Mark Carney is another Michael Ignatieff

Mark Carney has won the Liberal party leadership contest by an enormous margin. He will soon be the prime minister of Canada. It’s a moment of triumph for the former governor of the Bank of England, for a former governor of the Bank of Canada, for a senior banker at Goldman Sachs based in the United States, Japan and Britain, for a former shapeshifting personage of the United Nations, for a Davos regular: for one of the most globally ambitious guys around. It’s a repudiation of the idea that a citizen of nowhere financier type educated at Harvard and Oxford could never rise to the top in our populist age.

But things are not all roses for Carney. He puts me in mind of Michael Ignatieff, who was Liberal leader before 2011 and Justin Trudeau. Like Carney, Ignatieff was a professorial elitist who hit the heights abroad. Ignatieff was an academic at Cambridge and Harvard. He made TV documentaries for the BBC and spoke to Charlie Rose in New York about nationalism and belonging. He wrote a whole shelf of books and essays in the New York Review about foreign countries and his own Russian ancestry. When talking on American TV, he had this habit of referring to America as “my country.” He called Britain his “home.” Ignatieff returned to Canada in 2006, as his book Fire and Ashes says, because a delegation of Liberal grey cardinals sought him out in his American home as a future prime minister in waiting.

Ignatieff was soon cut down to size—after he had attained the Liberal leadership—by a brilliant Conservative slogan: “He didn’t come back for you.” Ignatieff was a man who did not live in Canada for many years, who had few ties to Canada. But he felt entitled to rule it as a philosopher-king regardless. The Conservative government knew a winner when they were onto one.

Carney is as much a citizen of nowhere as Ignatieff. He worked in high finance around the world for Goldman, a widely disliked firm. Carney was headhunted by Trudeau’s predecessor Stephen Harper as governor of Canada’s central bank, where he did not distinguish himself. Rumors even then circulated that he wanted to enter politics and to be the chief minister.

Carney was headhunted again as governor of the Bank of England. It caused controversy in both Canada and in Britain when he accepted the job, which he held through years of poor economic performance, and bad monetary policy, for which it seems he was significantly responsible.

When Carney grew tired of Britain, he swanned off to the UN in New York, working on “projects,” burnishing his credentials. A centerpiece of his CV has been the green stuff he has meddled in and his various campaigns for international power and influence.

Carney may criticise the economic policies of the Trudeau period—with falling per capita growth, a massive surge in migration, unjustifiable deficit spending—but Carney was one of Trudeau’s most important outside advisers. When Trudeau’s finance minister and deputy prime minister Crystia Freeland resigned last year and brought Trudeau down, it was Carney that Trudeau was openly threatening to replace her with.

It was a matter of time before Carney decided the moment was ripe to make a bid for power. He is one of the most transparently ambitious men in the English-speaking world. And now he has achieved it. Unelected by anyone except the Canadian Liberal party membership (Carney is not even a member of parliament), he has but a short time before an inevitable election to claim that he is different from the previous guy, his close friend, who ruled Canada with Carney’s sometime help and advice for almost a decade.

Canada’s Liberals ought to be smashed in the upcoming election, if there were any justice. They have destroyed an economy they promised to grow steadily. They have presided over a lost decade in housebuilding which has resulted in one of the worst housing crises in the world. Pierre Poilievre talks like a fiery populist but he is possibly the most impressive conservative leader on the planet. Until the tariffs threatened by Donald Trump’s America started rolling in, Poilievre and the Conservatives had an immense, seemingly inevitable lead. Carney, the unelected elitist citizen of nowhere, might just cling onto power.

Yet for all that Trump’s policies seem determined to see Canada’s Conservatives lose their previously in-the-bag election this year, a similar idea still could do for Carney what was done to Ignatieff: prove that he does not see Canada as his home—only as a place he deserves to rule.

As the anglophone world wrestles with “regimes” and “blobs,” it seems worth thinking about. There’s no reason to think the old slogans wouldn’t do again. They are still true, after all. Mark Carney: he didn’t come back for you.