Merry Christmas, Mr. Carney

It isn't much of a stretch to regard Mark Carney as a lucky man. He may indeed be one of the luckiest figures in recent political history. When Carney first started kicking the Liberal Party’s tires in late 2024, smart money was still on Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre to win the next election. After all Poilievre had held an expansive double-digit lead in the polls for months, and Ottawa was bracing for the coming Tory revolution.

Then came Donald Trump 2.0 with his threat to break Canada’s economy so that the Great White North would cave in and crawl to the United States in craven surrender or his less than subtle mutterings about forcible annexation and Greenland too. Canadians were looking to hire someone with the brains, the experience and the pragmatism to take on the president. Someone credible and not weird. This was no longer a time for a Disney prince who allowed his celebrity to get to his head, traded on empathy or someone who wanted to fit in at Mar-a-Lago like a gatecrashing arriviste. Voters wanted someone they could trust with a complicated tax return, a “safe pair of hands” (that hoary old cliché) whom they could entrust with the national bank account. So, they turned to the bank manager, who stunningly delivered the Liberals’ fourth election victory in a row. Luck doesn’t just come from events. It’s also about synchronicity with the moment and understanding the opportunities that it brings.

Why Carney won is clear. Who Carney is—is less so. Canadians voted for a CV, not a biography. While new dailies and glossy magazines ran big features on him before the election, Carney had no real face recognition outside the Ottawa bubble and the realms of high finance from his perch as Vice Chairman of Brookfield Asset Management. His first big North American media moment was on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show in early January, coyly playing with the comedian about running for the Liberal leadership. (“I just started thinking about it when you brought it up,” he joked to Stewart.) The only books about him that you can buy are sold on Amazon and likely written by artificial intelligence. Aside from being one of the luckiest politicians in Canada, he also came into the job as one of the most unvetted.

But there are some things we do know about the economist-in-chief. In a time when populism is driving politics, Canada has picked an establishment prime minister. Carney didn’t need to worry about the Tories running the kind of “he’s not ready” and “he’s not up to the job” campaign that they hit Justin Trudeau with over a decade ago. Only William Lyon Mackenzie King trumps Carney on education credentials, and no one comes close in his business and public service life. Carney’s Harvard BA and Oxford DPhil, his career with Goldman Sachs and Brookfield, his experience running two G7 central banks: in fact, Carney has the best credentials of any current world leader. And he’s likely one of the richest men to ever run Canada. Is he the kind of guy you want to have a beer with? Maybe not. He’s no Jack Layton, but he does know power, its dynamics, and moreover, how to wield it.

Ask Doug Ford. Poilievre might be better at working a crowd, but the Ontario premier is arguably the country’s most successful populist, winner of three big majority governments in a row. Somehow, both Ford, who dropped out of community college and went to work in his dad’s label company, and Carney have both managed to capture the national zeitgeist. In hockey terms, Carney is the smart, fast skating forward; Ford is his “elbows up” man working the corners. Their bond reveals how Carney seems to see himself as a politician: not as a tribal partisan but a big-tent operator; his instincts are transactional, not ideological, in some ways not all that different from the Great Disruptor to the south. For now, at least, the two men have forged a partnership that works, with common views on accelerating infrastructure and energy projects. And as long as Washington keeps generating danger to the nation’s jobs and sovereignty, it’s an alliance that leaves hard-right, Trump-adjacent figures like Poilievre and Alberta premier Danielle Smith on the fringe, looking reactive, not visionary. In fact, even the ideologically-driven Smith (who can forget her flying down to Mar-a-Largo to plead Alberta’s tariff case with the president) has been able to stitch together a pragmatic alliance with Carney over the recently announced pipeline project. She has even publicly praised the prime minister, something unheard of with regards to Trudeau.

If Carney’s political instincts are pragmatic (there’s that word again), his personal drive is nothing short of relentless. One key to Carney’s success is a punishing work ethic. Take his bestselling book 'Values: Building a Better World for All,' which came out in 2021. It’s a hefty book, coming in at 528 pages. Most politicians’ autobiographies/manifestos are ghostwritten collections of generic-sounding anecdotes whereas publishing sources say Carney wrote 'Values' himself. It was acquired only a few months after he left his post at the Bank of England—which suggests that he may have even started the process while on the job.

