It was the summer of 2007. Deep inside Canada’s finance ministry, high-ranking officials were staring down the barrel of a global financial meltdown.
They weren’t sure exactly when, or how, the market would crash, but as Mark Carney tells it, “We knew that the thing was going to fall apart.”
It was a turning point for Mr. Carney, then a senior public servant, and began the next chapter of his career managing economic crises as the governor of national banks in Canada and Britain.
It was also a transformative moment in Mr. Carney’s political evolution: He saw the financial crisis as the catalyst for a yearslong and steep decline in public trust of Western institutions.
“People were betrayed by the system,” Mr. Carney, 59, said at a meeting of a research group in Ottawa, the Canadian capital, in November. “How do you rebuild that trust?”
Canada’s Liberal Party, with lagging voter support after almost 10 years in power, is now looking in the mirror and asking itself the same question.
Mr. Carney has presented himself as the answer as he makes his pitch to win the Liberal Party leadership on Sunday and become prime minister, succeeding Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in both roles.
The Elites’ Pick
The Liberal Party establishment has rallied around Mr. Carney, an economist from Alberta who became a prominent leader of global monetary policy and later green investing. Polls show he is the leading candidate, with his lifelong friend Chrystia Freeland trailing behind him.
Much has changed in the two months since Mr. Trudeau announced his resignation. The domestic issues that contributed to his downfall, from immigration to inflation, have been overshadowed by President Trump’s tariff threats, which became a reality on Tuesday. By Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump had temporarily reversed some of them. But he made it clear that he intended to continue his surcharge policies against Canada.
To many voters, Mr. Carney’s economic qualifications and measured temperament make him well-suited to take on Mr. Trump, though it is unclear how long Mr. Carney would be prime minister. The Liberal Party does not have a majority in the Parliament and Mr. Carney would have to call elections, which must be held by October but could come sooner. As he is not currently a member of Parliament, his campaign has indicated he would move to a swift federal election.
When it comes to Mr. Trump, Mr. Carney has been largely circumspect, providing no sense of his strategy for dealing with the American president, who beyond wielding tariffs has also spoken about annexing Canada.
In a recent interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. Carney insisted that discussing his views of Mr. Trump would be bad form and give “conflicting signals” during Mr. Trudeau’s negotiations with Washington. By contrast, Ms. Freeland has said she would exact a dollar-for-dollar tariff retaliation.
Mr. Carney has also faced criticisms that he is too privileged and out of touch with the lives of many Canadians.
He has also been more guarded on the campaign trail compared with his opponents, often withholding basic details of events, like their locations, and rarely giving interviews. His representatives did not respond to multiple requests from The New York Times for an interview.
Not a Politician
Mr. Carney’s education at Harvard and Oxford universities and his expansive résumé, which includes rising to managing director at Goldman Sachs and sitting on the board of the World Economic Forum foundation, have added to the perception that he is part of the global elite.
But he has pitched his background in the banking sector as an asset for attracting private investment to Canada and addressing its longstanding productivity issues.
“I’m not a politician,” Mr. Carney said in a recent campaign ad, pointing to his work as a senior official in the finance ministry of a Liberal government in 2004, and that continued when a Conservative government was elected in 2006.
Mr. Carney was then tapped to lead the Bank of Canada in 2008. One month into his tenure, he slashed interest rates as part of a response to the global financial crisis. For his quick action, Canada’s financial papers labeled him “one of the shrewdest central bankers in the world.”
Maclean’s, a Canadian magazine, gave Mr. Carney a front-page spread calling him “the Canadian hired to save the world.”
Mr. Carney was born in Fort Smith, a small river town on the northern border of Alberta, and home to Canada’s largest national park. He was raised in Edmonton, Alberta, where his parents were both teachers.
His father was heavily involved in the province’s Catholic community and Mr. Carney has said that he regularly attends church and has served on a committee at the Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican. He is married to Diana Carney, an economist, and they have four daughters.
In 2013, Mr. Carney became the first person who was not British to be hired as governor of the Bank of England, which he ran until 2020. He became a household name in Britain as he tried to steer the country through Brexit. The consensus is that he was able to competently tackle the crisis, but critics found him to be too political for a central-bank governor, and Brexit supporters loathed him. They said his warnings that Brexit could hurt the economy unnecessarily incited fear.
Jim Flaherty, a former Canadian finance minister, said Mr. Carney’s overseas appointment sent an important signal to the world that Canada managed its economic affairs with a steady hand.
But Mr. Carney’s opponents have accused him of overstating his influence in helping Canada to weather the 2008 financial crisis.
“I have listened, with increasing disbelief, to Mark Carney’s attempts to take credit for things he had little or nothing to do with back then,” Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister who preceded Mr. Trudeau, wrote in a letter to Conservative donors this week.
The Conservatives have also called on Mr. Carney to disclose his financial assets and any conflicts of interest. Mr. Carney’s campaign said on Thursday that if he won, his assets would “immediately” be placed into a blind trust — meaning he would not have control over them — to avoid possible conflicts of interest.
Same — but Different
With a chorus of support from sitting Liberal members of Parliament, Mr. Carney has to perform a delicate dance to convince voters that he is forging a different path from the Trudeau government.
He has also had to distance himself personally from Mr. Trudeau, who tapped him in 2020 to be a special economic adviser.
But supporters say it was a limited role.
“That, I think, was of more cosmetic value to Trudeau than substantial value,” said Evan Siddall, a Canadian business leader who has worked with Mr. Carney and raised funds for his campaign.
Mr. Carney’s platform, in a big divergence from Mr. Trudeau, includes cutting the prime minister’s deeply unpopular carbon tax and replacing it with an industrial pricing system for big polluters that would involve paying consumers to shrink their carbon footprint. His climate plan includes incentives for a green energy transition, while trying to avoid any backlash in Alberta, the heart of Canada’s oil and gas industry.
Mr. Carney said he would also undo the Trudeau government’s capital gains tax increase and limit the size of the government work force.
Though he put forward a softer, more affable version of himself on the campaign trail, Mr. Carney is a no-nonsense technocrat, known at times to have a prickly and curt manner.
“I will say this,” Mr. Siddall said, “he doesn’t suffer fools.”
