Mark Carney is the wrong man at the wrong time for Canada

A globalist financier with no political experience could hardly be more out of tune with the current mood of global politics and society

When something is so universally anticipated, there is a sharp sense of anticlimax. So it was on Thursday when former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney announced that he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada following the resignation of Justin Trudeau. Carney’s website, a slick if conventional combination of biography, policy platform and fundraising mechanism, indicates that this was not a decision made on the spur of the movement. The 59-year-old financier from Canada’s Northwest Territories has long been eyeing a switch to electoral politics, and Trudeau, Prime Minister since November 2015, has looked wounded for some time, with definite traces of blood in the water.

How did we get here?

Trudeau is such a hate figure for some on the right now that it is worth taking a step back to gain some perspective. He only turned 53 years of age on Christmas Day last year, an age at which most of his 22 predecessors were either only in the early stages of their premierships or had yet to reach the highest office in Canada. Having been in office for nine years and 74 days, Trudeau is the seventh longest serving prime minister in his country’s history, and lies only 197 days behind his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper: if the contest to lead the Liberals is sufficiently prolonged, Trudeau might slip past him.

He came to office in a federal election victory in October 2015 which saw his Liberal Party win 184 seats in the House of Commons, a stunning reversal of fortune from their previous tally of 36, while the Conservative Party of Canada dropped from 159 to 99. The NewDemocratic Party, which had been the Official Opposition since 2011, was pushed into third place, losing 51 of its 95 MPs, while 10 of the remaining seats went to Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Québécois and Elizabeth May was returned as the only Green MP.

At 43, Trudeau was the second youngest Prime Minister of Canada, beaten only by Progressive Conservative Joe Clark, who came to the premiership the day before his 40th birthday in 1979 but served only nine months before being defeated at the polls by Justin’s father Pierre Trudeau. He seemed every young progressive’s dream; he was handsome, charming, informal but carrying the stardust of political dynasty and the glamour (by the standards of Canadian politics) of the charismatic and extroverted two-times premier and his much younger wife, Margaret. Pierre’s accession as Prime Minister in 1968 had even been accompanied by a perhaps rather un-Canadian phenomenon labelled “Trudeaumania”.

There were elements of that spirit of excitement when the younger Trudeau became Prime Minister. He appointed a cabinet that was evenly balanced between the sexes, with 15 men and 15 women joining him at the highest level of government; Jody Wilson-Raybould, the daughter of First Nations hereditary chief, became Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Ukrainian-Canadian MaryAnn Mihychuk was appointed Minister of Employment, Workforce and Labour, Harjit Sajjan, a Sikh immigrant from the Punjab, was named Minister of National Defense, and Maryam Monsef, an Iranian-born Afghan, became Minister of Democratic Institutions.

The Liberal government was consistently more popular in opinion polls than the Conservative Opposition until 2018, sometimes by substantial margins, while Trudeau himself maintained positive approval ratings for his first two years in office. He kept his progressive base content by promoting feminism and abortion rights, legalising assisted dying and the recreational use of cannabis, setting ambitious emissions targets and stricter environmental regulations and admitting an increased number of refugees and migrants. Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the presidential election of November 2016 burnished Canada’s image as a haven for liberals and progressives.

The cracks begin to appear

Trudeau’s fall from grace seems to have happened, to borrow Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, gradually, then suddenly. He had always had vehement opponents on the right—the first call for him to be assassinated came four days after the federal election in 2015—and at the following election four years later, the Liberals lost 20 seats and scored a lower percentage of the vote than the Conservatives (but retained a 26-seat advantage). Trudeau now had to form a minority administration, and the Covid-19 pandemic reached Canada a few months later. He called a snap election in September 2021, hoping to recover his majority, but the poll changed little: the Liberals won an additional five seats but remained a minority, and again received a smaller share of the vote than the Conservatives. There was a feeling among many voters that the election had been unnecessary and had not solved any of Canada’s problems.

In March 2022, Trudeau concluded a confidence-and-supply arrangement with the New Democratic Party, by which the government adopted some key NDP policies like national dental care and pharmacare and new taxes on financial institutions in exchange for the NDP’s support in the House of Commons. Last September, however, the NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, abandoned the agreement, and the Conservatives moved unsuccessful motions of no confidence in September, October and December. The NDP did not support any of them, but just before Christmas, Singh announced that he would table his own motion to try to topple the government. This came in the wake of the resignation of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland, who had refused to accept a transfer to another cabinet post.