How does a person like that run a country? Or more to the point, how does a person like that steer Canada through the political storms created by Trump? The president seems to respect Carney, possibly even like him. At some point—maybe sooner than the Liberals will like—we’ll have a hard conversation about whether any Canadian leader could have got a better trade agreement, or one at all. And we’ll pick apart his domestic policies. But for now, Carney is using power in ways few other prime ministers have dared.

Carney isn’t just a knee-jerk response to Trump. He’s also a reaction to Poilievre, to Trudeau, and to the endless churn of outrage that seems to characterize much of our increasingly adversarial, tiresome discourse these days. He came in offering normalcy to people exhausted by the shrillness and mudslinging. People are tired of elites, populists, shallowness, scandals, drama, and hyper-partisan brawls. And Carney is a reaction against the way the country’s been governed, at every level, for generations. Tough calls don’t get made. They’re agonized over: endless consultation, compromise, public scrutiny, and trashing by pundits. Canadians were tired of a system whose expenditure of energy and money isn’t justified by outcomes, and they picked a leader to reflect that.

And now we’re starting to see what the unleashed power of a national leader looks like in practice. The first thing that strikes you is technocratic ruthlessness. As soon as he was sworn in, Carney stripped away Poilievre’s best slogan by killing the retail carbon tax in a stunt that looked a lot like Trump’s executive-order photo ops, albeit delivered in a matter-of-fact, less histrionic way. It was also a personal reversal: Carney has called climate change an “existential threat” and a “crisis.” Just months before, he was the United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance. He’s even jokingly described himself to the British press as a tree hugger. Right: a tree hugger with a chainsaw.

Then, after the election, Carney dropped the housing minister, Toronto member of Parliament Nate Erskine-Smith, who had supported him in the Liberal Party’s leadership race. Erskine-Smith, seen as a leader of the next generation of Liberals, posted on X, “It’s impossible not to feel disrespected.” Political loyalty breeds expectations. Carney, shaped by corporate culture, seems more comfortable with a different set of rules and neither did he seem to care much about Smith’s bruised feelings. It's the law of the corporate jungle.

His decisiveness didn’t stop at scrapping taxes or dumping ministers. Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act, is supposed to erase interprovincial trade barriers, streamline the approval process for projects deemed to be in the national interest, and expedite major building efforts. The law gives cabinet—really, the prime minister—the power to identify these priority projects and push them past whatever environmental and political barriers stand in the way. The bill, supported by Conservatives, was rammed through Parliament with minimal scrutiny. It’s starting to feel like the prime minister isn’t leading a country but running a start-up with over 41 million employees.

Voters responded—with an astonishing 64 % approval rating, as of August (it’s 62% as of December. Trump’s is 39% and Poilievre’s 34%). Another poll found that a surprising slice of that enthusiasm is coming from conservatives. Of course there are outliers: Sikhs are angry about Carney’s invitation to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi for the G7 summit held in Alberta in June; environmentalists are worried about Carney’s push for east–west trade infrastructure, which include petroleum pipelines; Indigenous leaders fear that infrastructure might be bulldozed through their territory. But there are—as yet—no rail and highway blockades, which dominated Trudeau’s second term before COVID-19 came along, no marches on Ottawa, no anti-Carney rallies. Canada seems on a course to develop its own Third Way, born of economic and trade war necessity, determined to establish itself both domestically and globally as a Force with a profile (and its attendant soft power) as distinct as that as under Trudeau père.

Still, the firm hand on the tiller can all too easily become the iron fist of the state. Since the early 1960s, federal power’s been hoarded in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and it’s now being used. Carney’s shop is not like Trudeau fils. To begin, there are no women near the top of the organizational chart: this is 2025, not 2015. Carney brought in Michael Sabia, ex-head of Bell Canada and Hydro-Québec, to head the bureaucracy and remake it. Lawyer and diplomat Marc-André Blanchard, who worked on free trade negotiations in 2017, is chief of staff. Former justice minister and fellow Oxford alumnus David Lametti is principal secretary. The nerds are in charge now.

The image of old white guys jonesing over spreadsheets is a big contrast to Trudeau’s first months in power, with their defining images of him doing selfies with Parliament Hill visitors. Just before renaming the squat, ugly building that houses the PMO, Trudeau surrounded himself with young, attractive, inexperienced people. Some were college buddies; others were campaign workers. The majority of those hired were in their thirties and forties. Trudeau’s office—despite, or maybe because of, its young, hip staff—became something of a snake pit, with high turnover and a reputation for struggling under competing priorities.

