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As candidates line up to become Justin Trudeau’s successor as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, former central banker Mark Carney has arguably been in the running for the position longer than anyone else.
In fact, talk of Carney as Liberal leader goes all the way back to 2012, just after the party’s historic defeat in the 2011 federal election. “Why don’t I become a circus clown?” was Carney’s riposte to the suggestion at the time.
With Carney expected to officially announce his candidacy this week, he’s already wading through a tide of political baggage – much of which didn’t exist in 2012. Below, a quick summary of how Carney is already on the defensive as he begins his campaign to become Canada’s next prime minister.
He’s in a photo with Ghislaine Maxwell
In a pair of photos captured in 2013, Carney can be seen chatting with Ghislaine Maxwell. Taken at the Wilderness Festival — a U.K. music and arts festival that brands itself as a destination for “wholesome hedonism” — it shows a smiling Carney standing next to Maxwell along with his wife Diana Fox.
At the time, Maxwell was mostly known as a British socialite seen often in the company of charismatic U.S. financier Jeffrey Epstein. Now, she’s serving a 20-year jail term for assisting Epstein in running an elaborate pedophile sex-trafficking ring.
A source close to Carney told the Toronto Sun that Maxwell went to the same school as Fox’s sister, and that “while they have bumped into each other in public settings … they are not friends.”
He has multiple citizenships
There are no rules forbidding Canadian party leaders from holding dual citizenship. Technically, it would even be possible for a non-citizen to be prime minister.
But dual citizenship has been a point of controversy for Canadian politicians before, most notably with former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who held citizenship in both the United States and Canada. Although Scheer publicly announced his intentions to renounce his U.S. citizenship, he abandoned the effort after losing the 2019 election. “Knowing that I won’t be prime minister, I discontinued that process,” Scheer told CTV at the time.
Carney is a citizen of three countries. Born a Canadian, he obtained Irish citizenship in the 1980s, and then British citizenship in 2018 when he was Governor of the Bank of England.
He’s the international face of “net zero”
One of the biggest electoral liabilities for the Liberal Party right now is their climate policy. Although the Trudeau Liberals were always very open about their intention to pursue an aggressive policy of emissions reduction, the carbon tax very quickly came to rank among their most unpopular policies. With Trudeau announcing his intention to resign, party insiders are now openly speaking of ditching the carbon tax altogether.
This would be a harder tack for Carney, given that he’s one of the founders of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a consortium of major financiers pledged to “net-zero” emissions by 2050. Carney was also the UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance.
The Net-Zero Banking Alliance is faring about as well as the Liberal Party these days: Just last week, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America all defected from the group.
It also means there’s plenty of video around of Carney saying that businesses who do not sign on with centralized decarbonization efforts should be punished.
“The companies, and those who invest and lend in them, who are part of the solution, will be rewarded. Those that are lagging behind, and are still part of the problem, will be punished,” Carney said in one interview with the United Nations’ Climate Action office.
His tenure as Bank of England governor wasn’t all that great
This was something mentioned in a recent column in The Spectator; Carney’s last big government job was a bit of a fiasco.
There’s no obvious black marks on Carney’s tenure as Governor of the Bank of Canada; the years 2007 to 2013 were a pretty stable time for Canadian central banking. Carney also had the prestige of Canada weathering the 2008 Great Recession better than almost any other peer country.
But it’s a different story for his time as Governor of the Bank of England. As British financial columnist Matthew Lynn put it, Carney presided over low growth and the decline of London as the world’s leading financial centre. “The Bank printed way too much money, stoking an asset bubble, and ultimately triggering the highest inflation rate in the G7,” wrote Lynn.
Carney was also one of the central figures of what the U.K. tabloid press has dubbed “Project Fear”; an organized effort warning of dire financial consequences if the U.K. followed through with its exit from the European Union. Carney’s successor, Andrew Bailey, has now publicly acknowledged that many of those warnings were overblown.
He’s had a Canadian government job at the exact same time his company has been lobbying Ottawa for billions
It was in September when Carney got his first official link to the Liberal government by being named as a senior economic advisor to the prime minister. Unusually, though, it was a position with the Liberal Party of Canada rather than one with the Prime Minister’s Office. As Conservative critics pointed out at the time, this would have allowed Carney to take the job without going through the usual conflict-of-interest disclosures required of a prime ministerial aide.
He also got the job at the exact same time that his company, Brookfield Asset Management, was lobbying Ottawa on a $50 billion pension fund that would be directed towards Canadian assets. Brookfield was asking the federal government to pony up as much as $10 billion for the fund.
IN OTHER NEWS
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith became the latest provincial leader to meet personally with U.S. president-elect Donald Trump in an attempt to smooth over his pledge to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports. She said she engaged in “constructive dialogue and diplomacy,” but her meeting with Trump included Canadian entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary, who actually sort of supports Trump’s plan to erase the Canada/U.S. border. O’Leary’s not an annexationist. Rather, he favours a kind of economic union with the United States that would erase a hard border between the two countries. Think of it as a kind of “sovereignty-association.” When Quebec held its first separation referendum in 1980, the goal wasn’t immediate independence, but rather a “sovereignty-association” in which Quebec would still use Canadian dollars and have free borders with Canada, but act as an independent entity.
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This was NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh’s response to repeated threats by U.S. president-elect Donald Trump to annex Canada. He recorded a kind of diss video (complete with a beat) in which he says there will be a “price to pay” for a trade war with Canada.
The last time a wildly unpopular political party handed the reins to a new leader only a few months before the next election, the result was Kim Campbell becoming Canada’s first woman prime minister. Now, Nova Scotia MP Jaime Battiste (who is Mi’kmaw) appears to be trying the same thing, but as Canada’s first Indigenous prime minister. In a statement on Monday, he said he might run for the Liberal leadership, and emphasized that it would make him Canada’s first Indigenous prime minister. “I am laying the groundwork for an exploratory team that will seek to launch the first campaign by an Indigenous candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, and to be the next Prime Minister of Canada,” he wrote.
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