The election of Mark Carney as prime minister comes just in time, the majority of Canadians think. Targeted in a trade war and seemingly for annexation, Canada needs a prime minister capable of taking on the megalomaniac leading its once reliable and friendly neighbor to the south.
Carney did not come to his position as leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister by any conventional route. He was senior associate deputy minister of finance for both Liberal and Conservative governments in Canada and was at one time Governor of the Bank of Canada and then Governor of the Bank of England (the first non-Briton to hold that key position). He has worked for Goldman Sachs in New York and has served as chair of the board of Bloomberg LP, on the board of Stripe Inc., as chair of Brookfield Asset Management, and as UN Special Envoy for climate change. He was co-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, an idealistic undertaking to gather support for climate initiatives from high-level global financial institutions—an effort sadly abandoned in a shifting geopolitical environment. His business credentials are stellar, as is his academic pedigree: Harvard for an undergraduate degree in literature and mathematics, and Oxford for a DPhil in economics.
Carney arrives in the wake of the decade-long administration of Justin Trudeau, which had been unravelling for some time. The self-identified Catholic prime minister who delighted in provoking the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops on issues like MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) legislation and scolding them for their resistance to providing agreed-upon full compensation for the intergenerational trauma suffered by Indigenous communities subjected to the ruinous legacy of residential schools, was in the end a supreme disappointment for the entire country, and not just the Catholic episcopate. Trudeau was a savvy advocate for every progressive cause imaginable—both Canadian and foreign—and he began his leadership with great promise. But in the end, it was all patina. His government was firmly and ruthlessly controlled by a coterie of unelected communications strategists and devotees disposed to flattering their increasingly egocentric leader. Trudeau fired two of his finest cabinet ministers for standing up to his unethical behavior, and his follow-through on several legislative initiatives fell short. His approval ratings plummeted. He devolved from progressive icon to unctuous poseur.
Trudeau ignored insistent calls for his resignation, which became increasingly merciless from his political antagonists and increasingly desperate from his political allies. He finally caved in January, felled in part by his own aggrieved deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland. Carney had long been identified as a capable and ready successor—a much-courted contender with the intellectual and managerial chops who could step in at relatively short notice, contest the Liberal leadership, become prime minister without holding a seat in Parliament (a peculiarity of the Canadian version of the Westminster Parliamentary tradition), ask the governor-general to dissolve Parliament, hold federal elections over the course of barely a month, and then emerge triumphant as the now elected prime minister on April 28, with a seat in the House of Commons and an impressive gain in the popular vote.
But he also got a lot of help from Donald Trump. Trump’s quip to Trudeau about being governor of the “fifty-first state” came to seem less like a joke and more a declaration of intent. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Canada was on the same troubling shortlist as Greenland and Panama.
Trump’s apparent appetite for territorial expansionism has managed to generate a level of patriotism among Canadians the likes of which haven’t been seen since the 1967 centennial of the nation’s founding. Yet it’s only a minor comfort in the face of the economic chaos unleashed by the unsteady and capricious occupant of the White House. Convincing Trump that excessive tariffs and claims on national sovereignty are not how friendly nations deal with each other, Carney will need to draw on numerous personal resources besides his credibility as an economist, businessman, and public intellectual. One of these resources might be his Catholic faith.
Canada’s twenty-fourth prime minister is its eleventh Catholic one; not since Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Justin’s father) was prime minister has there been as visibly and prominently a practicing Catholic as Carney. When The Tablet of London chose one hundred of the top Catholics in the U.K. they put Carney—then the governor of the Bank of England and a principal figure navigating the politics and severe economic impacts of Brexit—at the top of the list. He attended Mass at St. Mary’s Church, Hampstead, London, just as he had the innovative and theologically sophisticated university Oblate Church of St. Joseph’s in Ottawa while governor of the Bank of Canada. His seminal work, Value(s): Building a Better World for All (2021), is not for the intellectually indolent or conventional, nor is it an exercise in business orthodoxy (even though it won the National Book Business Award). It sets the groundwork for his own decision to enter the political fray: “Politicians who worship the market tend to deliver policies that hurt people, and whose default to laissez faire leave us unprepared for the future. Put simply, markets don’t have values, people do.”
This is the political mantra that he follows as prime minister and that sets him apart from his American equivalent. During a campaign rally in Kitchener, Ontario, he was approached by the Liberal voter and Catholic educator Paul Tratnyek, who mentioned that they had a mutual friend in the Benedictine monk Laurence Freeman (director of the World Community for Christian Meditation). Tratnyek reminded Carney of the words of Cardinal Cláudio Hummes of São Paulo—who’d exhorted the recently elected Pope Francis that he should not forget the poor—and encouraged Carney to do likewise. Carney beamed, acknowledged their shared debt to Christian meditation and Dom Laurence, and assured Tratnyek that he won’t forget the poor—and that is why his government will be rolling out programs designed to address social and economic inequity.
Of course, this is in part boilerplate stuff, constituent-friendly and sufficiently vague to allow for subsequent maneuvering. But it is also classic Carney. He is a pragmatist in many ways, your typical Canadian centrist, inclined to measured proclamations rather than the oracular utterances of the now fully eclipsed Justin Trudeau. He knows that humanizing the market is a daunting task, that global leaders need to be won over, that business titans need to be persuaded that capitalism with a human face is good for industry, and that the skillful balancing required for any kind of credible climate-change economics will require an abundance of patience and not a few concessions. As the former Canadian senator and Ambassador for Disarmament Douglas Roche notes in an article for Island Catholic News: “It will be tough to show the high-mindedness that led him into politics. But beneath the clamor is a man who sees politics as a vocation, a medium to lift up the common good. He gives Canadians hope that fairness in life can be achieved.”
Carney’s biggest and immediate challenge is Trump, who elevates the priorities of the economic elite over the common good, who treats his office as an entrepreneurial opportunity, and whose territorial ambitions speak to a resurgent American imperialism. Canada is a middle power that has traditionally wielded its global influence softly, but that now must reconceive its position in light of an American administration that is capricious, cruel, and disdainful of serious diplomacy.
At the press conference kicking off his campaign, Carney was asked if, as a practicing Catholic who had been at Mass that morning, he would support abortion rights. He affirmed the Liberal Party’s pro-choice position, and that direct response defused the issue. He would not be defined by abortion politics any more than he would be defined by the charge that he is a Davos man who privileges the economic hegemony of the plutocrats. Still, his disinclination to reveal details around his considerable personal wealth has raised suspicions about his primary allegiances, and his anti-charisma sobriety makes for dry media performance.
But he is the best thing Canada has to offer against the incursions, immediate and anticipated, by the aggressive and frequently irrational contiguous power on its southern flank.
