Mark Carney: Canada’s New Prime Minister; A Foil for Donald Trump’s Attentions on America’s Northern Neighbour
The ruling Liberal Party of Canada has elected Dr. Mark Carney, a political outsider with a centrist outlook, as its leader, at a party event in a convention hall in downtown Ottawa on 9 March 2025, making him Prime Minister-designate in succession to Justin Trudeau, who decided to step down in January. Carney had announced his candidacy for the leadership contest on 16 January. The 150,000-strong party membership have given him a commanding victory with 131, 674 votes (85.9 %), consigning former deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland to a distant second place with a mere 11, 134 votes (8%). The soon-to-be 24th prime minister, who had been chosen by Trudeau to chair a Leader’s Task Force on Economic Growth in September 2024, has never previously sought political office. He has thus not been a member of the Canadian House of Commons nor served as a cabinet minister.
Mark Joseph Carney was born in Fort Smith, in the south-eastern Northwest Territories of Canada, in 1965, and was raised in Edmonton, Alberta, from the age of six. Both his parents were schoolteachers, his father being a high school principal. He attended St Francis Xavier High School in Edmonton. A partial scholarship took him to Harvard College, where he played college-level ice hockey as a back-up goalie and obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1988. A master’s degree (M. Phil,1993) and a doctorate (D. Phil, 1995) from Oxford University followed. His doctoral thesis was on “The Dynamic Advantage of Competition.” While at Oxford, he met Diana Fox, an English economist. They married in July 1994 and have four daughters.
Carney was an investment banker with Goldman Sachs for thirteen years, working in Boston, London, New York City, Tokyo, and Toronto, before becoming deputy governor of the Bank of Canada (2003-2004), and then senior associate deputy minister of finance (2008-2013). Under Carney’s stewardship as the eighth Governor of the Bank of Canada (2008-2013), Canada outperformed and recovered faster than the other G7 nations following the global financial crisis of 2008. Carney slashed interest rates and injected liquidity into the Canadian economy, thereby avoiding the bank bailouts seen elsewhere.
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne brought Carney to the Bank of England in 2013 as the 120th, and first non-British, governor since it was founded in 1694. He modernised the central bank and shepherded the British economy through the post-Brexit transition, guided by low interest rates and a quantitative easing programme. His term ended in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then followed a spell as UN Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, with an annual salary of $1, when he simultaneously led the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment strategy as vice-chair at Brookfield Asset Management. He launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero in 2021. Carney has championed the role of the private sector in climate action, seeking “positive social and environmental outcomes with strong risk-adjusted returns” for investors-to quote the World Bank.
Carney, considered “boring”, “uncharismatic”, and “elitist” by his right-wing detractors, nevertheless brings considerable economic expertise to his new post, particularly useful at a time of financial volatility and a brewing trade war with the US, just as Trump seeks to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian imports. He is more than capable of taking the fight to Trump, confident that “Canada will win.” Carney has accused Trump of “attacking Canadian families, workers and businesses” and has informed Canadians that “we cannot let him succeed.” He has promised to maintain retaliatory tariffs “until the Americans show us respect.”
Canada’s exports to the US, 75% of its total exports and around 18% of its GDP, amounted to US$348.41 Billion during 2024, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade. Key Canadian exports include energy products (crude petroleum, petroleum gas), steel, cars, motor vehicle parts and accessories, softwood lumber, dairy and other agricultural products, and consumer goods. Tariffs on these products will inevitably raise prices for American importers and consumers and almost certainly will invite other retaliatory measures, over-and-above tit-for-tat retaliatory tariffs. Accordingly, on 4 March 2025, Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford threatened to abandon a $100-million deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink, providing high-speed internet to the Canadian North, and to prevent American companies from bidding for £30 billion worth of annual procurement contracts and for the $200-billion infrastructure plan in his province.
Canada has many long-standing fraternal links with the US. Two out of three Canadians live within a hundred kilometres of the 8, 891-km-long land border between their country and the continental US. The two countries are traditional allies, fighting on the same side in both World Wars and in several other actions around the world. Notwithstanding his fixation on the fentanyl crisis, it is thus hard to fathom Trump’s hostility to Canada. It doesn’t even make sense that Trump seems to consider Canada (area: 9,984, 670 square kilometres) as the 51st state of the US (area: 9,833, 517 square kilometres). Trump’s Canada strategy seems to be backfiring, as it fans nationalist sentiments and hostility to America among Canadians, some of whom are boycotting American products, booing the American national anthem, and foregoing holidays in the US. The Liberal Party is meanwhile regaining its popularity amidst the turmoil. In Mark Carney, Donald Trump may have met his match, at least until the next Canadian elections, which are scheduled for October 2025.
Ashis Banerjee