The departure of someone who had been an ally of Trudeau, and hours before she had been due to deliver the government’s fall economic statement, seemed to crystallise opposition to Trudeau: gradually, then suddenly. As the Christmas and New Year holiday drew to an end, rumours began to spread that the Prime Minister was preparing to resign. On 6 January, in a rather mawkish, self-pitying and faux-rueful address which accepted little personal responsibility for the country’s travails, Trudeau announced his intention to resign.

This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it’s become clear to me that if I’m having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election… I am a fighter, and I am not someone who backs away from a fight, particularly when a fight is as important as this one. It has become obvious to me with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election.

Brought down, of course, by the petty squabbling of other, lesser men and women. Trudeau went on to explain that he would remain in office as Prime Minister until the Liberal Party had selected a new leader, and some eyebrows were raised when he added that he had asked the Governor General, Mary Simon, to prorogue Parliament until 24 March. Some have argued that this is within the bounds of normal constitutional practice in Canada; what is undeniable is that its outcome is that the opposition parties will not be able to table a motion of no confidence for more than two months, for the simple reason that the House of Commons will not be sitting.

Trudeau or the Liberal Party: what is being rejected?

The next federal election must take place by October this year. It is worth noting that the opinion polls have solidly indicated a substantial defeat for the Liberal Party since early 2022, and the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, who was elected in September 2023, has made the political weather and generally enjoyed double-digit leads over the Liberals. So Trudeau was facing likely defeat at the ballot box.

It is not easy to disaggregate falling support for Trudeau personally from that for the Liberal Party. With the reelection of Donald Trump as President of the United States and major electoral progress for the populist right in Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Germany and (to an extent) Bulgaria, there is a global tide running against parties of the centre-left, and, often, against incumbency. Therefore it might be reasonable to conclude that the Liberals were marching towards defeat under any leader. Yet Trudeau’s personal reputation has also been tarnished by a range of scandals and controversies, small enough in themselves, but taken together slowly corrosive.

The NDP’s leader hedged his bets. Singh reacted to the news of the Prime Minister’s resignation by saying:

The problem is not just Justin Trudeau. It’s every minister that’s been calling the shots, it’s every Liberal MP that looked down their nose at Canadians who are worried about high costs or crumbling health care.

Poilievre pointed to Trudeau more directly. Liberals MPs, he argued:

want to protect their pensions and paycheques by sweeping their hated leader under the rug months before an election to trick you, and then do it all over again.

Given these circumstances, the chance to lead the Liberal Party of Canada might not seem the most attractive opportunity at the present time. But most politicians understand two fundamental truths, one about themselves, and the other about the nature of politics. Firstly, almost all elected politicians are more ambitious than the average man or woman in the street, most will have entertained at least hazy daydreams of one day leading their party and few will have egos small enough or robust enough to pass up a tilt at the top job if they think they have even a slender chance of winning. Second, it is an iron rule of politics that you cannot predict what will happen: for any aspirant leaders, this could be their only chance to take the crown, however unpropitious the outlook, and equally, while it is very unlikely, it is not completely impossible that a new leader could somehow turn the Liberal Party’s fortunes around and stage a shocking comeback.

The Liberal Party’s rocky road ahead

The likelihood is that the winner will not be in office long. He or she is expected to be sworn in as Prime Minister at the end of March, giving a maximum duration of just under seven months until the federal election. At that election, he or she must, privately at least, expect to be defeated, ending their tenure as Prime Minister and perhaps triggering another leadership contest. It is an even more short-term prospect than that which faced the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party here in Britain when Boris Johnson resigned; if Liz Truss, who became Prime Minister on 6 September 2022, had survived more than her fleeting 49 days and delayed the general election until the very last possible date, 28 January 2025, she would still only have occupied Downing Street for two years and four months. That would still have left her languishing 39th out of 58 premiers, among forgettable names like the Earl of Wilmington (1742-43), Viscount Goderich (1827-28) and the famously “Unknown Prime Minister” (as H.H. Asquith cattily described him at his funeral), Andrew Bonar Law (1922-23).

We know that the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada will not be accorded a mere coronation. Despite the grim outlook, there are several aspirant prime ministers. First out of the starting gate was Frank Baylis, a businessman and former Liberal MP for Pierrefonds-Dollard who left the House of Commons in 2019, followed by Chandra Arya, an Indian-born Liberal backbencher who has no serious prospect of victory. Carney is the first heavyweight candidate to put himself forward, and was followed by the former Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland. It is also believed that Karina Gould, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, and Jaime Battiste, Canada’s first Mi’kmaw MP, elected for Sydney-Victoria in 2019.

