Mark Carney was born near the Arctic, led the central banks of two major economies, and is about to become Canada’s next prime minister despite never having served in parliament.
His path to the top job in Canadian politics has been unusual but, as he said when he launched his campaign to , so are the circumstances.
“Our times are anything but ordinary,” Carney told supporters in Edmonton in January.
“the most serious crisis of our lifetime” and said after his appointment that the US wants “our resources, our water, our land, our country”.
The 59-year-old says his experience leading the Bank of Canada through the 2008-2009 financial crisis and then heading the Bank of England after the Brexit vote there has equipped him for the moment.
Carney won 86 per cent of the ballots cast in the Liberal Party leadership vote and will become prime minister over the coming days.
He may not be prime minister for long, with a general election due soon that the opposition Conservatives are slight favourites to win, according to polls.
No matter how long Carney serves, his tenure will be unique.
Carney will be the first Canadian prime minister with no political experience. He has never held an elected public office or served in a government cabinet.
Justin Trudeau (left) embraced Mark Carney (right) after he was announced as his successor as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and the country’s next prime minister. Source: AAP / Sean Kilpatrick/AP
‘Boring’ but ‘reassuring’
Carney was born in Fort Smith, a small town in the Northwest Territories, where his parents were teachers, but he was raised in Edmonton, Alberta’s capital.
Like many Canadians, he played hockey in his youth. He studied at Harvard in the US and Oxford in England, and the initial part of his career involved him making a fortune as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, working in New York, London, Tokyo and Toronto.
Carney then joined the Canadian civil service, eventually being appointed governor of the Bank of Canada by former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper in 2008.
In 2013, the government of then-British prime minister David Cameron tapped him to lead the Bank of England, making Carney the first non-British person to lead the bank in its more than 300-year history.
Mark Carney previously served as the governor of the Bank of England. Source: AAP / PA/Alamy
Daniel Béland, director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University, described Carney as a “technocrat”.
“He’s a boring guy who in general doesn’t have a lot of charisma,” he said.
But Béland noted that with Canada rattled by Trump’s trade chaos and , rigorous competence with no flash may be appealing.
Carney presents “the image of a reassuring guy who knows what he is talking about,” he said.
Professor Lori Turnbull of Dalhousie University, an expert in parliamentary politics and government, cautioned that Carney’s potential struggles to connect with the public could become a liability.
“He’s not a particularly great communicator when it comes to the public,” she said.
“He is unusually well-equipped to deal with economic crises” but “it’s very hard to see how anybody would be successful in politics if you can’t bring people on board with you,” she told AFP.
The Conservatives are running attack ads branding Carney as “sneaky” — an early look at how they might plan to wage the campaign against him.
Carney is personally wealthy, spent significant parts of his career outside of Canada, worked for US-based Goldman Sachs and was chairman at one of Canada’s largest corporations, Brookfield.
“The Conservatives are trying to cast him as an elite who doesn’t understand what regular people go through. And I think if he can’t communicate well, then he runs the risk of being typecast in that way,” Turnbull said.
Climate change, and Carney’s plans to address it, are also certain to play a key role in the campaign.
“Carbon Tax Carney” has emerged as a favourite Conservative attack line, seeking to tie Carney to a deeply unpopular Trudeau policy that witnessed some homes face a marginal tax to offset emissions.
Climate has been central to the latter part of Carney’s career, but he says his focus is on investment-led solutions, like green technology, that create profit and jobs.
“Very much we are emphasising the commercial aspect of it, the competitiveness aspect,” he said recently in an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast.
“This is where the world is going.”
