Barry Ellsworth
10 March 2025•Update: 10 March 2025
TRENTON, Canada
Political outsider Mark Carney won the leadership race for Canada’s Liberal Party on Sunday, making him the man who will replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Carney has no political chops, but he is steeped in economics, having first headed the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England.
He will need all that knowledge and probably more because the first order of business will be to go head-to-head with US President Donald Trump, crippling tariffs, and the resulting trade war being waged.
Trump hopes the trade war will precipitate a financial crisis where Canada will be forced to cave in and fulfill his stated goal of annexing the country to become the 51st US state.
On the campaign trail, Carney, like the other three candidates – former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, ex-Cabinet minister Karina Gould and businessman and former member or parliament Frank Baylis – said there is not a chance of Canada losing its independence. As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put it weeks ago, “there is not a snowball’s chance in hell” of that happening.
The 59-year-old Carney – his birthday is March 16 – was born in Fort Smith in Canada’s Northwest Territories. He has impressive academic credentials, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1988, then a master’s degree in 1993 and a doctoral degree in 1995 at Oxford University.
From there, it was on to the world of high finance, working for 13 years at global investment bank Goldman Sachs. He progressed upward through Goldman’s domestic and foreign offices, eventually landing the job of managing director for investment banking.
Carney became governor of the Bank of Canada and piloted the country through the financial crisis of 2008. He is credited with going against the grain of other countries and lowering the interest rate rather than hiking it.
The gambit worked, and Canada was able to emerge from the crisis to prerecession levels faster than any other G7 countries.
In a stunning move in 2012, Carney was appointed as the first non-British governor of the Bank of England in its more than 300-year history. He succeeded Sir Mervyn King on July 1, 2013.
He served as pilot again, contending with Britian’s decision in 2016 to leave the European Union. Carney stepped down when his term ended in 2020. He then served in various economic roles, including with Brookfield Asset Management and Bloomberg L.P. and as special envoy to the United Nations for climate action and finance.
Carney and his British economist wife Diana Fox were married in 1994. She is active in various environmental and social justice causes. They have four children and live in the nation’s capital, Ottawa.
