Prime Minister Mark Carney will lead Canada with an economically liberal agenda

March 9 was a good day for Mark Carney, who was elected as the new leader of the federal Liberals — and inevitably Canada’s next prime minister — at the party’s leadership convention, sweeping the election with 86 per cent of the vote.

Carney has risen to premiership during a turbulent time for Canada, with the U.S. vacillating on tariffs, intermittent threats of annexation, an opposition whose polling strength draws from his predecessor’s unpopularity, and a federal election that is going to happen very soon. Needless to say, he has a packed schedule. 

What Carney does have going for him is his relative outsider status. Having been almost completely unaffiliated with Justin Trudeau’s governance, Carney will have an easier time deflecting the Conservative accusation that he is “just like Justin.”

But this leads us to ask who exactly is Carney? He may have never held any sort of elected office, but he does have a resumé that can be drawn upon to give us an idea of what to expect from a Carney government — and it is not going to be anything inspiring.

Keeping it brief, Carney has a background in global finance. Having both a PhD in economics and a career at Goldman Sachs, his first foray into the spotlight came when he was governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, during the global financial crisis.

He is often credited for mitigating the severity of the crisis on the national economy. Soon after, he became the first non-British governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

After that, he returned to Canada and held various roles, including chair of Brookfield Asset Management, an informal advisor to Trudeau, and chair of the Liberals’ economic growth taskforce. Carney definitely boasts an impressive CV for a country where economic woes are a major concern for many.

However, this list of career highlights also sheds light onto what we ought to expect from Carney going forward.

Carney is, to put it plainly, a capital-T Technocrat. Having been trained and worked as an economist, his expertise lies squarely in the numbers as prescribed by the liberal international order — he thinks like one and acts in kind.

When he was with Goldman Sachs, Carney was a member of the team that advised then-president Boris Yeltsin on navigating the 1998 Russian financial crisis, and then saw the finalization of a Mulroney-era privatization scheme by selling off the last 19 per cent of the federal government’s stake in Petro-Canada in 2004. Both were instances of said liberal international order’s global supremacy being reaffirmed through neoliberal economics.

Carney’s platform is one that is heavily couched in using the power of the state to enact market-based solutions to housing, climate change, and interprovincial and international trade, all while vowing to rein in government spending.

In a time when Canada’s largest trade partner, the United States, has taken to shunning allies, Carney’s pocketbook platform — including putting an end to the consumer carbon tax — paints him as being “the man of the moment” who can, and will, take on the Trump administration blow for blow whilst forging new trade alliances and stoking patriotism in the face of a potential existential threat.

If you are familiar with The West Wing T.V. drama, then Carney could very well be the real-life Josiah Bartlet, or to Carney’s actual hero, Jean Chrétien, an economic liberal technocrat with a patriotic streak.

I am inclined to go for the latter comparison because this is the real world with real consequences. Should a Carney government form after Canada’s next federal election, then we can expect a prosperous Canadian economy propped up by still-downtrodden Canadians.