On the side of a hockey rink, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney tests comedian Mike Myers’ Canadian cred.
“Capital of Saskatchewan?” Mr. Carney asks in a new political ad released ahead of the country’s snap federal election.
“Regina,” the Ontario-born comedian replies.
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A few months ago, most of the Canadian public couldn’t have told you much about Mark Carney. Now he’s the prime minister and the favorite to win national elections April 28 – largely thanks to the Trump administration’s hostility toward Canada.
“What are the two seasons in Toronto?”
“Winter and construction,” Mr. Myers jokes.
Then their exchange turns serious. Mr. Myers asks if Canada is going to become part of the United States, as President Donald Trump has relentlessly suggested with his “51st state” threat. “There will always be a Canada,” the prime minister replies earnestly.
A few months ago, most Canadians couldn’t put a face to the name of their new leader, a former central banker who has never held elected office.
But within weeks of Justin Trudeau stepping down as prime minister, his Liberal Party has made a stunning comeback under Mr. Carney’s leadership – from 24 points behind the Conservatives to a 6-point lead heading into the April 28 vote.
Much of this is thanks to Mr. Trump, who has launched a trade war – on April 2 announcing global reciprocal tariffs, including a 25% levy against many Canadian imports – and essentially handed Mr. Carney a pitch-perfect narrative as the man for the moment.
Mr. Carney was the exacting governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis, and the levelheaded governor of the Bank of England during Brexit. He’s been able to sell himself as a no-nonsense technocrat who knows how to steer a crisis.
And for Canadians, no crisis is bigger than the existential one they’ve been thrust into with an American president questioning their very sovereignty.
Mr. Carney may not be a natural behind a podium. But he’s seen as the North American anti-Trump: a cool, calm, and understated adult in the room.
“So maybe Carney isn’t the guy you’d love to get a beer with,” says Miville Tremblay, who worked with him at the Bank of Canada. “But he’s clearly got the right profile for the times right now.”
“A grown-up in charge”
Mr. Carney was born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, a remote western town where his father worked as a teacher. The family later moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where he grew up playing for the local hockey team and attending Catholic high school. He won a scholarship to study at Harvard University, majoring in economics in 1988.
Frank Gunn /The Canadian Press/AP
Mark Benning, a fellow Western Canadian, played on Harvard’s hockey team with Mr. Carney; they became fast friends. Mr. Benning says Mr. Carney’s ambitions always stood out. “He actually said to me, ‘I’d like to be the leader of Canada some day,’” he says.
They’ve stayed in touch ever since – recently attending an Edmonton Oilers game together. “He’s never grown bigger than any of us,” says Mr. Benning, now a venture capitalist in Edmonton.
Mr. Carney first worked in the private sector, spending 13 years with Goldman Sachs in New York, London, Toronto, and Tokyo. He was appointed governor of the Bank of Canada in 2008, right as the financial crisis decimated global markets.
His monetary policy for Canada, which fared better than its peers in the leading industrialized nations in the Group of Seven, garnered attention around the world. In 2010, Time magazine lauded him for running a banking system that didn’t need a “single bailout.”
Mr. Carney’s successes attracted the eye of George Osborne, who was chancellor of the exchequer in the United Kingdom at the time. Mr. Osborne recruited Mr. Carney to become the first non-Brit to ever hold the role of governor of the Bank of England. Mr. Osborne told a CBC news program that it took months to persuade Mr. Carney to upend his life in Ottawa, where he lived with his British-born wife, an economist and climate policy expert, and four daughters.
That stint was not without controversy. He made some enemies speaking out against the vote for Britain to leave the European Union – perhaps a first public glint of a political personality, says Jane Foley, head of currency strategy at Rabobank London.
But Mr. Osborne, speaking on the CBC, says that in the aftermath of the Brexit vote Mr. Carney was seen as a voice of stability at an anxious time. “People felt there was a grown-up in charge,” Mr. Osborne said. “I can’t help thinking there’s lots of parallels with what is going on at the moment. He is a very serious person for very serious times.”
The right leader to face off against the U.S.?
Polls seem to suggest an increasing number of Canadians agree. According to the latest CBC poll tracker, the Liberals stand to get 43% of the vote compared with 37% for Conservatives, who are led by Pierre Poilievre, long the person pollsters expected to win the next election.
The Liberal rise comes down, in part, to Mr. Trudeau’s exit. The former prime minister was wildly popular in his first term, especially as a progressive celebrating diversity and as someone who opposed Mr. Trump’s first-term isolationism. But the Liberals under Mr. Trudeau became tone-deaf after the pandemic and amid inflation and the housing crisis that have ensnared regular Canadians.
Mr. Poilievre gained appeal by railing against “broken borders” and “woke nonsense.” But that message has been overtaken as the country unified against a much bigger threat: an aggressive America.
Mr. Carney won the Liberal leadership race in March with 85% of his party’s vote. He is also offering a more centrist vision than Mr. Trudeau’s.
It’s an alternative Canadians have felt lacking as the two main parties have become more polarized, says Lori Turnbull, a professor in political science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A lot of people have felt like, where is that progressive conservative tradition? Where are the red Tories?”
Mr. Carney’s background as a central banker has given Canadians their answer. On his first trip as prime minister, he went to Paris, London, and Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic. It was a statement about Canada’s founding identity and a nod to its future aspirations to diversify beyond the U.S., destination of three-quarters of its exports.
For Ms. Foley at Rabobank, Mr. Carney’s contacts can only help Canada. “It’s good for the country that Europe is paying attention to Carney, and to Canada.”
This could also be a liability. Rivals have dubbed him a carpetbagger and a globalist, the kind that conservative parties have railed against over the past decade. It’s unclear how much he will connect to regular people who are still suffering from a cost-of-living crisis expected to worsen with tariffs.
In 2020 the former central banker began serving as the United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance. Catherine McKenna, from 2015 to 2019 Canada’s minister of environment and climate change and a long-time friend of Mr. Carney, says the new prime minister intimately understands that climate change is an economic issue.
“He understands that at some point, if we don’t tackle climate change, we’re going to have a ‘Minsky moment,’” the kind of market collapse that puts the greatest strain on regular people, even after corrections, she says.
“They are really scared in Canada. It is a real thing, where people are worried about their jobs. They’re also worried about their sovereignty and what is going on in the world,” she says. “This election is about a serious person who can stand up to Donald Trump and stand up for Canada and our jobs and our future.”
(She also swears her friend has a sharp wit and is fun – their friend group challenged themselves to learn how to curl and go whitewater kayaking in Ottawa.)
Mr. Carney wrote the book “Value(s): Building a Better World for All,” which argues for rebuilding fairly through the lens of the biggest crises of the time: the climate crisis, the financial crisis, and the pandemic. In the book’s preface, Mr. Carney argues that every country will have to “earn its place in a more fragmented, values-based international economy. … Canada can do much more – we can help shape the new order.”
That was written in 2022. But the words resonate more today. He’s been handed “a very compelling political cause right now,” says Dr. Turnbull. “He’s able to come into this campaign and use these messages of sovereignty and ‘elbows up,’” a hockey reference, “in defense of Canada. Two years ago, people would be like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’”
In fact it might not be just that Mr. Carney knows how to ride a crisis – he has impeccable timing for positioning himself as the person to manage it.
