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After less than two months in politics, Mark Carney on Sunday was elected leader of Canada's Liberal Party. He will succeed Justin Trudeau as the country's 24th prime minister.
Carney, 59, is a career banker and climate advocate with the globalist mindset of a true Davos man — credentials now out of favor in Washington. He’s a policy wonk who has dedicated much of his life to public service but not public office. He’s a lifelong ice hockey fan (and one-time collegiate player) who also pops up in the Royal Box at Wimbledon.
Carney has seemed less comfortable in his new profession — he admits he’s not a natural. That much has been obvious as Carney has come under fire from the Conservative Party war room, which has tagged him “sneaky carbon tax Carney.” Carney is positioning himself as a financial crisis manager well-suited to deal with the trade war Donald Trump has instigated. But Conservatives, including former PM Stephen Harper, have tried to discredit his credentials. Harper, who tapped Carney to lead the Bank of Canada in 2008, says it was his own finance minister who made the tough calls during the economic meltdown that followed.
“Communicate clearly, frequently and honestly,” Carney advised in his 2021 book Value(s): Building a Better World For All. “You can’t spin your way out of a crisis. The truth will come out.”
If Carney calls a snap election, sending Canadians to the polls, he could wind up the answer to a trivia question: Who is Canada’s shortest-serving prime minister? (Charles Tupper, who served 69 days in 1896, holds the record.) Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is favored to win, at least according to recent polls, but the Liberals have been closing the gap since the start of the year and now sit 6 points behind.
What does the world need to know about Canada’s new prime minister — at least while he’s still in power? Here, culled from interviews, deeply reported profiles, speeches, other media coverage and his own book, is a primer on the life of Mark Carney.
1.
His signature is on Canadian currency.
2.
He has never held public office.
3.
He was once called “the George Clooney” of central banking. “It’s a very low bar,” he retorted.
4.
He served as U.N. special envoy for climate action and finance where his annual salary was $1.
5.
He was the first non-British person to become governor of the Bank of England since it was founded in 1694.
6.
He says that each morning at the central bank of the U.K., he would repeat to himself a phrase from Marcus Aurelius: “Arise to do the work of humankind.”
7.
At 43, Carney was the second-youngest person to serve as governor of the Bank of Canada.
8.
He is the only person to head the central banks of two different countries.
9.
He placed a small map of “breathtaking” County Mayo in Ireland by his office door at the Bank of England in honor of his grandfather, who emigrated from there to Canada.
10.
Carney was born on March 16, 1965, in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, a town of a couple of thousand people along the 60th parallel north, nearly 3,000 miles from the capital in Ottawa.
11.
Carney has written that living in Canada’s far north taught him “we are just one small — and humble — element of an integrated ecosystem, while always respecting and nourishing it.”
12.
His parents were educators. His father was a high school principal. “Our house was filled with books, and there was lots of discussion on the issues of the day,” he has said.
13.
The third of four kids, Carney has two brothers and a sister. “He stands up to bullies,” his younger brother Brian said in a campaign testimonial.
14.
When Carney was 6, the family moved south to Alberta. He credited Alberta’s capital for instilling in him “Edmonton characteristics” — integrity, hard work, prudence, good judgment and perseverance.
15.
He delivered the Edmonton Journal.
16.
In his teens, he competed on separate English and French teams that took part in Reach for the Top, a game show that fired tough questions at academic nerds. (Harper is also an alumnus of the competition.)
17.
Carney was an Edmonton Oilers fan during the team’s heyday in the 1980s — and remains one now. “I certainly had firm views that I was going to play in the NHL.”
18.
He did play hockey, but never got much further than third-string goaltender on Harvard’s varsity team. He played in one game against Colgate, stopping 100 percent of the shots he faced.
19.
Carney attended Harvard on a partial scholarship, majoring in economics and studying under John Kenneth Galbraith.
20.
Peter Chiarelli, now vice president of hockey operations for the St. Louis Blues, has said of meeting his roommate at Harvard: “I remember saying to my friend, ‘That guy’s going to be the prime minister.’”
21.
In 1988, Carney graduated magna cum laude and went to work for Goldman Sachs.
22.
He learned an early lesson in finance from Bob Hirst, a partner at the investment bank, he wrote in his book: “If something doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense.”
23.
He went on to live in London, Tokyo, New York, Toronto — “moving jobs every 18 months or two years across three continents” over about 13 years.
24.
In 1991, he traded banking for Oxford University, where he earned a master’s degree in economics in 1993 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1995.
25.
While at Oxford, Carney met Diana Fox, the daughter of a wealthy English pig farmer who also played on the university ice hockey team.
26.
Carney and Fox, also an economist, married in 1995 and have raised four daughters.
27.
In 2003, Carney traded the world of banking for public service. In August of that year, he was named deputy governor of the Bank of Canada.
28.
Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge recruited Carney to assume the top job, which he did in February 2008. Dodge has called the move “one of the most important things I did.”
29.
Carney arrived just in time for a meltdown. His first interest rate announcement was a dramatic 50-basis-point cut. “The events of the past few weeks in global financial markets have been dramatic,” he told the Canadian Club of Montreal in September 2008. “Money and credit markets seized up.”
30.
During this time, Carney became known as “the rock star banker.” He championed a monetary policy he called “forward guidance” — when central banks telegraph the future path of interest rates.
