New Delhi: Mark Carney, former Governor of Bank of Canada and Bank of England, won the leadership contest in the Liberal Party of Canada Sunday and is set to become the next prime minister of the North American nation.
The former central banker stormed to victory in the Liberal Party electoral contest, winning 85.9 percent of the vote, followed by 8 percent for Chrystia Freeland, former deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada.
Carney got 131,674 votes from the registered voters, while Freeland was able to get 11,134. In choosing 59-year-old Carney, the Liberal Party has voted for a clean-break from the Trudeau era. The economist has never stood for an election as Member of Parliament (MP).
Freeland’s resignation from her posts last December set the wheels in motion for incumbent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation a few weeks later.
The PM-designate, in his victory speech, highlighted the dual challenges of his tenure–the threat of US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and defeat of his political opponent and Canadian leader of the opposition Pierre Poilievre in the upcoming general elections.
“Donald Trump as we know has put unjustified tariffs on what we build, on what we sell and how we make a living. He is attacking Canadian families, workers and businesses and we cannot let him succeed, and we won’t, we won’t,” Carney declared after the results.
“Donald Trump thinks he can weaken us with his plan to divide and conquer. Pierre Poilievre’s plan will leave us divided and ready to be conquered. Because a person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him.”
Hitting out at Poilievre, Carney further said the opposition’s “slogans” are not “solutions” and that their leader’s anger is not “action”.
The Conservative Party led by Poilievre had been leading in opinion polls for the last couple of years, before Trump’s tariffs threat.
The Liberals polling numbers had fallen to lows of 20 percent this January, while the Conservatives had touched 44 percent. Following Trudeau’s resignation on 6 January, the Liberals received a polling bounce, and are currently expected to win around 30 percent of votes if elections are held immediately.
Carney was touted as a potential finance minister in Trudeau’s cabinet, with reports indicating that Freeland resigned from her government roles after being asked to step aside as the new Liberal Party leader.
Freeland disagreed, and resigned, which eventually led to Trudeau’s resignation less than a month later. Freeland was considered a key pillar of Team Trudeau, and also of the Team Canada approach in dealing with Trump during his first tenure as US president.
However, despite her long tenure in the government alongside Trudeau, Freeland was unable to convince more than 8 percent of the Liberal voters that she could lead the party into the next general election.
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Who is Mark Carney?
Born in the remote northern town of Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories, Carney grew up in Edmonton, Alberta. The son of a high school principal, Carney went on to study at Harvard University on a scholarship, playing ice hockey, before earning a PhD degree in economics from University of Oxford in 1995.
He spent over a decade working for Goldman Sachs before transitioning in 2003 to the Bank of Canada as deputy governor. In 2007, he was appointed as Governor of Bank of Canada, just before the global financial crisis hit.
The crisis led to Canada entering a deep recession, and Carney’s stewardship of Canada’s central bank received praise as it helped prevent the North American country facing the worst of the crisis.
His leadership at the bank led to then British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne appointing Carney as Governor of Bank of England in 2013. Carney was the first non-Briton to be appointed to the post since the Bank of England was founded in 1694.
For the next seven years, Carney navigated the British economy through the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the economic impact of Britain’s exit from the European Union (EU). He left the bank in 2020, the year the UK formally exited the EU.
During his tenure in London, Carney had to cut interest rates a number of times, and restart the Bank of England’s quantitative easing programmes after its exit from the EU, to prevent the worst of its economic impacts.
He has dealt with Trump before, as chair of the Financial Stability Board–the institution set in place by the G20 nations in 2009 to monitor and co-ordinate regulatory bodies around the world–between 2011 and 2018.
In 2019, he became the UN’s special envoy on climate action and finance, and in 2021 he launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a group of financial institutions combatting climate change.
While there were rumours of a potential political career for Carney, until Trudeau’s resignation, he did not take the dive into politics. However, with Trump in the White House, resurgent Conservatives and a Canadian economy potentially negatively impacted, he seems to have changed his mind.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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