Who Is Mark Carney, Really?

“The luckiest fucking guy in Canadian politics.” That’s what former Quebec premier Jean Charest reportedly called Mark Carney on the eve of this year’s federal election. He wasn’t wrong. When Carney started kicking the Liberal Party’s tires in late 2024, smart money was on Pierre Poilievre to win the next election. Poilievre had a double-digit lead in the polls, and Ottawa was bracing for the coming Tory revolution.

Then came Donald Trump with his threat to break Canada’s economy so we’d crawl to the United States—and his mutterings about forcibly annexing us and Greenland too. Canadians were looking to hire someone with the brains to take on the president. Someone credible and not weird. This was no longer a time for a celebrity who traded on empathy or someone who wanted to fit in at Mar-a-Lago. Voters wanted someone they could trust with a complicated tax return. So they turned to the bank manager, who delivered the Liberals’ fourth election victory in a row. Luck doesn’t just come from events. It’s also about synchronicity with the moment.

Why Carney won is clear. Who Carney is—less so. Canadians voted for a CV, not a biography. The Walrus ran a big feature on him in 2021, and a couple of decent magazine and newspaper profiles came out before the election, but Carney had no real face recognition outside the Ottawa bubble and the realms of high finance. His first big North American media moment was on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in early January, coyly playing with the comedian about running for Liberal leadership. (“I just started thinking about it when you brought it up,” he joked to Stewart.) The only books about him that you can buy are sold on Amazon and likely written by artificial intelligence. Aside from being one of the luckiest politicians in Canada, he also came into the job as one of the most unvetted.

There are some things we do know about our economist-in-chief. In a time when populism is driving politics, Canada has never picked a more upper-class prime minister. Carney didn’t need to worry about the Tories running the kind of “he’s not ready” and “he’s not up to the job” campaign that they hit Justin Trudeau with over a decade ago. Only William Lyon Mackenzie King trumps Carney on education credentials, and no one comes close in his business and public service life. Carney’s Harvard BA and Oxford DPhil, his career with Goldman Sachs and Brookfield Asset Management, his experience running two G7 central banks: Carney has the best credentials of any current world leader. And he’s likely one of the richest men to ever run Canada. Is he the kind of guy you want to have a beer with? Ask British prime minister Keir Starmer, who went to an Ottawa bar with Carney in June to watch a Stanley Cup final before heading to Alberta for the G7 summit.

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Or better: ask Doug Ford. Poilievre might be better at working a crowd, but the Ontario premier is the country’s most successful populist, winner of three big majorities in a row. Somehow, both Ford, who dropped out of community college and went to work in his dad’s label company, and Carney have captured the national zeitgeist. Carney is the smart, fast-skating forward; Ford is his “elbows up” man working the corners. Their bond reveals how Carney seems to see himself as a politician: not a tribal partisan but a big-tent operator; his instincts are transactional, not ideological. For now, at least, the two men have a partnership that works, with common views on accelerating infrastructure and energy projects. And as long as Washington keeps generating danger to the nation’s jobs and sovereignty, it’s an alliance that leaves hard-right, Trump-adjacent figures like Poilievre and Alberta premier Danielle Smith on the fringe, looking reactive, not visionary.

If Carney’s political instincts are pragmatic, his personal drive is relentless. One key to Carney’s success is a punishing work ethic. Take his bestselling book Values: Building a Better World for All, which came out in 2021. It’s a beast of a book, coming in at 528 pages. Most politicians’ autobiographies/manifestos are ghostwritten collections of anecdotes. Jonathan Kay (former editor-in-chief of The Walrus) did most of the work on Justin Trudeau’s 2015 bestseller Common Ground (352 pages). George Radwanski, a former Toronto Star editor, and journalist Gérard Pelletier (who was also a former politician) constructed much of Pierre Trudeau’s Memoirs (379 pages, with lots of pictures). Journalist Ron Graham made a science of his craft, ghostwriting Jean Chrétien’s Straight from the Heart (221 pages). At times, such books—like Trudeau elder’s—are written when their “authors” are underemployed or retired. Publishing sources say Carney wrote Values himself. It was acquired only a few months after he left his post at the Bank of England—which suggests that he may have even started the process while on the job.

