‘Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, has a long record as a public servant—but that experience has largely come in the technocratic world of central banking. After years of mostly working in the shadows of policymaking, Carney is entering the spotlight of high politics.
Carney’s premiership is one of the topics that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze—Adam has met Carney several times at conferences.
‘Mark Carney, the new prime minister of Canada, has a long record as a public servant—but that experience has largely come in the technocratic world of central banking. After years of mostly working in the shadows of policymaking, Carney is entering the spotlight of high politics.
Carney’s premiership is one of the topics that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze—Adam has met Carney several times at conferences.
What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter
Cameron Abadi: What sort of leader do you think Mark Carney will be based on his background?
Adam Tooze: I mean, he’s a tough nut. I’ve done a lot of chairing [panel discussions] in my life, and Mark Carney is a handful. Not because he’s in any way uncooperative, unprofessional on stage, takes excessive amounts of time, or anything like that, but just because he is a force, and he gets his own way, and he doesn’t tolerate [nonsense]. I mean, I think he decided I was just completely incompetent, which, again, doesn’t happen to me all that often. It was quite something.
CA: What were you talking about?
AT: It was just chairing this extraordinarily distinguished panel of central bankers, and I think he felt I wasn’t entirely up to speed. There was Kuroda-san of the Bank of Japan on the same panel. And it was high-level stuff. So I got a little bit of coaching from Carney.
But, you know, we’re close contemporaries. He’s a kind of classic product of Anglo American, Anglo Canadian American, elite, economics business formation. He studied at Harvard in the late ’80s. He did a PhD in economics in Oxford. He then did a stint at Goldman Sachs in its offices all over the world—London, Tokyo, New York, Toronto. He’s ambitious. This is the one thing that’s very clear. Along with the competence and the drive, he’s a man with burning ambition. He was deputy governor of the Bank of Canada from 2003, and then he was governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, which is the period of the financial crisis. And on the back of that, then, in a very unusual move—I mean, he truly is this kind of cosmopolitan figure—he was governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to ’20. I think he got British citizenship by way of the Bank of England job, but his family is Irish Canadian, and so he has an Irish passport. So before Brexit, he was a European Union citizen. He managed the Bank of England quite successfully as an outspoken critic of Brexit. And then, as the manager of the fallout from Brexit in the Bank of England, he walked a very, very fine line, but actually managed to keep the wheels on the bus.
I thought he was really fascinating and quite exemplary in the way he basically said, “Look, I know where I stand on this, and in my position as a central banker and as business economist, I can’t pretend I think Brexit is anything other than a terrible idea. But my job as a central banker is not to curtail democracy by using financial markets, but, in fact, to provide the services of the central bank to stabilize financial markets, whatever incredibly stupid decision you electors may choose to make.” And he did that. He carried through on it. He actually, as it were, stabilized financial markets in the wake of the crisis. I thought it was quite an interesting display of what central banks could do in a cooperative way in relation to democratic processes, even if on the substance one profoundly disagrees.
After finishing at the Bank of England, there’s been a sense that he’s been kind of knocking around, looking for the next big job. There were rumors that he might be a candidate for the International Monetary Fund position, but that traditionally goes to a European—a proper European—and they were looking for a woman to fill the role. So Christine Lagarde did it for a while. So that wasn’t an option. And then Kristalina Georgieva took over. So his options were blocked in that direction. He was in the private sector. And then he emerged as the head of GFANZ, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, where he really was the kind of figurehead poster boy of blended finance. There were $133 trillion in assets waiting to pile into green causes—that was the promise at the Glasgow COP. That has subsequently disintegrated. And Carney and team have had an incredibly hard time holding that together with the move against environmental, social, and governance (ESG) in America.
And so, my sense was it was only a matter of time before he started to position himself for a run at the Canadian premiership. That was probably the job in the end that was the most fitting conclusion for the sort of extraordinary career that he’s had. He will be tough for the Americans to deal with. He’ll make mincemeat of the second-raters in the Trump team. It’ll be a bloodbath if they ever actually confront each other because he just doesn’t take prisoners. He’s made quite clear that Canada is not going to put up with this BS. He’s referred to Trump’s tariffs as the Voldemort figure, by which he means that one shouldn’t even dignify the politics of the United States right now with an explicit mention or discussion. One should just make clear that one opposes it and Canada will stand up for its sovereignty. This extraordinary American talk about incorporation of Canada is really beneath contempt. It’s a display of really extraordinary disrespect.
But one shouldn’t think of Canadian politics as merely a reflex to America. The actual problem that Canada faces, which was undermining [Justin Trudeau’s] premiership and was really posing the question of where Canada goes next, is the state of the Canadian economy, which, since 2008, has grown in a very lackluster way and has been overshadowed by U.S. growth—which may, of course, be a sugar high on the American side. But nevertheless, the prospects for the Canadian economy are far bleaker than they ought to be. It’s too dependent on an ongoing real estate bubble. There are really quite fundamental questions about its future.