Nowadays it’s as if the Brookfield ethos has taken over Carney’s office, projecting the professional corporate attitude of the boss: staff seem to show up in business suits; Carney doesn’t tolerate tardiness; everyone needs to review their files and be ready to answer Carney’s questions. When he was governor of the Bank of England, staff learned it was better to admit to being unprepared than to try to bluff. “He could explode. It was better to say you don’t know and get the information to him later,” one insider told a newspaper. In June, people close to Carney leaked that Carney would not tolerate senior bureaucrats who fail to live up to expectations. Ministers, deputy ministers, and their staff must work with “pace and urgency” to implement the PM's plans. He wants action: public servants must stop being bogged down in process, or make the changes necessary to expedite initiatives.

Then Carney ruined bureaucrats’ summers by making them come up with plans for big cuts to staff and programs. He took a short holiday in July but was back in his office for one of Ottawa’s now-routine heat waves, which had the added feature of being laced with wildfire smoke as Canada’s boreal forests burned.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne has ordered most departments to slash budgets by 7.5 % next fiscal year, 10 % the year after, and 15 % in 2028/29—though, according to the CBC, benefits like Old Age Security will be untouched. There are reports that the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and Via Rail have been told to decide where to trim in order to meet a 15 % cut. So much for preserving the public broadcaster and creating a low-emissions transportation system. Operating efficiency is now the focus.

Like former PM Stephen Harper, Carney practices the politics of control. The rumor mill around the current prime minister and his staff is silent. The few media leaks have been self-serving. While the PMO was trying to remake the economy and the public service, journalists were stuck covering Trudeau’s budding relationship with Katy Perry. Harper was criticized for muzzling government scientists and public servants. Under the Liberals, government employees still often ignore phone calls and fail to respond to journalists’ emails. In mid-July, First Nations leaders were invited to the national capital to talk about the implementation of Bill C-5. The Canadian Press reported that the chiefs and executives of First Nations organizations had to submit their questions to Carney’s staff in advance. He would not be blindsided.

When he was governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney dealt largely with a small pack of largely deferential financial journalists who avoided short sound bites and “gotcha!” traps. Since then, he’s had to work with reporters with different agendas. Like Harper, he has very little time for tough questions and the people who ask them. In March, Carney got into a public fight with two Parliament Hill journalists who questioned him over conflicts of interest from his career with Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. When a television journalist said it is “very difficult to believe” Carney didn’t have conflicts, Carney shot back, asking her to turn her lens on herself: “You start from a prior of conflict and ill will,” and implied he had sacrificed a lot to serve Canada. This is not a man who will cry on television, nor one who seems likely to suffer whomever he sees as a fool. This is someone who has run trillion dollar enterprises , knows how to make tough decisions and won’t lose sleep over them.

The Liberal Party and Canadian voters know he’s no empath like Trudeau, but they picked him. Maybe it takes a prickly streak to make it in politics, but you’re much more likely to hear about Trudeau quietly throwing people under the bus than having a temper tantrum. Jean Chrétien was skilled at picking his battles, believing most problems went away on their own. Carney is, at least in fiscal policy and governing style, the heir to Brian Mulroney or even Harper. In any case, he is winning over Conservatives without playing to the populist right, like supporters of the 2022 “Freedom Convoy,” some of whom even now picket outside his office. Poilievre still has them as his base, but left-leaning opposition Conservatives are starting to see Carney with his pedigree and policy outlook less like a social progressive and more of what used to be an endangered breed, the “Red Tory” or progressive conservative (small p and c). No great shocker than that, despite not having won a parliamentary majority mandate in the election, Carney is creeping towards one nonetheless as opposition members disgruntled with Poilievre’s slash and burn style (which reminds them too much of the feared and disliked Trump) have crossed the floor. He is now one MP short of a majority and seems likely to get it in the new year.

Business-oriented Tories and Liberals hoping for a more orderly, hard-nosed leadership got what they wanted—in spades. Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act, would amend the Criminal Code to let law enforcement get data from internet providers without a warrant. Bill C-4, Carney’s proposed changes to the tax system, would axe the retail carbon tax, prune income taxes, and ditch the goods and services tax for first homes under $1 million. What was easy to miss? Under C-4, political parties would be exempt from privacy laws.

