Mark Carney, soon to become Canada’s new prime minister, is a two-time central banker and crisis fighter about to face his biggest challenge of all: steering Canada through Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The 59-year-old will be the first person to become Canadian prime minister without being an MP or having any cabinet experience.
Carney’s credentials as a political outsider would in normal times have killed his candidacy in Canada but his distance from unpopular incumbent Justin Trudeau and a high-profile banking career played to his advantage, and Carney argues he is the only person prepared to handle Trump.
“I know how to manage crises … in a situation like this, you need experience in terms of crisis management, you need negotiating skills,” Carney said during a leadership debate last month.
He said in an interview last month: “President Trump probably thinks Canada will cave in. But we are going to stand up to a bully, we’re not going to back down. We’re united and we will retaliate.”
Carney has called the threats posed by Trump “the most serious crisis of our lifetime” and said on Sunday that the US wants “our resources, our water, our land, our country”.
Daniel Béland, the director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University, described Carney as a “technocrat”. “He’s a boring guy who in general doesn’t have a lot of charisma,” Béland said. However, he noted that Carney’s rigorous competence with no flash may be appealing, given Canada is rattled by Trump’s trade chaos and attacks on its sovereignty.
Carney presents “the image of a reassuring guy who knows what he is talking about,” Béland added.
Carney was born in Fort Smith, a small town in the remote Northwest Territories, where his parents were teachers, but he was raised in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital. He attended Harvard University in the US where he played college-level ice hockey, starring as a goalkeeper, and did a master’s at Oxford in the UK.
He made a fortune as an investment banker during 13 years at Goldman Sachs, working in New York, London, Tokyo and Toronto before being named deputy governor of the Bank of Canada in 2003. He left in November 2004 for a top finance ministry job and returned to become governor of the central bank in 2008 at the age of 42.
Carney won praise for his handling of that year’s financial crisis, when he created new emergency loan facilities and gave unusually explicit guidance on keeping rates at record low levels for a specific period of time.
Even back then, rumours swirled that he would seek a career in politics with the Liberals, prompting him to respond with a prickliness that is still sometimes evident.
Carney was headhunted in 2013 by the then UK chancellor, George Osborne, as the first non-British governor of the Bank of England and was known at the time by the unlikely epithet of “rock star central banker”.
Carney arrived in London determined to bring change to the stuffy Bank. He introduced plastic banknotes, and a new approach to communication known as “forward guidance”, which was meant to give investors a clearer idea of which way interest rates were heading.
The former innovation proved more immediately successful than the latter. After the Bank was seen as sending out mixed signals on rates, Carney was memorably accused of being an “unreliable boyfriend” by the Labour MP Pat McFadden – then a member of the Treasury select committee, now a powerful Cabinet Office minister.
Carney also waded into the fractious debate over Brexit, warning repeatedly about the risks to the economy of leaving the EU – leading to accusations that he had politicised the independent Bank.
The Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg called him the “high priest of project fear”, but Carney said it was his duty to talk about such risks.
When sterling tumbled in the hours after the Brexit referendum result in 2016, Carney delivered a televised address to reassure markets that the Bank would turn on the liquidity taps if needed.
“Mark has a rare ability to combine a central banker’s steady hand, with a political reformer’s eye to the future,” said Ana Botín, Santander’s executive chair, in a written comment to Reuters. She said Carney “steadied the ship” in the UK after Brexit.
He left the Bank of England in 2020, and then served as a UN envoy on finance and climate change, continuing to write and work on an area he emphasised as governor: the need for financial markets to catch up with the risks of the climate crisis.
In a much-quoted speech from 2015, he warned that efforts to tackle global heating were compromised by “the tragedy of the horizon” – politicians’ and markets’ inability to look beyond the next few years.
In his 2021 book Value(s) – subtitled “An Economist’s Guide to Everything that Matters” – Carney enlarged on the idea, and attacked finance-driven capitalism more broadly, for losing sight of society’s needs.
Carney remains an influential figure on the global economic stage, and the UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, hailed his endorsement at the 2023 Labour conference.
When it emerged in January that he was considering a run to replace Trudeau, Carney, who has four daughters, told the Financial Times he would be “considering this decision closely with my family”. He launched his bid for the Liberal leadership on 16 January.
Although his path to office appeared unusual, Carney told supporters in Edmonton in January: “Our times are anything but ordinary.” However, Carney may not be prime minister for long, with a general election due to be held by 20 October that the opposition Conservatives are slight favourites to win, according to polls. The Conservatives are led by Pierre Poilievre, a career politician with little international exposure.
Lori Turnbull, of Dalhousie University, said Carney may struggle to connect with voters. “He’s not a particularly great communicator when it comes to the public,” she said. “He is unusually well-equipped to deal with economic crises” but “it’s very hard to see how anybody would be successful in politics if you can’t bring people onboard with you,” she told Agence France-Presse.
“The Conservatives are trying to cast him as an elite who doesn’t understand what regular people go through. And I think if he can’t communicate well, then he runs the risk of being typecast in that way,” Turnbull said.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse
