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 the 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 late last month.
He argues Canada must fight Trump’s tariffs with dollar for dollar retaliation and diversify trading relations in the medium term.
Last month he said: “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 Beland, 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,” Beland said but he noted that his 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,” Beland said.
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 where he played college level ice hockey, starring as a goalkeeper, and studied at Oxford.
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 just 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.
The Bank of England was impressed enough though to poach him in 2013, making him the first non-British governor in the central bank’s three-century history, and the first person to ever head two G7 central banks. Britain’s chancellor at the time, George Osborne, called Carney the “outstanding central bank governor of his generation”.
Carney, though, had a challenging time, forced to face zero inflation and the political chaos of Brexit.
He struggled to deploy his trademark policy of signalling the likely path of interest rates. The bank said its guidance came with caveats but media often interpreted it as more of a guarantee, with Labour legislator Pat McFadden dubbing the bank under Carney as an “unreliable boyfriend”.
But he infuriated Brexit supporters by talking about the economic damage that he said was likely to be caused. 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 Botin, Santander’s executive chairman, 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 United Nations 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.
After launching the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero in 2021 to act as an umbrella group for financial sector efforts to get to net-zero emissions, Carney oversaw a surge in membership as boards rushed to signal a willingness to act.
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 cautioned that Carney may struggle to connect with the public. “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 on board with you,” she told AFP.
“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