A number of senior ministers have ruled themselves out of the contest. Self-denying ordinances should always be treated with a degree of caution, as it is not unknown for potential candidates whose chances were slender at best to seek to boost their profile and supposed authority by reluctantly deciding not to put themselves forward. Nevertheless, that caveat should be read alongside the unpromising circumstances and likelihood of electoral defeat later in the year: some of those who have reached the decision to stay out of the fray would probably have entered the contest under different circumstances.

The Salon des Refusés includes the Minister of Finance and Intergovernmental Affairs, Dominic LeBlanc, a veteran Liberal Party insider who used to babysit Justin Trudeau in his youth; the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, who has said that she will instead focus on dealing with potential tariffs on Canadian exports imposed by the incoming Trump administration; François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, described as “Trudeau’s pitchman” for advertising Canada to global investors; and the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Marc Miller, another childhood friend of Trudeau.

Enter Carney: the set-up

Mark Carney’s political ambitions have been widely acknowledged for some time. He is fiercely ambitious, and when he stepped down as Governor of the Bank of England the day before his 55th birthday in 2020, no-one expected him to seek a gentle and relaxing retirement. It would be excessive to say that the past five years have been a meticulously planned campaign, but Carney has conducted himself in such a way that he has retained a public profile as well as a degree of influence and authority. At the very least, he was putting himself in a position from which he could seek national office if the opportunity arose.

Immediately after leaving the Bank of England, Carney replaced Michael Bloomberg as the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, and Boris Johnson named him finance adviser to the UK presidency of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) held in Glasgow. Later in 2020 he became Vice-Chairman of Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world’s largest alternative investment management companies, where he took responsibility for environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues and impact fund investment strategy. He also created the Taskforce in Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, a private sector-led initiative to develop an effective and efficient voluntary carbon market. Following COP26, he became Co-chair with Bloomberg of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.

Carney had acted as an informal adviser to Justin Trudeau on recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic, but he made his first overtly party political step in 2022, when he endorsed the Ontario New Democratic Party candidate for Mayor of Ottawa, Catherine McKenney. Defeated by independent Mark Sutcliffe, McKenney was impeccably progressive: queer, non-binary, focusing on climate change, affordable housing, homelessness and public transport. More mainstream was his declaration of support for Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in October 2023 via a pre-recorded video at the party’s annual conference. This was a seen as a major coup for Labour, a seal of approval for their economic policies from the world of global finance. After the election, he joined the government’s National Wealth Fund Taskforce, responsible for bringing the UK Infrastructure Bank and the British Business Bank together in one entity, the National Wealth Fund.

Carney’s chances of winning the Liberal Party leadership must be at least reasonable. There is no doubt that he is an impressive, intelligent and experienced figure, with a formidable academic and intellectual record and the lessons of running not one but two G7 central banks. Indeed, in terms of heft, he may be a stronger candidate than his only mainstream rival Chrystia Freeland, to whose son he is godfather. But he has a number of serious disadvantages as a candidate for leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada.

A man out of time

The first challenge is that Carney has absolutely no experience of electoral politics. He may, perhaps, have more international gravitas than Freeland, but she has spent almost a dozen years as an MP and has served as Minister of International Trade (2015-17), Minister of Foreign Affairs (2017-19), Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs (2019-20) and then Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister (2020-24). Carney does not even have a seat in Parliament.

It is not unknown in Canadian history for a prime minister or party leader to assume office without being in Parliament, on the understanding that an election is imminent and he or she will be a candidate in that election: William Lyon Mackenzie King became leader of the Liberal Party in August 1919, having lost his seat in the 1911 federal election and moved to New York to work for the Rockefeller Foundation, but was returned at a by-election just over two months later; John Turner had retired from the House of Commons and ministerial office in 1975/76, but returned as Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader in June 1984 after Pierre Trudeau resigned, and, rather than seek an opportunity in a by-election, he was adopted as a candidate in the federal election which he immediately sought. He was elected for Vancouver Quadra in September 1984 but his government was defeated and, while he remained as party leader until 1990, he is notable for never having sat in Parliament as Prime Minister.

It is not, therefore, an insuperable obstacle that Carney is not a Member of the House of Commons. If he were to become Prime Minister, presumably he would be adopted as a candidate for the forthcoming federal election, leaving only a lacuna of a few months which is less unthinkable in Canada than it would be in the United Kingdom (there was a gap of 16 days between the Earl of Home, newly appointed Prime Minister, disclaiming his hereditary peerage on 23 October 1963, and, by then Sir Alec Douglas-Home, being returned as MP for Kinross and West Perthshire at a by-election on 8 November).

