“Carney hopes to ride a wave of anti-American anger to victory”
Three years ago, Mark Carney was the toast of Glasgow. Global climate action was surging, and the annual United Nations climate conference (COP 26) was swarming with finance executives eager to mobilize money to “finance a transition to a green future,” as was a theme of that year’s COP.
It all came to a crescendo when Carney announced the breathtakingly ambitious Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net Zero, a multitrillion-dollar coalition of 480 international banks promising to tackle climate change. “Central bankers aren’t often young, good-looking, and charming, but Mark Carney is all three — not to mention wicked smart,” wrote Time magazine.
Captain Canada
Heady stuff for a former Harvard hockey goalie, Oxford scholar, Goldman Sachs banker, and Governor of the Bank of England. Three years later, Carney is taking on an even bigger challenge. He’s positioning himself as “Captain Canada,” ready to defend against what Canadian journalist Lori Turnbull calls “a dire external threat.”
While Trump bulldozes through diplomatic norms, Carney navigates crises with private equity-like precision.
Only this time, it is not climate change but the United States of America. Canada is awash with anti-Trumpism, stunned that a longtime ally wants to annex its nation and undermine its economy with senselessly destructive tariffs. Across the country, hockey fans are jeering “The Star-Spangled Banner,” stores won’t stock American spirits, and Teslas are sitting unsold. Even the Quebecois are singing “Oh Canada” at the top of their lungs.
“Oh, Canada.” 18,000 fans respond to America. Source: CBC
Banking on Carney
With Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepping down, Carney won. Trudeau won a stunning 85.9 percent of the votes cast by Liberal Party members. Carney will most likely replace Trudeau as Prime Minister this week and set up a general election with Canada’s Conservative Party in the coming weeks or months. Carney is riding a wave of Canadian nationalism, hoping to get a national mandate to manage the unexpected crisis instigated by Trump. Carney hasn’t committed to a date for a general election but has previously said he would seek a new mandate from Canadians quickly to deal with the ongoing tariff threats from US President Donald Trump. And he has momentum, with the Liberals narrowing the gap on the Conservative Party in recent polls.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said Carney’s approach to trade retaliation is “right in line with what I believe in” and with what Canadians want. On Monday, the leader of Canada’s most populous province put a 25% surcharge on electricity exported to New York, Michigan, and Minnesota.
Who is Mark Carney?
Carney has one slight issue. While he may be a rock star at Davos, he is barely known in Canada. A recent poll found that 76% of Canadians couldn’t identify him.
To morph from financier to Prime Minister, he must first secure his position as the new Liberal Party leader in a party vote next month. Things are looking good. Fundraising is brisk, and according to recent polling by the Leger public opinion agency, he is the frontrunner, with 68% of the 432 Liberal voters surveyed ready to pick him as Trudeau’s replacement over the former Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland, for whom Carney is a godparent to one of her children. (Awkward.)
If he wins, he becomes Canada’s next Prime Minister, even for a short while. But he still must win a general election in the next six months against Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, who had surged in popularity as Canadians soured on Trudeau — once the golden boy of Canadian politics.
Fickle voters
That was until Trump threatened to slap draconian tariffs on imports from Canada and did not smile when he told Trudeau that he wanted Canada to become America’s 51st state. Protecting Canadian sovereignty and its interconnected economy with the United States became a ballot issue virtually overnight. Conservatives are watching their wide lead shrink as the Liberal Party wastes no time tarring Poilievre as “Canada’s” Trump. “If elected, he’ll be on the first flight to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring,” jeered Freeland. “He will bend down and sell us out.”
Supporters believe Carney’s mastery of finance, economics, and sensible energy policy is the necessary skill set to steer Canada through a crisis it never asked for or deserves.
The anti-Trump
From an international perspective, Carney’s greatest strength now is that he is everything Trump is not. If Trump is fire, Carney is ice. While Trump bulldozes through diplomatic norms, Carney navigates crises with private equity-like precision. Trump’s business career has been filled with messy bankruptcies and divorces — leaving in his wake everything from casinos to airlines to Marla Maples. Carney is a fixer. He helped Canada avoid the worst of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and, as the first non-British Governor of the Bank of England, maintained financial stability during the chaos surrounding Brexit. Had Carney encountered developer Trump in the 1980s, he would have denied him credit.
His master of disaster image appears to be sticking. Another recent Leger survey suggests that if Carney wins the Liberal leadership race, he will erase the Conservative lead of the past year. As Carney learned on Wall Street, timing is everything.
Moving forward
Should Carney pull off an upset, the great irony will be that the man who once commanded the world’s largest climate finance coalition would now lead one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters. He would undoubtedly test conventional climate action wisdom but also offer a counterbalance to Trump’s reckless assault on clean energy. Supporters believe Carney’s mastery of finance, economics, and sensible energy policy is the necessary skill set to steer Canada through a crisis it never asked for or deserves.
