In almost 20 years of covering Mark Carney, I have found him to be a no-nonsense technocrat who is frustrated that Canada isn’t moving faster to realize its potential and has an ill-disguised impatience with those lacking his quick mindedness.
Here are five things I’ve learned about Carney, former governor of the central banks of Canada and the U.K., and front-runner in the federal Liberal leadership race that will be decided on March 9.
Carney wants to change the world
Carney is a dogged crusader for a carbon-free global economy, which he touts as a tremendous source of new jobs.
He also seeks to risk-proof global finance to prevent the bank failures that triggered the Great Recession.
Carney’s bestselling book “Value(s): Building a Better World for All” (2021), is a blueprint for putting an end to “staggering” income inequality, restoring civility to public life, and excising “the malignant culture at the heart of financial capitalism.”
Carney has followed up with another set of ambitious reforms, “The Hinge: Time to Build an Even Better Canada.”
The book, which takes its title from Winston Churchill’s expression “Hinge of Fate” for the world’s swing to freedom and prosperity, is due out in May.
Carney’s personal motto is that of the Girl Guides: Be prepared
A theme running through Carney’s speeches and interviews over the years is that “leaders have to plan for failure, in order to protect from it.”
Noting that Canada wasn’t prepared for the pandemic, Carney said in a 2021 television interview that “you have to plan that some big American bank is going to fail. You have to plan that a cyber attack is going to be successful, and what are you going to do to make sure our systems continue to work? You have to plan that there’s another virus that comes out of some country so that we have the resources to address it.”
Carney says Canada is acutely vulnerable to external threats, a looming U.S. trade war being just one example.
Carney is self-assured and doesn’t hide it
In 2011, Carney famously upbraided Jamie Dimon, CEO of U.S. megabank JP Morgan Chase, for resisting stronger regulations on the banks whose collapse brought on the Great Recession.
A year later I experienced Carney’s self-certainty first-hand during an interview with him at his Bank of Canada office.
“No questions,” he interrupted me when I interrupted him with an objection. “Just listen.”
Skip ahead to 2011, and Tory MP Pierre Poilievre was grilling Carney at a parliamentary committee hearing on pipeline policy.
In a bid to educate Poilievre, Carney said “I’m trying to explain how a bit of the economy works.”
“Thank you so much,” Poilievre said icily. Ignoring the sarcasm, Carney went on to lecture on the proper role of MPs, which, he said, is to create jobs.
And at last week’s Edmonton launch of his Liberal leadership bid, Carney snapped at a reporter who wanted Carney to confirm his earlier statement that he had quit his corporate board positions and UN work. “I just told you,” Carney said. “I literally just told you.”
Carney is a political outsider — and insider
Carney has long distanced himself from partisan politics.
Yet apart from his 13 years as a Goldman Sachs investment banker, Carney has spent more time working with politicians than most people alive.
He has done so as a central banker, as the UN special envoy on climate change and finance, and as a top economic adviser to Britain’s Labour party and the Trudeau government.
In 2022 Carney endorsed Catherine McKenney’s unsuccessful bid in the Ottawa mayoralty race, and Rachel Reeves as the next U.K. finance minister, the post she now holds.
Carney’s father was a government mandarin and social-justice advocate. It might be that Carney was sincere in his 2021 assertion that “I’ve never understood the workings of political parties.”
But he’s had decades of exposure to public policy and politicians.
Carney is prescient
In the early 2010s, before he took the top post at the Bank of England, where he helped steer a U.K. economic recovery, Carney was warning Canadian policymakers about impending shortages of affordable housing and skilled labour.
He wanted to shift capital from steep housing valuations to greater export prowess and increased business investment.
Carney accused Corporate Canada of contributing to the country’s laggard productivity growth by hoarding cash rather investing it in R&D and modern plant and equipment — a belief now widely held among economists.
Those problems have since become crises.
But Carney is an optimist. He declared last fall that “with a winning growth plan, we can build the strongest economy in the G7 and an even better future for all.”
In the forthcoming federal election, the electorally untested Carney will awkwardly alternate between passion and calm.
But an admiring U.K. Guardian found Carney’s demeanour agreeable and dubbed it “intensely relaxed.”
