By David Ljunggren
OTTAWA (Reuters) -Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose Liberal Party won Canada’s election on Monday, is a two-time central banker and crisis fighter who now faces his biggest challenge of all: steering Canada through U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Carney’s ruling Liberals completed their comeback win over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, but secured a minority government that fell short of the strong mandate that the former central banker had sought.
Carney, 60, had never held office, which would in normal times have undermined his candidacy in Canada. But a high-profile banking career played to his advantage, with the Liberal leader arguing he is the only person prepared to handle Trump.
Usually speaking in a monotone, Carney ran a low-key five-week campaign and steered clear of major gaffes. His blend of tough talk and bland competence was a deliberate strategy, Liberal strategists said.
“Unlike Pierre Poilievre, I’ve managed budgets before. I’ve managed economies before. I’ve managed crises before. This is the time for experience, not experiments,” he told reporters last week.
Carney was elected Liberal leader in March, replacing former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who resigned amid low approval ratings after nearly a decade in office. Carney was the first person to become Canadian prime minister without having experience as a legislator or cabinet member.
He quickly axed an unpopular carbon tax on consumers and capital gains tax measures, then called the election, stressing the need to stand up to Trump.
Carney was born in Fort Smith in the remote Northwest Territories. He attended Harvard University, where he played college-level ice hockey as a goaltender.
A globetrotter who spent 13 years at U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs before being named deputy governor of the Bank of Canada in 2003. He left in November 2004 for a top job in Canada’s Department of Finance and returned to become governor of the central bank in 2008 at the age of just 42.
POACHED BY BANK OF ENGLAND
Carney won praise for his handling of the financial crisis, when he created new emergency loan facilities and gave unusually explicit guidance on keeping rates at record-low levels for a specific period of time.
Even at that stage, rumors swirled that he would seek a career in politics with the Liberals, prompting him to respond with a prickliness that is still sometimes evident.
“Why don’t I become a circus clown?” he told a reporter in 2012 when asked about possible political ambitions.
The Bank of England was impressed enough though to poach him in 2013, making him the first non-British governor in the central bank’s three-century history, and the first person to head two G7 central banks. Britain’s finance minister at the time, George Osborne, called Carney the “outstanding central bank governor of his generation.”
Carney, though, had a challenging time, forced to face zero inflation and the political chaos of Brexit.
He struggled to deploy his trademark policy of signaling the likely path of interest rates. The central bank said its guidance came with caveats, but media often interpreted it as more of a guarantee, with Labour legislator Pat McFadden dubbing the BoE under Carney as an “unreliable boyfriend.”
When sterling tumbled in the hours after the Brexit referendum result in 2016, Carney delivered a televised address to reassure markets that the central bank would turn on the liquidity taps if needed.
“Mark has a rare ability to combine a central banker’s steady hand, with a political reformer’s eye to the future,” Ana Botin, Santander’s executive chair, said in a written comment to Reuters. She said Carney “steadied the ship” in the UK after Brexit.
‘HIGH PRIEST OF PROJECT FEAR’
But Carney infuriated Brexit supporters by talking about the economic damage that he said was likely to be caused by leaving the European Union. Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg called him the “high priest of project fear,” but Carney said it was his duty to talk about such risks.
From 2011 to 2018, Carney also headed the Financial Stability Board, which coordinates financial regulation for the Group of 20 economies.
After leaving the Bank of England in 2020, Carney served as a United Nations envoy on finance and climate change.
After launching the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero in 2021 to act as an umbrella group for financial sector efforts to get to net-zero emissions, Carney oversaw a surge in membership as boards rushed to signal a willingness to act.
As the implications of moving to renewable energy began to filter down to the economy, though, a political backlash from some U.S. Republican-controlled states accusing companies of breaching anti-trust rules ultimately led a number of large U.S. companies to drop their membership.
Carney also served on the board of Brookfield Asset Management and was chair of the Bloomberg board, but resigned his U.N. special envoy position and left all commercial posts after he launched his bid for the Liberal leadership.
“If it’s not a crisis, you wouldn’t be seeing me. I am most useful in a crisis. I am not that good in peacetime,” Carney told supporters in February.
(Additional reporting by William Schomberg, Elisa Martinuzzi and Simon Jessop in London; Editing by Caroline Stauffer, Sandra Maler and Paul Simao)
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