Second in a series of profiles of the major party leaders.
Now that Donald Trump has won two presidential votes, though he notoriously claims three, it is easy to forget how disorienting the Brexit referendum was to the political and economic establishment, and how similar a shock.
Brexit happened not long before the first Trump win in 2016, and it seemed to announce a new era. It took down a British prime minister who had argued, alongside the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, that leaving the European Union was a terrible idea for the U.K., tantamount to economic self sabotage, ginned up by a chaotic new populism that tugged on modern conservatism from the farther right.
So it fell to Carney, now Canada’s Prime Minister seeking his first election to public office, to use monetary policy to absorb those shocks. And he did. There were recriminations about him being a doomsayer, and accusations of being so unclear on interest rates that he got tagged with the “unreliable boyfriend” nickname in the financial press. But it could have been a lot worse. Doom was dodged.
Canada faces similar economic fears today, and similar imperatives to resolve volatile geopolitics with economic reality. These have transformed Carney from a long-running Liberal daydream to the front runner in the polls.
“Has there ever been a prime minister with a résumé so suited for this job, at least on the economic management side? But at the same time there has never been a prime minister so inexperienced,” said Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, professor of political studies at Queen’s University and director of the Canadian Opinion Research Archive.
Running a central bank or hedge fund is different than governing a country like Canada. There is less visibility, and fewer regional and provincial balances to strike, Goodyear-Grant said. Carney’s career has been an escalating series of jobs managing money and setting rules behind the scenes for others to follow, but he has less experience playing them out himself before the public, and barely a few weeks experience as a governing party leader.
Carney studied at Harvard and Oxford, and worked for the investment bank Goldman Sachs in London and Tokyo before serving both Liberal and Conservative governments in Canada as an economic policy advisor. He was Governor of the Bank of Canada through the 2008 financial crisis, and on the strength of Canada’s resilience, became the first non-British Governor of the Bank of England (he holds Irish citizenship, and became British in 2018, but has started the process of renouncing both to be solely Canadian). He later took up roles in global climate and finance with the United Nations, and in the private sector with Brookfield Asset Management and fintech firms Stripe and Bloomberg.
“I find him fascinating,” with his “long flirtation” with the Liberal Party, and the obvious sense that he was only interested if he could have the top job from the get-go, said Jim Farney, professor of political studies at the University of Regina, director of its graduate school for public policy, and an expert in the politics of Canadian social conservatism.
“He clearly has a global network and global sense of Canada and thinks of us in that global setting. We haven’t had a PM except arguably Trudeau père with that sensibility,” Farney said. “It’ll be interesting to see what his team looks like when he gets to make it himself. He has no problem making big changes quickly. The question is how does that run into official Ottawa, which is more hierarchical, with more stress on a leader’s ability to make decisions.”
Farney said chiefs of staff under Stephen Harper, for example, usually went about 18 months. What would it mean to be chief of staff to Carney, he wondered, or finance minister? Farney said he is likewise unclear how Carney will relate to provincial premiers and Indigenous leaders, with
his poor French
and inexperience in brokering political compromise.
“I haven’t seen how he behaves in those primus inter pares (first among equals) settings,” Farney said.
“Somewhere Michael Ignatieff is screaming,” said Tamara Small, professor of political science at the University of Guelph. The same things that tanked Iggy arguably apply to Carney too: the “Just Visiting” slogan, that sense of elite entitlement, of swanning into politics as if it’s a step down, the wonky inexperience with campaigning. “They both use words like mendacious,” Small joked.
Everyone knows the Liberal Party of Canada loves a clever Oxbridgian who is handsome enough for television but also a bit of a nerd. No sooner did Ignatieff vanish after the 2011 election did they start looking to Carney, who seemed to tease with his silence. That flirtation lasted well over a decade, popping up in the media every time Justin Trudeau seemed to wobble.
But now it’s looking like Canadians in general will also warm to the archetype, if they think the moment is right for a prime minister with Harper’s economic policy sense but not his wooden affect, and Trudeau’s global celebrity without the melodrama.
That’s Carney’s current image to the wide centre-left of the Canadian electorate. Smart as Harper, less cringe than Trudeau. Polls suggest it is a sweet spot, though the real test remains.
Canadians do not usually vote mainly on foreign affairs, not since free trade in 1988, and even more rarely on a single issue, not since conscription in 1917. This election
is set to be an outlier
.
“We are going to vote on a nationalistic posture toward foreign affairs. It won’t last forever, but it’s strong now. People are still in the throes of trying to figure it out,” Small said. Carney’s novelty helps him, because he looks good on paper, his bio full of what his main rival Pierre Poilievre has called “trophy titles.”
On the key issue of energy policy, Carney gives the impression of trying to strike a tricky balance between quickly making Canada a self-sufficient energy superpower, while also
being non-committal on new pipelines
.
It has not been an easy sell. For a former UN special envoy on climate action and finance, he has barely mentioned climate change in the campaign. And his vagueness
has amplified concern
, such as telling an audience in Calgary he would accelerate federal approval of major infrastructure projects and streamline provincial and Indigenous buy-in with a “one project, one review” approach, but then telling an audience in Quebec: “We must choose a few projects, a few big projects. Not necessarily pipelines, but maybe pipelines, we’ll see.”
Things look good for Carney if voters stay worried enough to wonder things like which candidate knows best how to negotiate trade policy with Europe, and decide that’s him.
The polls reflect this
. But Small describes that recent movement of public opinion to Carney and the Liberals as conditional, a tentative endorsement in theory.
“A serious gaffe could be the end of it,” Small said. “If he gives people a reason not to vote for him, they won’t.”
It would not be just a gaffe, like his
flubbing the name of his own candidate
Nathalie Provost and appallingly getting the name of École Polytechnique wrong in mentioning the 1989 massacre there (he said it was Concordia), but a more revealing one, something that cuts to the core of his image and somehow damages it.