How does a person like that run a country? Or, more to the point, how does a person like that steer Canada through the political storms created by Trump? The president seems to respect Carney, possibly even like him. At some point—maybe sooner than the Liberals will like—we’ll have a hard conversation about whether any Canadian leader could have got a better trade agreement, or one at all. And we’ll pick apart his domestic policies.

For now, Carney is using power in ways few other prime ministers have dared.

Carney isn’t just a response to Trump. He’s also a reaction to Poilievre, to Trudeau, and to the endless churn of outrage. He came in offering normalcy to people exhausted by the shrillness and mudslinging. People are tired of screwballs, scandals, drama, and partisan brawls. And Carney is a reaction against the way our country’s been governed, at every level, for generations. Tough calls don’t get made. They’re agonized over: endless consultation, compromise, public scrutiny, and trashing by pundits. Canadians were tired of a system whose expenditure of energy and money isn’t justified by outcomes, and they picked a leader to reflect that.

And now we’re starting to see what the unleashed power of a national leader looks like in practice. The first thing that strikes you is the technocratic ruthlessness. As soon as he was sworn in, Carney stripped away Poilievre’s best slogan by killing the retail carbon tax in a stunt that looked a lot like Trump’s executive -order photo ops. It was also a personal reversal: Carney has called climate change an “existential threat” and a “crisis.” Just months before, he was the United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance. He’s even jokingly described himself to the British press as a tree hugger. Right: a tree hugger with a chainsaw.

The image of old white guys going over spreadsheets is a big contrast to Trudeau’s first months in power

Then, after the election, Carney dropped the housing minister, Toronto member of Parliament Nate Erskine-Smith, who had supported him in the Liberal Party’s leadership race. Erskine-Smith, seen as a leader of the next generation of Liberals, posted on X, “It’s impossible not to feel disrespected.” Political loyalty breeds expectations. Carney, shaped by corporate culture, seems more comfortable with a different set of rules.

His decisiveness didn’t stop at scrapping taxes or dumping ministers. Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, is supposed to erase interprovincial trade barriers, streamline the approval process for projects deemed to be in the national interest, and expedite major building efforts. The law gives cabinet—really, the prime minister—the power to identify these priority projects and push them past whatever environmental and political barriers stand in the way. The bill, supported by Conservatives, was rammed through Parliament with minimal scrutiny. It’s starting to feel like our prime minister isn’t leading a country but running a start-up with over 41 million employees.

Voters responded—with an astonishing 64 percent approval rating, as of August. Another poll found that a surprising slice of that enthusiasm is coming from conservatives. There are outliers: Sikhs are angry about Carney’s invitation to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi for the G7 summit held in Alberta in June; environmentalists are worried about Carney’s push for east–west trade infrastructure, which might include petroleum pipelines; Indigenous leaders fear that infrastructure might be bulldozed through their territory. But there are—as yet—no rail and highway blockades, which dominated Trudeau’s second term before COVID-19 came along, no marches on Ottawa, no anti-Carney rallies.

Still, the firm hand on the tiller can become the iron fist of the state. Since the early 1960s, federal power’s been hoarded in the Prime Minister’s Office, and it’s now being used. Carney’s shop is not like Trudeau’s. To begin, there are no women near the top of the organizational chart: this is 2025, not 2015. Carney brought in Michael Sabia, ex-head of Bell Canada and Hydro-Québec, to head the bureaucracy and remake it. Lawyer and diplomat Marc-André Blanchard, who worked on free trade negotiations in 2017, is chief of staff. Former justice minister and fellow Oxford alumnus David Lametti is principal secretary.

The image of old white guys going over spreadsheets is a big contrast to Trudeau’s first months in power, with their defining images of him doing selfies with Parliament Hill visitors. Just before renaming the squat, ugly building that houses the pmo, Trudeau surrounded himself with young, attractive, inexperienced people. Some were college buddies; others were campaign workers. The majority of those hired were in their thirties and forties. Trudeau’s office—despite, or maybe because of, its young, hip staff—became something of a snake pit, with high turnover and a reputation for struggling under competing priorities.

Carney’s office, instead, projects the corporate attitude of the boss. Staff show up in business suits. Carney doesn’t tolerate tardiness. Everyone needs to review their files and be ready to answer Carney’s questions. When he was governor of the Bank of England, staff learned it was better to admit to being unprepared than to try to bluff. “He could explode. It was better to say you don’t know and get the information to him later,” one insider told the Times. In June, people close to Carney leaked to the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife that Carney would not tolerate senior bureaucrats who fail to live up to expectations. Ministers, deputy ministers, and their staff must work with “pace and urgency” to implement Carney’s plans, one official told Fife. He wants action: public servants must stop being bogged down in process.