It must be telling, though, that we are having to expend quite so much ink explaining why it is not impossible for an outsider to replace Justin Trudeau. Even if Carney is technically eligible for the party leadership, and even if some few precedents can be found in Canadian history, going to such lengths implies that there is an overwhelming case for his candidacy and these are mere logistical obstacles. Connected to this is the reputational hazard of choosing an outsider: bluntly, it implies that none of the insiders is up to the job.

When Alec Home emerged as the surprise choice for Prime Minister in October 1963, the Opposition wasted no time in attacking him as out-of-touch and anachronistic. Labour’s Deputy Leader, George Brown, portrayed Home’s elevation as a judgement on Conservative MPs:

No party can ever have portrayed such a total lack of confidence in each other as to have to resort to such a drama in order to find the lowest common denominator.

The same rhetoric was deployed when Rishi Sunak ennobled David Cameron and appointed him Foreign Secretary in November 2023. Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary, taunted the government during the Debate on the Address:

What kind of message does it send to their constituents that their own party leader cannot find a suitable candidate for Foreign Secretary among the 350 Conservative MPs who sit in this House?

It is a simplistic and facile jibe, of course, but it is quicker to deliver than it is to rationalise and explain away. If Mark Carney does become Prime Minister, what will be his and his party’s answer to a question posed by opposition parties: was not a single one of their 153 MPs good enough to succeed Trudeau?

These are superficial criticisms, though any capable politician knows that superficiality can be deadly. But look at the issues on which Carney has been most active: climate change, net zero, ESG. Five or 10 years ago these were reliable progressive boasts, badges of pride, and while opposition existed it tended to come from the further fringes of the political spectrum. Remember that, while the Climate Change Act 2008 was passed by a Labour government, it was a Conservative administration which introduced the Climate Change Act 2008 (2050 Target Amendment) Order 2019 and made the target more demanding.

The political landscape has changed swiftly and immeasurably. There are growing anxieties that ambitious emissions targets are simply not achievable, especially given that sales of electric vehicles remain inconsistent and unevenly distributed. Moreover, the data include plug-in hybrid vehicles which are not, of course, free from emissions, making overall progress difficult to assess. In many areas, ESG is now seen as primarily a marketing tool rather than a means to increase and strengthen sustainability. The number of investors who regard it as a significant consideration is declining year-on-year, and some of the biggest investment managers like BlackRock and Vanguard are losing enthusiasm. In essence, Carney’s strongest suit is not only out of date but in some ways actively unpopular.

A more general problem of perception is that Mark Carney is, whether he likes it or not, the epitome of a globalised financial elite which has lost a great deal of its lustre. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford, where he was awarded a DPhil in economics for a thesis entitled The Dynamic Advantage of Competition, and spent 13 years working around the world—Boston, London, New York, Tokyo, Toronto—for investment bank Goldman Sachs, an organisation that was sharply criticised for its part in the 2007/08 global financial crisis. Carney also has links to the World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg Meetings, two objects of hatred and suspicion for populists from left and right.

An apparently privileged outsider with close links to global finance and supposedly shadowy elite organisations arriving, deus ex machina, in Canadian politics with no experience but a striking sense of entitlement and self-confidence, espousing high-minded ideals that have seen better days: whether you think that is a fair assessment of Mark Carney or not, it is a caricature which the Liberal Party’s opponents would not have to work hard to foster. It would be a challenging background for someone taking over any administration, but remember the opinion polls: in the last three months alone, the Conservatives have enjoyed a lead of between 11 and 30 per cent, and in one or two surveys the Liberals have been pushed back to third by the NDP.

The next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, who may enjoy a fleeting term as Prime Minister, faces an uphill struggle which is almost vertiginous. It will not be enough not to be Justin Trudeau. The party needs emergency attention and a profound reset of its relationship with the Canadian electorate. Even then, it may simply be the end of an electoral cycle, with the Liberals having been in power for a decade after nine years of Conservative rule, itself following 13 years of Liberal government. To choose Mark Carney, however, given his views, his background and the current political climate would look like a tired and disconnected party telling voters why they were wrong. Pierre Poilievre was raised a Roman Catholic but many friends now doubt he has any strong religious faith, but a gift like Carney as his chief opponent might just make him revise his views.