Now for the Hard Part: Mark Carney's Improbable Victory

In 2019 (a time that seems in retrospect as far removed from the present as the dinosaur age) an official prominent within certain rarefied circles but largely unknown to the global public delivered an argument which could be best characterized as unusual to a roomful of global central bankers gathered in Jackson Hole Wyoming: he postulated that the U.S. dollar should be knocked off its perch atop the global financial system.

It was the US Federal Reserve Bank’s yearly conference, and the man was making the point that if the game was not changed in the longer term, structural risks were building in the global economy. He argued that other countries are whipsawed by developments in the U.S. economy, even if they have few direct ties to the U.S., because of the dominant role of the dollar. To him it would be misguided to simply accept the status quo, comments that raised eyebrows among the global elites in attendance.

The central banker in question giving that message to some of the dollar’s most important guardians was Mark Carney, the then head of the Bank of England. Now, he has been confirmed by the recent April 28th election as the prime minister of Canada, with a mandate of his own to face down American hegemony and navigate President Donald Trump’s trade war.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on the 29th, Carney walked onto a stage at the old Ottawa civic centre — the same hockey arena where John Turner was elected Liberal leader in 1984, the last time the Liberals tried to replace a member of the Trudeau family (and the first political convention this writer ever attended) — and promised to be guided by Canadian values of humility, high purpose and unity.

With that, he capped what could arguably be described as the most remarkable four-month period in the history of Canadian politics — an incredible sequence of events that began, shockingly, on the morning of Dec. 16. When Canada awoke that day, Justin Trudeau was still prime minister, Joe Biden was still the U.S. president, Trump's comments about Canada becoming the 51st state were still just regarded as a joke, and Pierre Poilievre's opposition Conservative party had a 21-point lead over the ruling Liberals in most opinion polls. In fact, the Trudeau's Liberal were on pace not just to be replaced but evaporated electorally by a populist conservative who vowed to do things very differently and could win up to 200 seats in the 343-seat parliament.

Then Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland blew things up by phoning the prime minister and telling him she was resigning. Trudeau himself soon followed her out the door by announcing his intention to resign on Jan. 6th. Ten days later, Carney entered the race to replace him. Four days after that, Trump was inaugurated.

The new president launched a trade war against Canada less than two weeks later. Five days after that, Trudeau told a Toronto audience what many Canadians had already come to fear: that Trump's comments about Canada becoming the 51st state were no joke. On March 9th, Carney was elected leader of the Liberal Party. On March 23rd, he asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament for a new election.

Caught your breath yet?

Thirty-six days later, Carney has won his own right to govern, and this dizzying swirl of history has produced a uniquely split result — one that may only underline the challenges that are waiting for the country and the prime minister on the other side of the shortish but divisive campaign.

In popular vote terms, this would be the best Liberal result since 1980 when Pierre Trudeau completed his political resurrection, reversed his retirement and won a thumping majority. At 43.5% Carney beat anything the Liberals received under Jean Chrétien or Justin Trudeau, even while they were winning majorities in parliament. It had, in fact, been 25 years since any party reached 40 %. But on Monday night, two parties finished above that threshold. The governing Liberals and the Conservatives. To say voters were engaged would be a woeful understatement.

At 41% (as of this writing) the Conservatives' share of the popular vote would be the highest in the 20-year history of the party — two points higher than when Stephen Harper's Conservatives won a majority in 2011 — and the best result for any centre-right federal party since 1988.

Compared to their result in 2021, the Conservatives made significant gains — in votes and in seats. And in any normal election, 41% of the vote might translated into a majority of seats. But compared to where the party stood just mere months ago, this is also an incredible reversal of fortune. And so, what lessons will the Conservatives choose to learn?

At various points of this campaign, it was argued that Poilievre should pivot. And perhaps the Conservative leader could have somehow focused more of his rhetorical energy and policy agenda on the threat posed by Trump. He is, after all, gifted debater and speaker whose voice could have added to the discourse, and by so doing might also have wrested the ‘tough guy standing up to the bully’ mantle Carney took was so quick to don. But if Poilievre's problem was deeper than that — if it was truly who he is (i.e. the no-holds barred fiery, verbal bomb-throwing iconoclastic performer both in parliament and on the hustings), how he does politics and how closely that compares with Trumpism — his actual ability to pivot was limited at best. That he never actually managed to summon up the ability to project calm and generosity of being which would have humanized him in the public perception, caused a disconnect with voters which made them uneasy.

Perhaps the most telling feedback was related by Conservative party door knockers who related that voters liked the party’s policies, if they were to be implemented by Mark Carney, not the actual party leader.