Then Carney ruined bureaucrats’ summers by making them come up with plans for big cuts to staff and programs. He took a short holiday in July but was back in his office for one of Ottawa’s now-routine heat waves, which had the added feature of being laced with wildfire smoke as Canada’s boreal forests burned.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne has ordered most departments to slash budgets by 7.5 percent next fiscal year, 10 percent the year after, and 15 percent in 2028/29—though, according to the CBC, benefits like Old Age Security will be untouched. The Toronto Star reports that the CBC and Via Rail have been told to decide where to trim in order to meet a 15 percent cut. So much for preserving the public broadcaster and creating a low-emissions transportation system.

The cuts dash the hopes of young people who want a career in federal public service, making no distinction between high performers and clock watchers. Michael Wernick, clerk of the Privy Council from 2016 to 2019, argued that freezing hiring and reducing staff levels through attrition is a self-defeating way to run an organization. “What happens if your absolute key cybersecurity expert retires next week? You’re not going to replace her?” he told a CBC reporter. “If your aspiration is a serious compression of the numbers, then you have to be more mindful about it, and you have to do layoffs and buyouts.”

Trudeau promised sunny ways. Carney brings deadlines, hard choices, and an unforgiving to-do list.

Like Stephen Harper, Carney practises the politics of control. The rumour mill around the current prime minister and his staff is silent. The few media leaks have been self-serving. While the PMO was trying to remake the economy and the public service, journalists were stuck covering Trudeau’s date with Katy Perry. Harper was criticized for muzzling government scientists and public servants. Under the Liberals, government employees still often ignore phone calls and fail to respond to journalists’ emails. In mid-July, First Nations leaders were invited to the national capital to talk about the implementation of Bill C-5. The Canadian Press reported that the chiefs and executives of First Nations organizations had to submit their questions to Carney’s staff in advance. He would not be blindsided.

When he was governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney dealt largely with a small pack of deferential financial journalists who avoided short sound bites and “gotcha!” traps. Since then, he’s had to work with reporters with different agendas. Like Harper, he has very little time for tough questions and the people who ask them. In March, Carney got into a public fight with two Parliament Hill journalists who questioned him over conflicts of interest from his career as vice chairman of Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. When the CBC’s Rosemary Barton said it is “very difficult to believe” Carney didn’t have conflicts, Carney shot back, “Look inside yourself, Rosemary. You start from a prior of conflict and ill will,” and implied he had sacrificed a lot to serve Canada.

Why have Liberals stayed silent about Carney’s move to the right?

London’s often-brutal journalists, who got to know Carney better than Ottawa’s press corps have, saw a man who, as Bank of England governor, made sure everybody knew he was the smartest person in the room. When challenged about his decisions during Brexit, Carney became prickly. In fact, that’s the Brits’ go-to adjective for Carney. Phillip Inman, former economics editor at the Observer, told The Walrus writer Curtis Gillespie in 2021, “He was very prickly when you asked questions that appeared to impugn his forecasting or his social conscience or any of the things that he felt he should be praised for.” Roya Nikkhah and Oliver Shah, covering Carney’s first weeks in power for the Sunday Times, wrote: “He was known for outbursts of temper inside the Bank and he could be prickly with journalists.”

Liberal Party and Canadian voters know he’s no empath like Trudeau, but they picked him. Maybe it takes a prickly streak to make it in politics, but you’re much more likely to hear about Trudeau quietly throwing people under the bus than having a temper tantrum. Jean Chrétien was skilled at picking his battles, believing most problems went away on their own. Carney is, at least in fiscal policy and governing style, the heir to Brian Mulroney or even Harper. He is winning over Conservatives without playing to the populist right, like supporters of the 2022 “Freedom Convoy,” some of whom even now picket outside his office. Poilievre still has them as his base.

Business-oriented Tories and Liberals hoping for a more orderly, hard-nosed leadership got what they wanted—in spades. Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act, would amend the Criminal Code to let law enforcement get data from internet providers without a warrant. Bill C-4, Carney’s proposed changes to the tax system, would axe the retail carbon tax, prune income taxes, and ditch the goods and services tax for first homes under $1 million. What was easy to miss? Under C-4, political parties would be exempt from privacy laws.

