Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s successor as the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party was never as forgone a conclusion as when the late Queen Elizabeth’s septuagenarian son Charles got his sweet new gig as our official head of state a couple of years ago. But the smart money was always on central banker’s central banker Mark Carney, who has been touted as potential prime ministerial material since back when Trudeau was still a rookie Quebec MP and nepo baby hoping to make a name for himself on his own merits by beating up a Conservative senator on live television.
(No, really.)
A political advisor who has never held elected office, Carney nonetheless won a whopping 86 percent of support in a hastily arranged leadership race that saw roughly 152,000 party members — some as young as 14 — pick the new boss, and on Friday was sworn-in as Canada’s 24th prime minister. Former second-in-command Chrystia Freeland deserved a hell of a lot better than the embarrassing eight percent her own bid garnered, but a strong accomplished woman whose guts Donald Trump openly hates somehow didn’t seem like the safest bet at this moment in time. Fortunately she’ll at least be sticking around as the new transport and internal trade minister, which may seem like the demotion it is but figuring out how to get rid of archaic interprovincial trade barriers is a new priority needing a steady hand now that our largest trading partner has gone full apeshit.
No doubt the one-trick phony in the Oval Office will soon start calling him “Governor Carney” as part of the tedious 51st state schtick but it won’t pack quite the same punch as he is a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
Or not. It’s possible his status as a world-renowned superbanker, who’s widely credited for helping to get Canada through the 2008 financial crisis in OK shape and also for minimizing some of the more catastrophic consequences of Brexit, may at least earn a modicum of respect from a career grifter who bankrupted six businesses and had to rely on shadier banks’ flexibility for loans. He also played varsity hockey while attending both Harvard and Oxford, so maybe there are former teammates who can offer some locker-room talk about how his trouser snake is just as tremendous as Arnold Palmer’s to catch Dear Leader’s attention.
Carney, who turns 60 today, is expected to call an election before March 24 when Parliament is set to reconvene and hoping to not beat Sir Charles Tupper’s record of 69 days as the shortest-serving prime minister in Canadian history. Federal campaigns are required to be between 37 and 51 days — as opposed to the two-year slogs that are the baffling norm in the US — and election days have to fall on a Monday, meaning the likely date will be either April 28 or May 5.
The usual suspects are already bleating online about Carney being a Day One dictator because he wasn’t actually elected to lead the country, not unlike President Musk. It’s admittedly not a great look to unilaterally put a former Goldman Sachs guy in charge of a G7 nation, but that’s how it sometimes goes in a constitutional monarchy. We think it’s bonkers America doesn’t have an equivalent of the non-confidence vote where parties can band together to bring down a government when necessary rather than wait another four years and hope sanity will prevail. Or even that free and fair elections will continue. The whole world saw how effective twice impeaching a motherfucker is.
The accepted wisdom as recently as a few months ago was the new Liberal leader would be, at best, a sacrificial lamb and mere place-holder like poor ol’ Stéphane Dion as the nose-diving party rebuilds after an electoral bloodbath from the Conservatives led by the odious Pierre Poilievre. But that was before Trump 2.0 and a tsunami of grassroots patriotism in response to his fever dream of turning the country into his own personal Ukraine. (Fun fact: Canada is home to the world’s largest Ukrainian diaspora outside of Russia, many of them conveniently located in prairie provinces that typically vote Conservative.) A recent Leger poll found the two main parties are now in a dead heat with a shared 37 percent of potential voters.
We have repentant Republican Rick Wilson to thank for the saying “everything Trump touches dies,” and a fun silver lining in our current era of madness has been watching Poilievre tapdance around distancing himself from Stupid Hitler while trying not to lose his Maple MAGA base to the even loonier People’s Party of Canada. And ringing endorsements from the likes of Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, and the Space Nazi certainly aren’t helping with newly furious Canadians.
Carney played between the pipes during his hockey days, a position where the newly minted “elbows up” national rallying cry thanks to worthier Wayne Campbell — or the more in-house sortons les coudres — typically doesn’t apply in a sport where players aren’t allowed to even touch the goalie, but a solid netminder who can keep the country in safe hands could not only be the economist Canada deserves but also the one it needs right now.