Out of the blue at June’s G7 meeting, Carney pledged to increase Canada’s military spending to 5 % of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035 and to bring Canada up to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 2 % target this year. The Conservatives were only promising to meet the NATO target in four years.

There’s some accountant’s sleight of hand to the military-spending increases. According to some sources, the government will lump veterans’ benefits into calculations of the percentage of GDP. About a third of the spending goes to infrastructure like airports that have civilian uses (a share of the money for Montréal–Trudeau’s $10 billion CAD revamp, for instance, may be logged under NATO).

Still, the military pledge will reshape the Canadian government and its priorities. “Guns or butter” choices will have to be made. Tanks or climate change research? Clean water for Indigenous communities or warships? High-speed rail in the Quebec City–Windsor corridor or F35 fighter planes? Increases to old-age pensions or Arctic military bases?

Where will the money come from? Some will be squeezed out of the public service, just as Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, supposedly saved money by haphazardly slashing Washington’s bureaucracy. Public service cuts are always predicated on the idea that bureaucrats don’t work hard. In some departments, that’s true. In others, especially those that deal with the public, it’s likely not. And when you order a 15 % cut in a research team, who’s out? The least productive? No. The newest hire, most likely.

There have been loud complaints from certain quarters about Bill C-5, especially concerns that while the “get the machinery working” but “leave a lot of roadkill along the way,” criticizing the rush to pass the bill without proper study or genuine Indigenous involvement. But the left, inside and outside Parliament, was quiet. Many Indigenous leaders have been willing to go along with the program or at least talk. Carney has assured them that approval of national projects won’t infringe on modern treaties.

Why have Liberals stayed silent about Carney’s lurch to the right? Many in the party, like plenty of Canadians, were fed up with what they saw as Trudeau’s fixation on identity politics. When Trudeau’s team was winning elections, there wasn’t much they could do about it. The Liberal Party has managed to dominate federal politics because it is a big tent where it has largely remained centrist with its left and right wings occasionally dominating. It's displayed a tendency to change to suit the times, and right now, people in the party and voters want a leadership that can handle Trump and deal with whatever economic changes come from what’s happening in the U.S.

Just as the federal Conservatives are splitting between western populists and eastern centrists because of Poilievre’s insistence on hanging on to the leadership after both losing the election and his seat, Carney’s Liberals have issues that may eventually conspire to bring them down. In the first months of his government, people saw the change in tone and policy but not the results. How do the Liberals square years of reconciliation with First Nations and Carney’s Bill C-5? What happens if and when Trump stops threatening Canada? Or when people realize that money spent on the military is cash that no longer goes to the things they think are important? Events could change the vibe: an environmental catastrophe, a global financial meltdown, a foreign crisis that Canadians can’t ignore, a George Floyd–style racial reckoning, another pandemic, or even - should the Parti Québécois win next year's provincial election and subject the country to yet another separatist referendum.

By mid-summer, an Abacus Data poll showed 69 % of Canadians believed Carney is “calm and steady during uncertain times,” his most favorable attribute. 50 % said the same about Poilievre. On “avoiding unnecessary conflict,” Carney led Poilievre by twenty-two points. Overall, the Liberals had reversed the polling numbers of the summer of 2024. That, in itself, was a mandate for sweeping change.

History suggests that high approval ratings in a honeymoon period when your opponent is busy fighting for his political life can generate hubris if one is not careful. Most political careers tend to end in tears or, at least, intense frustration. Can a prime minister remake Canada’s economy while spending so many hours dealing with Trump’s petulance and the consequences which result? Can he remake the Canadian economy to reduce its dependence on the US and position the nation for a redefinition of its identity on the world stage?

He was in the front row for two of Britain’s relatively recent existential crises: Brexit and Scottish independence. Now his home country faces its own challenges with Trump, the Quebec issue, as well as the prerogative to forge a national socio-political and economic identity further away from Washington's gravitational pull.

Can he manage it? There's nothing so far to suggest that Carney is so mesmerized by the Prime Ministerial role that he would be like Margaret Thatcher and try to "go on and on and on" in power. Rather, he seems the type to drive as much change as possible, and set Canada on a certain course before stepping back. After all, he's already had a storied career. What's left is to carve out a consequential political legacy for himself.

If recent history is anything to judge the likelihood of his success by, it would be unwise to bet against Mark Carney, much less underestimate him.