It does not appear his campaign missteps have yet risen to this level, though they have come close.
Goodyear-Grant said she saw a sharpness and impatience in Carney’s
angry and imperious snap
at CBC journalist Rosemary Barton about his own assets and his compliance with conflict of interest rules, such that even his body language seemed to say, “Why are you asking me this stupid question?”
“Look inside yourself, Rosemary,” Carney said, condescendingly. “You start from a prior of conflict and ill will.”
“This is a guy who seems at home where speaking sharply is fine, as long as you can back it up. That’s not politics though,” Goodyear-Grant said. “That’s not how Trudeau would do it.”
There was also a bumbling response to a
question about offshore tax havens
, such as those used by Brookfield under his leadership. After a rally in Calgary, he claimed he had not heard a heckler use the word “genocide”
in regards to Gaza
, to which he replied “I’m aware, which is why we have an arms embargo.”
Even his explanation in stilted French on Radio-Canada that he is not personally boycotting American groceries such as strawberries because, as prime minister, he
does not buy his own groceries
, could have dented the popularity of a certain sort of candidate, the sort who should know the price of milk. But none of these seemed to hurt Carney. It already seemed unlikely he did much grocery shopping.
Gaffes have to mean something. For Robert Stanfield dropping the football in 1974, the real worry was that he was old. For Stockwell Day in his wetsuit on a jetski in 2000, the real worry was that “this guy’s all flash,” as Small put it. And so in those cases, the polls moved accordingly.
For a Carney gaffe to be truly damaging, Small said, it would have to play on the central worry that he’s not actually able to stand up to Trump.
Even the plagiarism claim about his PhD thesis,
first reported by the National Post
, seemed to do little more than remind people he had a doctorate in economics from Oxford, albeit with a few sentences that had previously been published verbatim elsewhere. It made headlines overseas, in Britain especially, and gave Poilievre some attack lines, but it didn’t move the Canadian polls.
On the other hand, the scandal of Liberal staffers who got caught
planting fake buttons
with provocative Trumpist slogans at a Conservative conference, and then were “reassigned” within the campaign, threatened to linger as an awkward reminder that the people behind Carney are the same ones who were behind Trudeau, the same party most of the country so recently soured on.
“People who are giving Carney a look are people who have voted Liberal in the past and just couldn’t do Justin Trudeau,” Small said. “I don’t think people who were committed to the Conservatives seven months ago are people who have swung to Carney.”
One advantage, once voters start looking closely, is that, although Carney is clearly of the global financial elite, he did not start out there.
“He’s got a bit of the self-made man thing going for him,” Goodyear-Grant said. The silver spoon accusation does not land as well on Carney as it did on Justin Trudeau, who was famous as a child, and even the question of Carney’s early life draws more comparison than contrast with his rival Poilievre, as both grew up in Alberta.
One of Carney’s long-standing family friendships from his time in Ottawa is with Catherine McKenna, a former MP and Trudeau cabinet minister in environment and infrastructure, who now runs a climate consultancy.
She remembers being on the road toward Banff in October 2007 and hearing on the radio that Harper’s Finance Minister Jim Flaherty had chosen Carney to succeed David Dodge as Governor of the Bank of Canada, and knowing it was a good hire.
“People talk about him like he’s a bureaucrat,” McKenna said. “He’s also really smart.”
Later they interacted when she was minister. “He understood climate as an economic issue,” she said. McKenna recalled Carney coming to Toronto to speak to business leaders in 2016, and how everyone wanted to hear him talk about Brexit, this cataclysm that threatened to shake the foundations of Britain’s economy. But instead he talked about moving the economy forward, about the risks and costs of climate change, and about the economic opportunity of clean energy.
She sees a parallel to Canada’s strategic situation today, starting its separation from America as Britain separated from the European Union.
“There’s a definite parallel between Brexit and the situation we’re in,” McKenna said. “The reality is these are complex problems.”
“He’s very clear headed, and he understands the Canadian economy but more importantly he understands the global economy,” McKenna said. Where Trump is volatile and capricious, Carney is “outcome focused,” she said. “He is not someone who is going to bend or concede.”
Carney has been drawing this same parallel on the campaign, that he has experience being in an economic pressure cooker with strong political dimensions, and averting catastrophe through sound judgment.
“The U.S. is harming themselves with these tariffs, OK. It takes some time for that to filter through, just like it took some times for the impacts of Brexit to filter through to the U.K. economy. But I have seen this movie before. I know exactly what’s going to happen,” Carney said at a rally.
This wrongfoots the opposition because Conservatives cannot easily lean on their party’s good reputation for fiscal management as their winning issue “because the rival has more,” Goodyear-Grant said.
There’s a third parallel, less obvious but still relevant, Farney said. After the financial crisis of 2008, many Western democracies saw a renewal of the radical right, fuelled by high debt and stagnant economies. Farney said Canada was largely insulated from that trend because of a tightly disciplined Conservative Party under Stephen Harper, with sound economic management that kept the economy afloat, and a resource boom that mollified politics in Western Canada. But a political storm was rising that would later blow through Britain and then America, first as Brexit, then as Trump.
So this new global trade war, seemingly off and on like a teenage romance, is Carney’s “third time around” with managing the economic volatility of hard-right populism, and also his “most challenging,” Farney said.
Regardless whether he gets to face it as prime minister, Carney has already turned Canadian politics upside down.
“Justin Trudeau’s legacy could be saved by Mark Carney, and Donald Trump ironically,” Small said. “Because even if the Liberals don’t win this election, they’re not going to be destroyed.”
Read Jagmeet Singh’s profile. Next: Pierre Poilievre.
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