Canada’s Liberals have put their faith in a novice

As widely expected, Mark Carney has become the new Liberal party of Canada leader — and will become Canada’s next prime minister. 

The former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor won by an overwhelming margin on Sunday, taking 85.9 per cent of the vote. Former Liberal deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland finished a distant second with 8 per cent. Carney will now meet with outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to set a timetable for the transition of power.

The fact that Carney won isn’t a surprise. What is surprising is many Liberals have put their faith in someone who doesn’t have any political experience.

Carney has never held or run for a political seat. His name has been bandied about for a while as a possible Liberal candidate, but he’s never dipped a toe in the political waters. He also has no experience in leading a party, government or simply navigating the often-vicious world of politics.

How can someone who is so unfamiliar with the nature of political leadership be trusted to take a giant leap into the position of a world leader?

Carney’s band of merry followers don’t seem particularly concerned. The longtime economist has managed two central banks, they often point out. He served as chair of Brookfield Asset Management, Financial Stability Board and Bloomberg L.P.’s board of directors. He was the United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance and, most recently, chaired the Liberal party leader’s “Task Force on Economic Growth.”

Hence Carney’s supporters believe he can take those skills and transfer them with ease. Some Canadians have bought into this theory, too. Recent polls highlight a tightening race between the Liberals and Conservatives for the first time since 2022. Most polls still show the Conservatives comfortably ahead, however.

To those who believe it will be as easy as pie for Carney to make this work, it won’t be. Even the most inexperienced of politicians have usually had a little something under their belts. Trudeau grew up in a political family (his late father, Pierre, served as Canada’s PM) and had been an MP for almost five years before becoming Liberal leader in 2013. Former President Barack Obama had been a senator in Illinois for over three years before winning the White House. Even the most widely-referenced example, President Donald Trump, briefly ran in the US Reform party presidential primaries between October 1999 to February 2000 before dropping out.

What sort of policies will Carney champion as Liberal leader and PM? This remains to be seen, but we have some early indications.

Carney has previously supported net-zero climate solutions, and also claimed the radical Occupy Wall Street protests were “entirely constructive,” in spite of the fact that he worked at Goldman Sachs and was part of the wealthy 1 per cent that the protestors opposed. He even once compared Trump to Lord Voldemort, the villain of the Harry Potter series — which won’t endear him to the US President during this on-again, off-again tariff war in North America.

On the campaign trail, Carney said he would scrap Trudeau’s highly unpopular carbon tax. (Most Liberals now oppose it in order to save their political hides.) It would be replaced with “a system of incentives to reward Canadians for making greener choices.” He’s also called for running a deficit “to invest and grow” the Canadian economy, penalizing ‘high-polluting foreign imports,’ committing to the 2 per cent NATO defense spending target, cutting middle class taxes and supporting retaliatory tariffs against the US. 

Carney is more intelligent and capable than Trudeau, which is a pretty low bar to begin with. His policies won’t be significantly different, however. In certain ways, it could end up being worse for Canada.

Then again, maybe Carney won’t have time to ruin Canada like Trudeau did. There’s plenty of chatter that he could call an early election. With the polls being uncertain and the electorate in a volatile state, it’s a huge gamble to take. If he rolls the dice and loses, Carney will end up being the shortest serving prime minister in Canadian history.