At 60 years old, Mark Carney has faced financial crises from the top seat of two major central banks, dealt with banking and inflation panics, faced pressures from political leaders, and dodged delicate questions from the media, aware that a word from him could cost pension funds, small savers, or market sharks billions of dollars. But what Carney, a powerful technician for decades and a centrist of the kind that is practically rare in Canada, had never done until this year was to face the polls. And in just two months, he has managed to prevail twice, in the Liberal Party primaries and this Monday in the probably most important general elections in the recent history of Canada.
Starting the course, the Liberals were 25 points behind in the polls, sunk in approval after 10 years of Justin Trudeau's administration and a huge string of problems: economic stagnation, soaring prices, the same housing access dramas that bring down governments all over the world. But also an end of a cycle, an era, with the Conservative Party opposition that seemed destined for success thanks to having adapted part of the populist discourse that has worked in the US, Hungary, or Italy. One identity-driven (Canada first), wary of immigration and environmental policies, and championing the anti-woke house, but in much more moderate terms, educated, controlled than in the Republican Party, Fidesz, or Fratelli D'Italia.
Carney, in his brief experience as prime minister in recent weeks, has hardly made any major decisions, except for eliminating an environmental tax. He is not a very charismatic figure, although enormously popular, and his limited French does not shine in French-speaking populations. But he has managed to establish himself as a figure of stability and reliability to which an angry, overwhelmed, offended country with its southern neighbor, and also afraid of the possible consequences of clashing with Donald Trump, has clung. "If there were no major crisis, you wouldn't be seeing me here today," he said a few days ago at a small rally. "Honestly, I am more useful in a crisis, I am not so good in times of peace," he confessed.
His advantage is that with a trade war underway, and with Trump insisting and almost threatening with an annexation, the current times are anything but peaceful. On Saturday night, at his last campaign event in Victoria, the former banker quoted former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who years ago said that campaigns are done in poetry but then governance is done in prose. "As those who have followed me closely can attest," he said with a laugh, "my campaign has been in prose, so my government will be in econometrics," he added, emphasizing his profile.
Carney was at the helm of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 global financial crisis and the Bank of England during Brexit, the first non-British in the position in over 300 years of history. His work, his successes, and his constant and growing media presence made him a top-level figure.
Three of his four grandparents were Irish, but he was born in 1965 in Fort Smith, a town built around an old Hudson's Bay Company trading post. Son of a school principal, he obtained a scholarship to study at Harvard and earned a doctorate in Economics at Oxford, with a thesis on competitiveness and competition. Throughout his career, he has worked in New York, London, or Tokyo, in companies or investment banks like Goldman Sachs or Bloomberg.
In 2003, he left the private sector for the second time and entered the Bank of Canada, and just four years later, he was at its helm with the worst depression since 1929 hitting the planet. Carney has not entered pure politics until now, but he has been surfing it for two decades. With governments wanting low-interest rates and banks buying their public debt, but also in the corridors of the G7, the G20, or the Davos Forum. The Liberals courted him even before choosing Trudeau in 2015, but he always said no. Not because he didn't want to, but quite the opposite. He always had it in mind, but it wasn't the right time.
Although at the end of 2019 he was dubbed the 'green banker' for his defense of environmental sustainability policies, after being appointed as the UN special envoy for climate change, and although he chaired a fund with a $15 billion portfolio in sustainable projects, his first significant decision when replacing Trudeau was to eliminate a controversial and unpopular carbon tax, which required Canadians to pay a levy on emissions and receive a refund. It was the conservatives' main battle issue, but despite believing in it, by eliminating it, he took away his opposition's political advantage.
Because if Carney knows one thing, it's planning and execution. He has no parliamentary experience or within the Party. He lacks a solid network of allies, confidants, and knows his country from the outside, not from the inside. But everyone agrees that for this moment, this situation, these elections, he arrives with an almost perfect profile. An outsider, without administrative burdens, without too many skeletons in the closet, without enemies. Quite the opposite of his rival Pierre Poilievre.
The words most used to define Carney are "liberal," but in the Canadian way, which implies a strong social component and a strong state network. Also centrist or "pragmatic." But perhaps disciplined, systematic, and strategic are the most appropriate. He was in his education and career, about the investments that made him a millionaire. About his health, after years of running every morning at dawn and taking care of his diet to project and maintain his image.
Those who have worked with him highlight his intelligence, but also, as the Globe&Mail summarized in a campaign profile, "a distinctive quality: filtering, making connections, putting things in order." Vital at the helm of a government in trouble, but perhaps even more so in a campaign as atypical as the current one, where it was as important to distance oneself from Trudeau as not to crucify him by denying his entire legacy.
His team and his critics admit that he can be impatient, volcanic, or even condescending when he feels someone is not up to par, something typical of someone accustomed to giving orders. An article in the Financial Times said when he was in London that his employees said that enduring his reproaches was like "receiving an electric shock." But in the campaign, and with journalists, Carney has been polite, charming, and even funny up close. Without conveying tension, nerves, amateurism. But also discreet and not particularly accessible, aware of his weaknesses as a political novice, in a hostile and ruthless world, as Michael Ignatieff, the Liberals' last attempt to field an inexperienced professor as a candidate, suffered over a decade ago.
Unlike him, Carney is very ambitious and fierce, something that became clear since he was young. When he chose a profession, and when he resigned from it, and the money that came with it, to enter public service. When he left the comfort of home and applied for the position at the Bank of England.
When he has crossed an almost unprecedented line. He likes power, influence, and wants to be where decisions are made. Leading a government, one that is part of NATO and the G7. After a lifetime of preparing and waiting for the moment, he has now followed in the footsteps of Mario Draghi or Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, but with the difference that he does it through the ballot box, without shortcuts or deals. Perhaps he grew up and arrived with a technical profile, but he wants to make it clear that he is not and will not be a technocrat.