Governor-turned-politician, climate change advocate, these are some of the nicknames given to Mark Carney, the 59-year-old who took over as Canada’s premier after Justin Trudeau resigned amid a trade war with Donald Trump. Canadians are hoping Carney will use his more than 10 years of experience in finance and his tenure as head of the central banks of both Canada and Britain to their advantage.
Canada’s Liberal Party overwhelmingly elected Mark Carney as the country’s new prime minister, as the former Bank of Canada governor warned of “dark days” brought on by the United States under Donald Trump’s presidency.
But who is Mark Carney? Governor-turned-politician, climate change advocate, these are some of the nicknames given to Mark Carney, the 59-year-old who took over as Canada’s leader after Justin Trudeau resigned amid a trade war with Donald Trump. Canadians are hoping that Carney will use his more than 10 years of experience in finance and his tenure as head of the central banks of both Canada and Britain to their advantage. As CNN notes, although Carney has never run for elected office, there have been hints and rumors of his involvement in politics for years. For more than a decade, Carney has advised Trudeau on Canada’s economic recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic.
“But the banker-turned-politician didn’t make his official political entrance until Trudeau announced his resignation in January. With his competitors all active politicians, Carney is preparing to become Canada’s prime minister without holding a seat in the country’s parliament,” writes CNN.
Carney was born in Fort Smith, northwestern Canada, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. His parents were teachers. Carney went to the United States to study economics at Harvard University, before earning a master’s and doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford. The future prime minister of Canada spent 13 years working for Goldman Sachs, traveling between the company’s offices in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto. In 2003, he joined the Bank of Canada, where he served as governor until 2008, taking up the position as the world was sinking into the Great Recession. During his campaign for the Liberal Party leadership, Carney pointed to this time as evidence of his experience in dealing with crises, stressing that it had helped protect jobs and stabilize the Canadian economy.
After these 5 years, Carney was hired by the Bank of England to become its governor, thus becoming the first non-British citizen to hold this position.
During his term, Britons voted for Brexit, which he warned about in speeches before the 2016 referendum about the economic impact it would have. In 2020, he left the Bank of England, and after becoming the UN special envoy for climate action in 2019, he argued that the financial sector should invest in zero emissions. “When I became governor of the Bank of England, which oversees the insurance industry, I saw that the number of extreme weather events had tripled and the cost of these events had increased fivefold in a quarter of a century,” he said in an interview on the UN website. “These facts made me focus on climate issues.”
Since then, he has made clean energy, climate policy and Canada’s economic prosperity central to his campaign, arguing that low carbon will help Canada become more competitive. He has proposed shifting the financial burden of a carbon tax from consumers to big business and has said that under his leadership, the tax paid by Canadian consumers and small businesses on fuel will be replaced with incentives to reduce carbon emissions.