Out of the blue at June’s G7 meeting, Carney pledged to increase Canada’s military spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2035 and to bring Canada up to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 2 percent target this year. The Conservatives were only promising to meet the NATO target in four years.

There’s some accountant’s sleight of hand to the military-spending increases. According to some sources, the government will lump veterans’ benefits into calculations of the percentage of GDP. About a third of the spending goes to infrastructure like airports that have civilian uses (a share of the money for Montréal–Trudeau’s $10 billion revamp, for instance, may be logged under NATO).

Still, the military pledge will reshape the Canadian government and its priorities. “Guns or butter” choices will have to be made. Tanks or climate change research? Clean water for Indigenous communities or warships? High-speed rail in the Quebec City–Windsor corridor or F35 fighter planes? Increases to old-age pensions or Arctic military bases?

Where will the money come from? Some will be squeezed out of the public service, just as Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, supposedly saved money by haphazardly slashing Washington’s bureaucracy. Public service cuts are always predicated on the idea that bureaucrats don’t work hard. In some departments, that’s true. In others, especially those that deal with the public, it’s not. And when you order a 15 percent cut in a research team, who’s out? The least productive? No. The newest hire.

If cuts are made across the board, food inspectors and climate scientists could be cut at the same rate as the National Capital Commission staff who organize “Snowshoe under the Stars” events. Ottawa and Gatineau stand to lose 24,000 jobs. During then finance minister Paul Martin’s 1994–96 “program review,” I remember neighbourhoods popular with public servants sprouting forests of “For sale” signs. At least Ottawa’s tech scene was booming. Not so much anymore.

And just as he did with the military-spending increase, Carney made this decision himself, without warning, without discussion even in his own cabinet, let alone in Parliament.

Lloyd Axworthy, who’d been one of Chrétien’s foreign ministers, came out of retirement to complain about Bill C-5. In an interview with the Canadian Press, he warned that the government might “get the machinery working” but “leave a lot of roadkill along the way,” criticizing the rush to pass the bill without proper study or genuine Indigenous involvement. But the left, inside and outside Parliament, was quiet. Many Indigenous leaders have been willing to go along with the program, or at least talk. Carney has assured them that approval of national projects won’t infringe on modern treaties.

Why have Liberals stayed silent about Carney’s move to the right? A veteran of the last three Liberal prime ministers told me many in the party, like plenty of Canadians, were fed up with what they saw as Trudeau’s fixation on identity politics. If Trudeau’s team was winning elections, there wasn’t much they could do about it. “The Liberal Party is a big tent. Sometimes, the left dominates, sometimes the right. It changes to suit the times, and right now, people in the party and voters want a leadership that can handle Trump and deal with whatever economic changes come from what’s happening in the United States.”

Just as the federal Conservatives are splitting between western populists and eastern centrists because of Poilievre’s insistence on hanging on to the leadership, Carney’s Liberals have issues that may eventually bring them down. In the first months of his government, people saw the change in tone and policy but not the results. How do the Liberals square years of reconciliation with First Nations and Carney’s Bill C-5? What happens when Trump stops threatening Canada? Or when people realize that money spent on the military is cash that no longer goes to the things they think are important? Events could change the vibe: an environmental catastrophe, a global financial meltdown, a foreign crisis that Canadians can’t ignore, a George Floyd–style racial reckoning, another pandemic.

By mid-summer, an Abacus Data poll showed 69 percent of Canadians believed Carney is “calm and steady during uncertain times,” his most favourable attribute. Just 50 percent said the same about Poilievre— who, in a bid to claw his way back into Parliament, was preparing to fight for a seat in an Alberta by-election. On “avoiding unnecessary conflict,” Carney led Poilievre by twenty-two points. Overall, the Liberals had reversed the polling numbers of the summer of 2024. That, in itself, was a mandate for big change.

High approval ratings in a honeymoon period when your opponent is busy fighting for his political life can generate hubris. Most political careers end in tears or, at least, intense frustration. Can a prime minister remake Canada’s economy while spending so many hours dealing with Trump’s petulance? Can he remake the Canadian economy to reduce our dependence on the US?

He was in the front row for two of Britain’s existential crises: Brexit and Scottish independence. Now his home country faces its own. Can he manage it?