Justin Trudeau’s successor Mark Carney is ‘boring but reassuring’ for extraordinary times

He was born near the Arctic, led the central banks of two major economies and now Mark Carney is about to become Canada’s next leader despite never having served in parliament.

Canada's new Liberal leader and prime minister-designate Mark Carney listens to the vote result during the leadership election in Ottawa. Picture: Dave Chan / AFP

He was born near the Arctic, led the central banks of two major economies, and now Mark Carney is about to become Canada’s next prime minister despite never having served in parliament.

Mark Carney’s path to the top job in Canadian politics has been unusual but, as he said when he launched his campaign to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, so are the circumstances.

“Our times are anything but ordinary,” Carney told supporters in the western city of Edmonton in January.

Carney has called the threats posed by President Donald Trump “the most serious crisis of our lifetime” and said on Sunday local time that the United States wants “our resources, our water, our land, our country”.

He says his experience leading the Bank of Canada through the 2008-2009 financial crisis and then heading the Bank of England after the Brexit vote there has equipped him for the moment. He was the first non-Briton to lead the bank in its more than 300-year history.

Mark Carney alongside his wife Diana gestures at supporters after being elected. Picture; AFP

Carney, who previously led both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, soundly defeated his main challenger, Trudeau’s former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, who held several senior cabinet positions in the Liberal government that was first elected in 2015.

Carney won 85.9 per cent of the nearly 152,000 rank and file ballots cast in the Liberal Party leadership vote and will become prime minister over the coming days.

Carney lost no time taking a defiant stance against a US president he accused of “attacking Canadian workers, families, and businesses.” “We cannot let him succeed,” added the 59-year-old, who will take over from Trudeau in the coming days.

Carney may not have the job for long.

Canada must hold elections by October but could well see a snap poll within weeks. Current polls put the opposition Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre as slight favourites.

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 with Canada rattled by Trump’s trade chaos and attacks on its sovereignty, rigorous competence with no flash may be appealing.

Carney presents “the image of a reassuring guy who knows what he is talking about’’, Beland said.

Carney campaigned on a promise to stand up to Trump

In his victory speech to a boisterous crowd of party supporters in Ottawa, Carney warned the US under Trump was seeking to seize control of Canada.

“The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” he said. “These are dark days, dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust.”

Carney campaigned on a promise to stand up to Trump.

The US president has repeatedly spoken about annexing Canada and thrown bilateral trade, the lifeblood of the Canadian economy, into chaos with dizzying tariff actions that have veered in various directions since he took office.

Delivering a farewell address before the results were announced, Trudeau said “Canadians face from our neighbour an existential challenge”.

The prime minister Scott Morrison and wife Jenny have a meeting with Mark Carney, then governor of the Bank of England, in London in 2019. Picture: Adam Taylor

Carney led central banks during the GFC and Brexit

Carney has argued that his experience makes him the ideal counter to the US president, portraying himself as a seasoned economic crisis manager who led the Bank of Canada through the 2008-2009 global financial crisis and the Bank of England through the turbulence that followed the 2016 Brexit vote.

Data released from the Angus Reid polling firm on Wednesday shows Canadians see Carney as the favourite choice to face off against Trump, potentially offering the Liberals a boost over the opposition Conservatives.

Forty-three per cent of respondents said they trusted Carney the most to deal with Trump, with 34 per cent backing Poilievre.

Before Trudeau announced his plans to resign in January, the Liberals were headed for an electoral wipeout, but the leadership change and Trump’s influence have dramatically tightened the race.

“I think we were written off about four months ago, and now we’re right back where we should be,” former MP Frank Baylis, who also ran for the leadership, told AFP in Ottawa.

The former investment banker also served as UN envoy

Carney made a fortune as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs before entering the Canadian civil service.

Since leaving the Bank of England in 2020, he has served as a United Nations envoy working to get the private sector to invest in climate-friendly technology and has held private sector roles.

Why Carney is a political risk

He has never served in parliament nor held an elected public office. Analysts say his untested campaign skills could prove a liability against a Conservative Party already running attack ads accusing Carney of shifting positions and misrepresenting his experience.

“It is absolutely a risk. He is unproven in the crucible of an election,” said Cameron Anderson, a political scientist at Ontario’s Western University.

He said Carney’s victory speech, and its tough anti-Trump rhetoric, “is what Canadians want to hear from their leaders.” “The average Canadian in the country is viewing these things in an existential way,” Anderson said.

A unique background and ‘boring but reassuring’

No matter how long he serves, his tenure will be unique.

Carney will be the first Canadian prime minister with no political experience. He has never held an elected public office or served in a government cabinet.

He was born in Fort Smith, a small town in the Northwest Territories, where his parents were teachers, but he was raised in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital.

Like many Canadians, he played hockey in his youth. He studied at Harvard in the United States and Oxford in England, and the initial part of his career saw him make a fortune as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, working in New York, London, Tokyo and Toronto.

Carney then joined the Canadian civil service, eventually being appointed governor of the Bank of Canada by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper in 2008.

In 2013, the government of then-British prime minister David Cameron tapped him to lead the Bank of England, making Carney the first non-Briton to lead the bank in its more than 300-year history.

Lori Turnbull of Dalhousie University cautioned that Carney’s potential struggles to connect with the public could prove a liability.

“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 running attack ads branding Carney as “sneaky” – an early look at how they might plan to wage the campaign against him.

Carney is personally wealthy, spent significant parts of his career outside of Canada, worked for US-based Goldman Sachs and was chairman at one of Canada’s largest corporations, Brookfield.

“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.

Climate change, and Carney’s plans to address it, are also certain to play a key role in the campaign.

“Carbon Tax Carney” has emerged as a favourite Tory attack line, seeking to tie Carney to a deeply unpopular Trudeau policy that saw some homes face a marginal tax to offset emissions.

Climate has been central to the latter part of Carney’s career, but he says his focus is on investment-led solutions, like green technology, that create profit and jobs.

“Very much we are emphasising the commercial aspect of it, the competitiveness aspect,” he said recently in an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast.

“This is where the world is going.”

AFP