Canada’s Incoming Prime Minister Is a Banker
Mark Carney, Canada’s incoming prime minister, is a former banker with no political experience. His technocratic centrism is ill-suited for an era of populism and political upheaval, making a Liberal victory in the looming election far from certain.
Mark Carney addresses supporters after the official announcement of the 2025 Liberal Leadership race results at Rogers Centre, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on March 9, 2025. (Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
For several years, the basic dynamic of Canada’s 2025 federal election has seemed all but inevitable. Dragged down by their inadequate response to the country’s cost-of-living crisis and the deep unpopularity of prime minister Justin Trudeau, the governing Liberals were on course for an electoral wipeout. Partly thanks to its confidence and supply agreement with the Trudeau Liberals, the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) has remained mostly stagnant in the polls, while the Conservatives — under the unabashedly right-wing leadership of Pierre Poilievre — have enjoyed an unbroken lead in the double digits.
Then, everything changed. Over the past two months, Donald Trump’s resurgence and the soft coup that forced Trudeau’s exit have upended the race. While Canada’s cost-of-living crisis persists, it has quickly taken a backseat to North America’s burgeoning trade war, and the more existential questions of economics and national identity that have come with it. In most polls, the Tory lead has either dwindled significantly or evaporated, with the Liberals rebounding ahead of a near-certain election call in the next few days.
No figure has benefited more from Canada’s shifting political sands than newly elected Liberal leader and prime minister designate Mark Carney. A former Goldman Sachs executive and central banker — having served as governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England — Carney’s rapid ascendance in Canadian politics is more or less without precedent.
He has never held elected office and, until very recently, was at least not publicly affiliated with the Liberal Party. Ideologically speaking, he is basically a center-right technocrat who — through books and media appearances — has quite skillfully established a progressive public image. His presentation is invariably cool, calm, and unexciting. He speaks almost exclusively in the register of a bureaucrat, communicating ideas and policies with reference to abstract numbers and official metrics.
How Canada Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Banker
Canadian liberalism, like liberalism elsewhere, has always had a strongly technocratic streak. But Canadian Liberals themselves have most often sought out charismatic (or at least Charismatic™) politicians rather than avowed technocrats as their standard-bearers. With the recent exception of Michael Ignatieff, who led the Liberals from 2009 to 2011, they have also typically chosen leaders with an established background as MPs or cabinet ministers.
This time, however, the party overwhelmingly broke with precedent. In last weekend’s leadership vote, Carney secured a whopping 85.9 percent of the roughly 131,000 votes cast on the first and only ballot — winning every constituency in the country by double digits and handily trouncing former deputy prime minister and minister of finance Chrystia Freeland.
Given his own background at the upper echelons of global finance, Carney — whatever his own claims to the contrary — can hardly be called an “outsider” in any meaningful sense. But his meteoric rise in Canadian politics is somewhat unusual and is hard to imagine in even a slightly different political context. And yet, Carney has emerged as a cipher uniquely well-positioned to exploit an uncertain and anxious political moment.
To centrist liberals and older middle-class voters upset by Trump, his elite professional background offers a reassuring sense of stability. At the same time, he never served in Trudeau’s cabinet, allowing him to sidestep the baggage of the outgoing leadership. With the Canadian electorate overwhelmingly hostile to Trump and more preoccupied by his economic threats than the price of housing or groceries, Carney’s technocratic image — to some at least — carries an unusually seductive appeal.
For all the lofty rhetoric about “reclaiming Canada’s economic destiny,” however, the Carney program is more or less exactly what one would expect from a cursory survey of its namesake’s professional trajectory. He has committed to ditching the capital gains tax increase recently introduced by the Trudeau government and wants to replace the unpopular carbon tax with a consumer incentive program.
Alongside his fellow Liberal leadership candidates, he has pledged a massive ramp up in military spending and is touting a deficit-financed infrastructure program that leverages public money to attract private capital for investments in housing and the energy sector. While vowing to invest, he also promises to reduce government spending and shrink the federal public service, in effect softening the language of cuts and fiscal discipline with the rhetoric of nation-building and growth.
Same Playbook, New Cover
In the current political atmosphere, Carney’s quite orthodox center-right program scans for some as far more novel than it actually is. Following the exhausted template of centrist parties elsewhere, he hopes to grow the economy and fight climate change through a familiar mix of cuts, business incentives, and selective public spending.
In the hands of the Quebec social democrats and progressive liberals who popularized it during the 1960s, the phrase “masters in our own home” implied the nationalization of energy, expansion of the welfare state, and a zealous commitment to activist government. In Carney’s, it implies a market-friendly program whose fundamentally neoliberal contours are partly obscured by the language of economic nationalism.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether the Carney-led Liberals can actually win. The Tories, thanks in part to association with Trump, are now on the backfoot and faced with a looming election battle that will likely be fought on decidedly non-advantageous terrain. Still, Carney remains a largely untested political figure tied to the less-than-admired worlds of banking and finance, and thus potentially vulnerable to Poilievre’s ersatz style of populism.
The NDP, for their part, now have a clear opportunity to present a real social democratic alternative to both the Liberal and Tory visions of austerity and nation-building — one that reaches beyond the likes of tax incentives, new natural gas pipelines, and increased defense spending. If Trump goes full steam ahead with his tariffs, it will take state intervention on a scale not seen for decades to prevent a massive loss of jobs. An ambitious industrial strategy designed to achieve much more than softly nudging private capital will also be needed to restructure Canada’s export-dependent economy, and it can quite safely be said that neither the Tories nor the Liberals are going to offer one.
Regardless of the election’s outcome, the resurgence of nationalism will not protect Canada’s workers, repair deep-seated economic inequality, or foster genuine social solidarity on its own. Trump’s rhetoric may well lend it a second wind, but Canadian neoliberalism is every bit as politically and ideologically exhausted as its equivalents elsewhere. The real question is what comes next.