As this campaign came to a close, the most telling sign of where things stood for the Conservative party seemed to be Poilievre's absence from the party's final television ads — a tacit admission that the man who Conservatives wanted to be prime minister was not liked by the voters the party needed to win. In a final poll before election day, 44% of Canadians had a negative view of Poilievre, compared to 4 % who had a positive view.

The 2025 election became a stark and binary choice between Poilievre and Carney — to the detriment of the NDP and Bloc Québécois who found themselves squeezed out of the discourse, for Canadians were considering who could be more trusted to sit across from Trump, negotiate or stand up to him— and Poilievre lost because in voters’ eyes, he was the most like Trump.

Conservatives might take solace in the feeling that they were just unlucky and that they are now well-positioned to win the next election — indeed, Poilievre's speech on Monday night, in which he was theoretically conceding defeat, sounded more like his attempt to get a head start on the next campaign as well as planting his flag on continuing as party leader. But is it possible that a different Conservative leader would have gotten over the finish line?

In any case, if Poilievre is intent on remaining leader, he will at least now have to find a new seat — Liberal candidate Bruce Fanjoy having pushed the Conservative leader out of Carleton, a riding Poilievre had held for 20 years.

In the waning days of this campaign, Poilievre leaned ever harder into the idea of "change." And understandably so — if this had merely been a campaign about change, the Conservatives would have won massively. The liberals have, after all, been in power for the better part of a decade.

But for half of the electorate, this was an election about Trump — and Carney was the decisive winner among those voters.

Carney did not look or sound like Justin Trudeau. They have had different life stories, different experiences and emphasized different things — and Carney quickly moved to bury the consumer carbon tax, the most contentious element of Trudeau's agenda, sending the signal that he was not as ‘woke’ or left-leaning as his predecessor.

Before he entered the Liberal leadership, it was all too easy to imagine how he might fail. After all, he came from the world of high finance with central banks and MNCs, spoke with all the verve and flair of a central banker (which is to say the lack thereof), and he'd never sought political office before. How could someone like that survive in the less than edifying day to day of the controlled chaos we call politics?

But at this moment, during these times, his calm and mannered bearing seemed to be what Canadians were looking for and wanted in their national leaders. Despite repeated Conservative attacks, including some on his previous role as chairman of Canada’s largest company by assets under management (which proved to be damp squibs when it was revealed that Conservative MPs also invested in it), his background and unquestioned familiarity with economic issues was viewed as an asset. It also didn’t hurt that he was appointed as the central banker in Canada and the UK by conservative governments. His limitations (including his French) were somehow forgiven. What Canadians saw and knew of Carney, they seemed to largely like — polls showed a positive/negative ratio of 46% to 34% for the Liberal leader, putting Carney just slightly behind where Trudeau was when the Liberals swept to power in October 2015.

Thus, where John Turner only briefly revived the Liberal party before face planting in the 1984 election campaign, Carney succeeded beyond anything any Liberal could have reasonably hoped for last December. That he didn’t quite secure a majority government (as of last count the Liberals are at 169 seats – 3 short of this goal) is less a testament to his personal challenges than an Ontario campaign which saw potentially winnable seats fall to the opposition.

And now, as they say in politics, comes the hard part. "There is no going back,” Carney said on the campaign trail recently. “We in Canada will have to build a new relationship with the United States.”

Like it or not, history waits for no one. Thrust into the global limelight, Carney is emerging as a central figure in the global response to Trump’s tariffs, even becoming an avatar of just how to stand up to the hard-driving president.

Having campaigned on the promise of leading the country through the crisis posed by the Orange Man to the south, Carney now faces the not inconsiderable challenge of actually walking that talk. Ever the prudently cautious banker and businessman, in the early hours of a post-election dawn, the prime minister cautioned that the "coming days and months will be challenging and they will call for some sacrifices." But he vowed to "fight" and to "build" and "think big and act bigger."

He has been, from the day he won the Liberal leadership, nothing less than a crisis leader. And the sheer scale of the Trump crisis may only still be coming into view as it becomes increasingly clear that there is a hard reality behind all of this 51st state talk: Trump means it. But Carney might now have what precious few leaders are given: a rare opportunity to unite a country around dynamic action.

But, as ever, time is the fire in which we burn, and he also now faces the rare task of governing the country after more than 40 per cent of voters cast a ballot for the party that will be the Official Opposition. In his speech to Liberal supporters, Carney acknowledged that "millions of our fellow citizens preferred a different outcome." He can but offer outreach, not only to those voters but to a increasingly restive Alberta with 25% of its population stating in polls that they would seriously consider separating from the Canadian federation, something which would play into Trump’s hands. Premier Danielle Smith is wily political operator whose interests may not always align with that of Canada’s and her opportunistic style may choose to whip up an ‘Us vs Them’ sentiment Quebec’s Bloc Quebecois leader Yves Francois Blanchet would be all too willing to engage in.

