally undemonstrative 59-year-old is in position to deliver such fighting talk. Last July, five months before Mr Trudeau announced that he was standing down, a nationwide poll found that 93% of Canadians had no idea who Mr Carney was when shown his picture. On March 9th he won an astounding 85.9% of the votes cast in the Liberal leadership race. The effect on his party has been similarly Lazarus-like. At the end of 2024 The Economist’s poll tracker gave the Conservatives a 24-point lead over the Liberals. The gap has now narrowed to just seven points.
Even so, most Canadians still don’t know very much about Mr Carney beyond his experience as a central banker. The shiny CV of the Harvard- and Oxford-trained economist, who was a devotee of the gabfests of global elites, might have put off voters in an era of rampaging populism. But as the man who steered the Bank of Canada through the 2008-09 financial crisis, and the Bank of England during the Brexit years, Mr Carney looks reassuring to many Canadians at a time when America has vowed to wage an “economic war” and coerce Canada into becoming the 51st state. “He’s taking the elitist disadvantage and flipping it,” says David Coletto, of Abacus Data, a polling firm.
He began those political gymnastics by dispatching some of his unpopular predecessor’s signature policies, including a carbon tax that Mr Carney had previously championed. Mr Trudeau had once successfully campaigned on the pollution levy, winning three successive mandates. But after the pandemic, as Canada’s interest rates rose and the cost of living soared, the Conservative’s leader, Pierre Poilievre, succeeded in making the tax radioactive. One of Mr Carney’s first acts as prime minister will be to kill it.
Mr Carney will probably be sworn in swiftly. Those close to him suggest he will name a slimmed-down cabinet over the coming week. He will use the next few days to decide if he will take that new cabinet into a parliament that is due to meet on March 24th. If not, he will dissolve that parliament and call an election for late April or early May. Momentum is with him and his party. Whether that will be enough to deliver victory—and to keep Mr Trump at bay—is yet to be seen. ■