31.
In 2011, he was voted “Most Trusted Canadian” by editors at Reader’s Digest Canada. Readers, however, placed him 19th.
32.
In his book, Value(s): Building a Better World For All, Carney shares a lesson from those days: “Trust can be undermined not just through loss of certainty about the future value of money, but also through the loss of confidence in banks or even a loss in the financial system itself.”
33.
He says in the book he learned about crisis management from other central bankers Ben Bernanke, Christine Lagarde and Goldman alum Mario Draghi. Lesson one: “The market can be wrong longer than you can stay solvent.”
34.
In 2013, he was recruited to join the Bank of England — just in time for Brexit.
35.
The BBC reported that Carney’s starting annual salary of £480,000 (about $768,000) — plus £144,000 pension allowance — was £175,000 more than his predecessor Sir Mervyn King received.
36.
Carney was upset when the British press criticized his wife for“wearing vegan shoes and recycling plastic bags,” wrote Chris Giles in the Financial Times.
37.
Carney worried people might have a problem with a foreigner at the helm of a British institution, but he was advised that once he traveled north of Birmingham, “the Governor of the Bank of England is an alien. No one will know the difference.”
38.
Carney’s honeymoon with the British public was brief, wrote Curtis Gillespie in The Walrus magazine. Carney’s performance was regularly questioned by the media. He was criticized for warning about a “cliff-edge Brexit,” rather than staying above the fray. “A public figure receiving a mauling by the British press is like winter in Edmonton,” Gillespie added. “The question is not if or when but how bad and for how long.”
39.
In 2014, a Labour politician compared the Bank of England under Carney to an unreliable boyfriend — “one day hot, one day cold.”
40.
He completed the 2015 London Marathon in 3:31:35. “Pretty impressive for a guy who just turned 50,” in the words of Business Insider.
41.
He drinks water first thing in the morning — “the most important thing for cognitive functioning.” If he’s busy, he meditates, he writes in his book: “Trust me, it creates time.”
42.
He’s a regular at Wimbledon, most recently making the Royal Box roll call in 2024.
43.
Carney was at the United Nations when Greta Thunberg delivered her speech to the U.N. Climate Action Summit on Sep. 23, 2019. “We will not let you get away with this,” the Swedish teenager told the adults in the room. “Right here, right now is where we draw the line.” The message Carney received: “With the clarity of youth: We were failing.”
44.
After leaving his Bank of England job in March 2020, he took a climate gig with the UN and served as the U.K. prime minister’s adviser for climate finance ahead of COP26 in Glasgow.
45.
In 2020, he joined Brookfield Asset Management, a global investment firm with an emphasis on achieving climate goals. It is just one of the business links he says he cut at the start of his leadership bid. Canada’s National Post recently reported that Carney had yet to resign from many corporate boards, even as he’s said to be “all in” on the race.
46.
"Where I was born is now melting, setting in train a process that releases CO2 and methane, accelerating global warming,” he wrote in his book, Value(s). “The prospect of these feedback loops is becoming likely as the Arctic has warmed by twice the global mean.”
47.
Bono, the U2 frontman and climate activist, praised the book in a blurb on the dustjacket: “Great leadership is not a bullhorn but rather, as Mark Carney shows, a clear set of instructions in a smoke-filled room.”
48.
In April 2021, Carney launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero to champion the green transition among a coalition of banks, asset managers and insurers around the world. But the arrival of Trump has lately inspired the departure of key members as the new administration wages war on climate progress.
49.
In 2021, when asked if he was considering a future in politics, Carney said, as he had numerous times before, “I never say never.”
50.
Many expected he was ready to announce his move into politics when he appeared as a keynote speaker at the Liberal Party convention in the spring of 2021. During a virtual speech, he declared, “I’ll do whatever I can to support the Liberal Party in our efforts to build a better future for Canadians.” (That declaration alone was considered by many to be extraordinary for a former senior public servant.) He advised the Liberal government informally during the Covid-19 pandemic.
51.
Speculation about Carney’s aspirations only increased after the publication of his first book, which The Guardian described as an intellectual broadside at free-market fundamentalism. “The progressive cause has been advanced,” reviewer Will Hutton wrote. “The boy from Canada’s Northwest Territories, still slightly incredulous at his own phenomenal career given his modest beginnings, done good.”
52.
Carney started formally advising Trudeau last fall as chair of the Liberal Party's Task Force on Economic Growth. With Trudeau’s popularity in freefall amid a cost-of-living crisis, there were rumors Trudeau was trying to recruit Carney to replace Chrystia Freeland as finance minister. Freeland quit the cabinet in December, intensifying pressure on Trudeau to resign.
53.
Carney is the godfather of Freeland's son.
54.
“I’m not the usual suspect when it comes to politics,” Carney said when he officially entered political life on Jan. 16. “This is no time for politics as usual.”
55.
Carney’s book closes with this advice: “Be humble. However grand you are today or may become tomorrow, you too will be forgotten.”
Sources: Value(s): Building a Better World For All, CBC News, Business Insider, Cabin Radio, BBC News, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Bloomberg News, Britannica, The Telegraph, Harvard Crimson, The Toronto Star, Reader’s Digest Canada, The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, Queen’s University, Maclean’s, Wimbledon, Financial Times, Running Magazine, NPR, Bank of England, Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, National Post and The Guardian.
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