Before Chrysta Freeland called out Justin Trudeau and changed the course of Canadian history, the prevailing crisis was framed as the "cost of living." Inflation had taken its toll. Housing was unaffordable. (Economists and business groups were also fretting about Canada's GDP per capita.) Time had also worn down the Trudeau government — they had reached the point at which most governments would have struggled to win re-election. But beyond the public's general fatigue with Trudeau, the Liberals were also struggling to fulfil the promise of economic and financial security — something that Trudeau himself understood as a promise that needed to be realized if progressives and liberals were to stem the rising tide of populism.

Carney gave the Liberal party new life and new leadership while Trump gave Carney a moment he seemed tailor-made for.

And the reward? With power comes the opportunity and the responsibility to tackle crises both current and future.

1. Double the home-building rate

In his victory speech, Carney pledged to "build, baby, build" - an apparent nod to Trump's boisterous pledges on oil drilling, except that his promise focused on the housing industry, seeking to build twice as many homes every year with an entirely remodelled new housing industry using Canadian technology, Canadian skilled workers, and Canadian natural resources such as lumber.

Like almost everywhere else in what can be considered the ‘first world, ’housing prices have skyrocketed across the country in the last decade. By doubling the rate of building, Carney hopes to have a supply of 500,000 new homes a year and by doing so deprive the opposition of an election issue used so effectively against the previous Trudeau regime.

The Liberals want to create a standalone federal entity that would act as a developer for affordable housing, planning to use this body to supply tens of billions of Canadian dollars in debt-financing for prefabricated home builders to stimulate the industry.

2. Ease the cost of living

Like people in other countries, Canadians have been grappling with higher prices for everyday goods while wages have failed to keep up - an issue over which Carney's party was criticized while under the stewardship of predecessor Trudeau.

Thus, the Liberals have proposed a minor tax cut for those in the lowest bracket, reducing the rate from 15% to 14%. Carney's party has also vowed to scrap sales taxes on homes under $1M CAD ($720,000 USD; £540,000) for first-time buyers.

They also want to make dental care widely available to lower-income Canadians by extending the national insurance program to 4.5 million people aged 18 to 64. The plan currently covers children, the elderly and some disabled Canadians.

The Liberals will also cap the number of temporary workers and international students allowed into the country to less than 5% of the population to the end of 2027 to ease pressure on housing and government services.

3. Build a national electricity grid

Carney and his party have vowed to maintain the push on reducing carbon emissions (something he has always been a strong advocate of) - as part of the fight against climate change - while ensuring that Canadian companies remain globally competitive. To that extent, he has promised to build a national "east to west" electricity grid to reduce energy dependence on the US.

This reinforces his vision of transforming Canada into an “energy superpower” for both clean and conventional energy, a nod to the pragmatism he displayed in the private sector.

Before the election, in one of his opening moves as prime minister, was to repeal Trudeau's unpopular carbon pricing program, which was designed to give financial incentives for people and firms to turn away from fossil fuels.

4. A massive defense spending hike

Carney has vowed to raise defence spending to 2% of Canada's GDP, which is the target for all countries in the Nato military alliance. Last year, it spent less than 1.4%, w woefully anaemic sum which has brought the G7 country almost endless opprobrium from other NATO nations and the special scorn of Trump, who has made a hobby horse of criticizing Canada for hiding under the massive shadow of American military power.

The Liberals say they will spend C$18bn on defense over the next four years, which will go to purchasing new equipment like submarines and heavy icebreakers that can be used in Canada's north in addition to a sweeping remodeling of the navy’s aging frigate fleet. The latter has become even more important in light of increasing Arctic competition between the US, Russia and China. It is vital that Canada police and exercise sovereignty over the crucial Northwest Passage.

5. Boost domestic trade and auto-manufacturing

Carney has pledged to find new ways to trade in light of the impediments placed on cross-border commerce by Trump's tariffs regime. He has expressed the desire to create new trade and energy corridors while working closely with the rambunctious provinces, territories and indigenous peoples, no mean feat when so many previous efforts at binding the nation together in such a manner have failed or been watered down.

But he has made this an essential priority. He has pledged to remove federal barriers to trade between provinces by 1 July, Canada Day.

Among his plans are an "all-in-Canada" network for vehicle parts, under which more manufacturing will happen domestically - meaning less reliance on imports from the US. The Liberals also want to invest C$5bn in national ports, railways, roads and other infrastructure that would help the country further diversify its trading partners.

It’s an ambitious agenda, as always subject to the exigencies of Canada’s domestic and foreign political and socio-economic landscape. Taken against the reality of a minority government (traditionally these do not last beyond two years) it’s a race against time and a test of Carney’s mettle.