For most of his adult life, Mark Carney has thrived in a world where facts matter and logical arguments can suffice.
But Canada’s prime minister, who until this week had never held elected office, now enters a domain in which personal slights, ambition and ego often hold more sway than truth or reason. And Carney, who dealt with politicians, some hostile, as a central banker, has now become one, occupying a role in which he’s all but guaranteed to disappoint someone.
On Monday, Carney led Canada’s Liberal party to a victory that only months ago few would have thought possible. Running as the candidate best-equipped to defend Canada’s sovereignty against Donald Trump, he emerged with a minority government.
After a congratulatory phone call on Wednesday, Donald Trump called Carney a “very nice gentleman”, said the prime minister “couldn’t have been nicer” and predicted “we‘re going to have a great relationship”. Notably, he did not refer to Carney as “governor” – a slight he appeared to have reserved for the former leader Justin Trudeau. The pair will meet at the White House on Tuesday – their first in-person encounter in Carney’s role as prime minister.
Carney gave a eulogy for Canada’s old relationship with the US. Now he must redefine it
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Carney used his first post-election press conference to once again quash any idea Canada was interested in becoming the 51st US state, a proposal repeatedly floated by Trump.
“It’s always important to distinguish want from reality,” Carney said on Friday, referring to a firm belief that Canada joining the US will “never, ever happen”.
Standing up to the erratic US president – prone to dressing down allies on a whim – will be a key task for Carney. But experts say his economic challenges might prove far more testing than managing Trump.
“There’s actually only so much we can do if the Americans decide to repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot and inject uncertainty into their economy, the North American economy and the global economy,” said Robert Gillezeau, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto.
“And let’s imagine we got the best-case scenario – the Trump regime says: ‘We messed up, tariffs are off the table, we’re going to go back to a reasonable and irrational global approach to economics.’ We’d still probably be in a fairly deep recession. Tariffs matter, but the uncertainty also matters. And at this point, in terms of business investment, nobody has any idea what the hell they’re going to do.”
As a veteran central banker who helped establish stability amid first the 2008 financial crisis and then Brexit, Carney’s argument to Canadians was that he was the consummate fixer. “I am most useful in a crisis,” he said on the campaign trail. “I’m not that good at peacetime.”
It was an argument that convinced many voters, who gambled that what the country needed was a safe pair of hands
Carney ran – and won – as a newcomer to politics and sought to draw a clear line between himself and his Liberal predecessor Justin Trudeau – but he nonetheless is steering a government into its fourth term.
To run again, he would be asking voters for a fifth consecutive Liberal win in a country that “believes it healthy for different parties to govern”, said Gillezeau.
“There’s a real likelihood that he gets between two and four years as prime minister. And because he’s been thinking for long about entering politics, I suspect he’s aware of that – and so there is a meaningful chance that he does make good use of the time.”
By midweek, it became clear the Liberals had fallen just four seats short of a majority government, with some races decided by a handful of votes.
For a brief period of time as votes were counted, it appeared as though the Liberals would be forced to rely on the Bloc Québécois, a separatist party that is politically toxic outside Quebec and whose leader recently claimed Canada was an “an artificial country with very little meaning”.
Parliament resumes on 26 May, with King Charles travelling to Canada to formally open proceedings the following day – “an historic honour that matches the weight of our times”, said Carney.
Once the grind of legislating begins, Carney can partner with three parties to pass bills, giving his minority government far more stability. The most likely partner for the Liberals are the New Democrats, who faced a wipeout but managed to win seven seats held by incumbents. Those federal seats, alongside the Liberal’s 168, give the two parties more than enough to pass legislation.
“Minority governments will take political sophistication to navigate. It’s about seeing the whole chessboard listening and taking counsel from many people,” said Jordan Leichnitz, a former senior strategist with the New Democratic party. “This will give us a glimpse into whether Carney has the intangible skills that make somebody a durable political leader and able to survive in this environment. Because there’s a question mark over whether he has any interest or is capable of doing this. And not everybody who voted for Carney quite knows what they got.
In its electoral collapse, the NDP also lost both its leader, Jagmeet Singh, and official party status, which grants certain parliamentary privileges, including the ability to ask questions during question period and to sit on key committees. With the Bloc and Conservatives both potentially hostile to the Liberals, they could use the committees to grind government to a halt.
“It’s in the power of the Liberals to lower the threshold for party status and grant it to the NDP. Doing so wouldn’t be out of the goodness of their heart, but instead reflect an understanding of political considerations,” said Leichnitz. “And we’ll see soon if this government – and Carney – has these instincts.”
The nature of his victory and the unusual cobbling together of his voter base – a mix of progressives fleeing the NDP and older voters typically voting Conservative, gives the prime minister a shorter than typical honeymoon.
While Trump figured prominently in the early days of the federal election to Carney’s benefit, many of the issues that previously fueled growing support for the Conservatives are likely to bubble back to the surface in the coming months.
Housing remains unaffordable, the cost-of-living crisis hasn’t yet abated and wage growth feels stagnant to young workers. A somewhat chastened Conservative party, whose leader, Pierre Poilievre, lost his own seat, will want electoral revenge.
And despite winning seats in every province, the prime minister also faces a hostile Prairie region, where a small but vocal minority are agitating for oil-rich Alberta to secede from the country.
“Carney could be in a Keir Starmer situation where he’s elected, but it’s a loveless victory and he has a very short window in which to deliver what voters think they should be getting from him,” said Leichnitz. “If you don’t deliver soon and people began peeling away, it can be really difficult to recover from that. And so in many ways, I think his honeymoon ended the minute he stepped off the stage after giving his victory speech.”
