In the coming days, Mark Carney will be sworn in as the 24th Prime Minister of Canada, a political novice stepping onto the ice at a moment of maximum peril, both for his party and his country.
Carney, who many years ago was the backup goalie for Harvard’s hockey team, will find himself in front of the net for a game that he can’t afford to lose. Donald Trump is threatening to use economic force to annex Canada, and Canadians are expected to go to the polls within weeks to decide who will guard the net—Carney or Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, whose populist bombast is unusually intense for Canadian politics.
It would be a daunting task for any politician, let alone a rookie. Carney has never held elected office, but Canada’s desperate Liberals gave him a strong mandate to lead their party on Sunday, with 86% of the vote on the first ballot. That decisive vote was based wholly on the strength of Carney’s CV, which Immigration Minister Marc Miller points out is noteworthy.
Asking about Carney’s CV is “like asking someone whether War and Peace is a good book,” says Miller, who backed him to take over from Justin Trudeau. “It’s a f***ing good book.”
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Trudeau, who was a high-school teacher before he was elected to Parliament, had the thinnest CV of any Prime Minister in Canadian history. He swept to office with a majority government in 2015 based on his good looks, boundless energy on the campaign trail, and family name—he is the son of former Prime Minister and Liberal icon Pierre Trudeau.
Carney could hardly be more different. He lacks Trudeau’s gift for working a crowd, is not notably dashing, and his father was a high-school principal in Fort Smith, a town of 2,000 people in Canada’s far north. Where Trudeau has always been seen as a charismatic lightweight, Carney is a nose-to-the-grindstone type. He worked his way to Harvard, then Oxford University, then Goldman Sachs, then the governorship of first the Bank of Canada—where he drew global admiration for his management of the 2008 financial crisis—and then the Bank of England, where he kept Britain liquid after the U.K. voted in 2016 to leave the European Union.
Carney’s cool was tested by the chaotic Brexit years, and he made lifelong enemies among the Brexiteers. But the man who gave him the job, George Osborne, who was finance minister under Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, thinks he did a splendid job.
Osborne recently told the CBC that Carney has the technical knowledge and the “street smarts” to cope with the trade war that Trump has imposed on Canada.
“I think if I was sending someone into bat for Canada, I’d want Mark Carney,” he said. “The Canadian with the most international experience in the whole of Canada is Mark Carney.”
Canada’s Liberals hope his experience managing crises will be enough to convince voters to re-elect them in an election expected this spring.
Canadians have watched, horrified, as Trump has repeatedly threatened to bring in 25% tariffs—which could kill up to 600,000 jobs in Canada—unless Canada agrees to become the 51st state. Trump has twice ordered tariffs, then pulled back at the last moment. Some went into effect on Tuesday, although he paused others temporarily after stock markets fell and the Big Three automakers pleaded for time.
Canadians at first reacted to tariffs with icy fear, but that has hardened into anger and resolve. They repeatedly booed the Star Spangled Banner at hockey and basketball games, have taken bourbon off the shelves, cancelled Florida vacations, and boycotted American produce.
After Trump’s first tariff threats, Trudeau reacted by trying to shuffle Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland out of cabinet to make way for Carney. She quit instead, and Trudeau was forced to resign, which led to the succession race that Carney won on Sunday.
The Trump factor disrupted the carefully laid plans of Poilievre, who had looked sure to win the next election. For two and half years, Poilievre had built momentum as the agent of change. A pugnacious critic with an unerring instinct for finding his opponent’s weakness, he harnessed widespread anger over the cost-of-living crisis, record immigration, and one of the world’s worst housing crises, promising a great reckoning for Trudeau’s “woke” policies. But Poilievre, who took over his party by harnessing the anger of the truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates, borrowed techniques and messages from the MAGA movement, and that now makes him vulnerable.
When Trump started attacking Canada, and Trudeau announced his resignation, the Liberals surged in the polls. The upcoming election now looks like a dead heat. Since candidates usually get a boost coming out of a leadership convention, the Conservatives will start out as the underdogs, a shocking turnaround after two years where they were leading by 20 points and the Liberals faced electoral oblivion.
Underneath the horse-race numbers, there is more bad news for the Conservatives. Polling shows that voters are more likely to trust Carney than Poilievre to manage Trump—perhaps because part of Poilievre’s base is pro-Trump.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Carney is sure to win. Exhaustion with the Liberals is profound after almost a decade in power. On other issues—particularly climate and resource development—Carney will face challenges. He has a long record of advocating for emission reductions in financial markets—he was a U.N. climate envoy—which may make it hard for him to appeal to voters who have had enough of Liberal restrictions on oil and gas production, especially now that Canadians are wishing they had more pipelines to tidewater so that they could tell Trump where to put his tariffs.
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And Carney’s win was all but a coronation. As when Kamala Harris took over from Joe Biden, there was not time enough for a proper contest to test potential replacements for Trudeau. The Liberal leadership race was compressed, and Carney was far ahead all along, so his opponents were not motivated to challenge him too much. Freeland, who was once Trudeau’s trusted right hand, looks like she wants to be on Carney’s team.
The abbreviated race means Carney is untested and may be prone to rookie mistakes. He struggled to explain a decision to move the headquarters of Brookfield Asset Management, where he was chair, from Toronto to New York. It was not a fatal mistake, but a sign that, like many from business who enter politics—he has not calibrated for the demands of public office.
He showed some charm when he teased his leadership announcement on The Daily Show in January, but he is not an electric speaker, speaks French like a bureaucrat, and has little experience debating.
Carney often says he is not a politician, contrasting himself with Poilievre, who has never done anything else. But it may be hard for a technocrat and multi-millionaire to present himself as an outsider and a change agent. Even those on his team acknowledge some trepidation.
“It’s hard to go from a minister to Prime Minister,” says Miller. “It’s hard to go from just a backbencher to Prime Minister. It’s really hard to go from politically nothing to Prime Minister.”
But the Liberals have no backup goalie, and the puck is about to drop.
