OTTAWA — Only this campaign could have produced Prime Minister Mark Carney.

The former banker with the sober demeanor of a natural technocrat persuaded millions of Canadians he was the guy to lead the nation amid an unprecedented onslaught of threats and ridicule from the brash President Donald Trump.

“Good luck to the Great people of Canada,” Trump messaged on Election Day, imploring Canadians to take his side over anybody actually on the ballot.

The outburst from the White House in the 11th hour of a snap election campaign served up yet another reminder to Canadians why they were prioritizing calm and competence above everything else.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has poked and prodded Canadians, enraging them with tariffs and annexation talk while whipping up patriotic sentiment.

When Justin Trudeau announced his resignation in January amid deep unpopularity, Carney was not yet a politician. By March, he’d been chosen by the Liberals to take over as leader and prime minister — and on Monday, millions of Canadians elected the seasoned banker as the antidote to Trump.

“My message to every Canadian is this,” Carney said early Tuesday morning with results still being counted. “No matter where you live, no matter what language you speak, no matter how you voted, I will always do my best to represent everyone who calls Canada.”

Boring Man takes the plunge

Carney doesn’t ooze charisma. But that is exactly the point, says the first Liberal lawmaker to back Carney’s party leadership bid following Trudeau’s stunning exit announcement.

“We’re not looking for charisma, we’re looking for competence and someone who’s real and someone who’s authentic,” Ali Ehsassi told POLITICO in his Toronto campaign office on the final weekend before Election Day.

Ehsassi met Carney about a year and a half ago. He was also in the room last April, when Carney delivered a keynote at a think tank event in a Toronto hotel ballroom.

What he saw was an explainer, not a campaigner.

“It wasn’t political language. It wasn’t sloganeering. So I was a bit concerned, to be honest with you, at that particular event,” Ehsassi says.

On the hustings, Carney’s voice occasionally rises an octave or two, but much of his tone and cadence on the stump resembles a speech he might’ve delivered in recent years to a global conference on green finance. One step above a lecture.

“I think that’s very deliberate,” Ehsassi says.

Most political observers did not predict that a numbers guy who lacked political experience could turn around his party’s fortunes. When Trudeau finally announced his resignation, the Liberals had reached a depressing nadir in the polls.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was 25 points ahead, all but assured of a win at the next opportunity. Liberal staffers had been jumping ship for months, and many of those who remained had lost hope of a comeback.

“Bankers are very cautious personalities,” Ehsassi says. “But despite the challenges that were quite obvious to everyone … he had the backbone to take the plunge.”

In January, transformative events rolled out at remarkable speed.

A newly inaugurated Trump ratcheted up his tariff fight with Canada and intensified his musings about absorbing the country. Carney was battling for the leadership with former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, whose resignation in December supercharged calls for Trudeau’s exit.

He out-fundraised Freeland and racked up endorsements, running away with the leadership when all the votes were counted on March 9. Nine days later, after a whirlwind trip to Europe and a spate of high-profile Trudeau-era policy reversals, Carney called an election.

By the time he boarded his campaign bus, the Liberals had their first polling lead since 2023. He’d barely had time to measure the drapes, let alone hire a staff.

The polls kept getting better as a curious trend emerged: Progressive New Democratic Party voters were abandoning their flock for the centrist banker. Even Francophone voters in Quebec didn’t seem to mind Carney’s rudimentary French.

Everything, all at once, seemed to be breaking his way.

But don’t call that simple luck, says Seamus O’Regan, a former Cabinet minister who left politics before the election.

“There were a number of things that lined up for him, no question. But there’s always an opportunity to get that wrong,” O’Regan told POLITICO. “The onus is on [him] not to screw that up. There were all sorts of opportunities where he could have and he didn’t, and he’s proven himself to be a lot more adept at retail politics and strategy than a lot of people were giving him credit for at the beginning.”

The ‘existential economic threat’

Carney’s emergence as a leadership candidate was enough to convince Anita Anand, a Cabinet minister who was on her way out of politics in January, to return for a second act.

In a late-March interview with POLITICO, the former law professor at the University of Toronto insisted her decision to run again only two weeks after announcing her return to academic life was not influenced by the upturn in her electoral prospects.

In the first week of the campaign, she felt the difference at the doorstep with voters.

“Six months ago, eight months ago, we did not have the Canada-U.S. situation that we have had, and have right now, and people thought, ‘the Liberals have had their chance, and now it’s time for change,’” she said.

What changed? “It’s the threat. The existential economic threat.”

Long time coming

When Trump was elected last November, Carney was still officially on the political sidelines, a perpetual politician-in-waiting looking for the moment to pounce.

For years, the banker with heaps of experience in both the private and public sectors had privately confided his interest in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Rumors first surfaced in 2012, when the then-Bank of Canada governor vacationed at the Nova Scotia cottage of Scott Brison, a prominent Liberal and fellow banker.

Those particular whispers amounted to nothing.

When he returned from a seven-year stint atop the Bank of England, Carney’s tip-toeing into politics commenced in earnest. In 2020, when Trudeau dumped his first finance minister, Bill Morneau, The Globe and Mail’s sources mused about Carney making the jump.

Carney later came out as a Liberal at a party convention in 2021. He honed his centrist message at ballroom keynotes — like the one Ehsassi heard last year — that increasingly fascinated curious Liberals hungry for a change.

Still, the forever-maybe candidate held off openly auditioning for Trudeau’s job.

Last summer, The Globe published reports of friction between Trudeau and Freeland. Both denied any trouble was brewing, but that jarring episode reignited rumors that Trudeau was courting Carney for a Cabinet role.

In September, he took on an economic advisory role with the party — another baby step into rough-and-tumble politics that timed to a brewing caucus rebellion in the fall.

By November, the internal fracas had failed to oust Trudeau. Then came the bombshell that instantly transformed Canadian politics.

On Dec. 16, hours before Freeland was set to deliver her government’s latest economic plan, she abruptly quit Cabinet. Again, the Globe reported that the PM had offered Carney a Cabinet job as minister of finance.

WIthin weeks, Trudeau was on the way out and Carney was in.

“He was very, very adept at dancing, yeah,” O’Regan says of the prime minister’s sense of political timing. “And when the opportunity came, he went for it, and none of that’s easy.”