Mark Carney is the prime minister of Canada, the leader of the Liberal Party and a former governor of the central banks of both Canada and England. He grew up in Edmonton, the capital of Alberta. He has admitted to a weakness in French.
On the eve of Canada's April 28th 2025 election, The Economist's prediction model gave the Liberals an 86% chance of winning the most seats in Parliament. Voters cited his experience as a central banker as the main reason they preferred him to handle the trade disruption caused by American tariffs; by a margin of 46% to 28%, he was preferred over Pierre Poilievre to take on the American president.
The 29-point swing to the Liberals since Justin Trudeau resigned, Donald Trump took office and Mr Carney took the helm of the party was one of the widest on record in any democracy. The left consolidated around the Liberals to an extent not seen for half a century, diminishing smaller left-wing parties. The New Democratic Party's vote share fell from 18% in 2021 to 6%. The People's Party dropped from 5% to 1%.
The Liberals won 169 seats, three shy of a majority but enough to form a minority government—a rare fourth consecutive Liberal stint in power. Mr Carney earned the nickname "Captain Canada" through a viral advertisement in which he quizzed Mike Myers, a Canadian actor and comic living in the United States, on Canadian cultural trivia at a hockey rink.
Mr Carney succeeded Mr Trudeau as Liberal leader after Mr Trudeau's resignation on January 6th 2025. He distanced himself from Mr Trudeau's emphasis on identity politics, instead projecting a pragmatic, patriotic message focused on economic growth. His platform included a house-building programme, a reform of carbon taxes so that consumers do not pay them directly, and an acknowledgment that immigration levels need to be calibrated for the realities of the housing market. He promised to continue his predecessor's practice of appointing a cabinet with a roughly equal number of women and men.
Mr Carney's platform overlapped strikingly with the Conservatives': both parties agreed on the need to cut taxes, spur home building, spend more on defence, expand trade beyond the United States, replace ageing ports and crumbling bridges, and build new pipelines to carry Canada's energy resources to market. "We are going to build, build baby, build," he declared in his victory speech. He has said he will "govern in econometrics."
He must mend fences with Alberta, where three in ten residents said they would back independence if the Liberals returned to power. He must also meet Donald Trump by the time Canada hosts the G7 summit in Kananaskis, in Alberta's Rocky Mountains.
On September 18th 2025 Mr Carney made his first official trip to Mexico and met Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's president. The pair promised to "strengthen" the USMCA. Canada and Mexico have adopted very different tactics when dealing with Trump's tariffs: Canada has been openly critical, while Mexico has embraced American demands.
On May 27th 2025 King Charles delivered the throne speech opening Parliament—the last monarch to do so was Queen Elizabeth in 1977. The king was drafted in to rally Canadians to Mr Carney's banner; Mr Carney's brother runs the household of Prince William, the king's son and heir. Mr Carney has offered to approve energy projects in two years rather than five, and said he will use national-interest rules to speed up development further, in a bid to head off Alberta's independence movement. Having guided the Bank of England through Brexit as its governor, he is familiar with the risks of high-stakes referendums.
In office Mr Carney has scrapped consumer taxes on carbon pollution—part of a broader move to steal his opponents' clothes—and is cutting government departments by 15%. He has dropped many of Justin Trudeau's policies deemed to be excessively "woke", preparing tougher laws against crime, reducing the number of migrants allowed into Canada and spending more on national defence. Much of this programme was pinched from Pierre Poilievre's platform. He has taken the Liberal Party sharply to the right.
A poll released on October 5th 2025 by Abacus Data found 46% of Canadians supported his government, down four points from September and seven points below a peak in June. That is still high compared with other Western leaders. The rising cost of living has overtaken Trump-related concerns as Canadians' dominant worry.
By early April 2026 Léger, a polling firm, put Mr Carney's favourability at 61%—30 points higher than Pierre Poilievre's. Public-opinion surveys gave the Liberals a double-digit lead over the Conservatives. David Herle, a seasoned campaigner, called the consensus around Mr Carney as strong as any he could remember for a Canadian prime minister.
Four opposition MPs crossed the floor to the Liberals after the 2025 election, while three Liberal seats fell vacant in the meantime. By-elections to fill them were scheduled for April 13th 2026; two of the ridings have reliably voted Liberal for years. Political historians cannot recall a Canadian prime minister winning a majority via a by-election in the past century. In a November 2025 confidence vote, some Conservative MPs hid behind curtains to avoid triggering an election that polls suggested they would lose. Advisers describe Mr Carney as thin-skinned and resistant to criticism, but say that as long as his popular support holds, backbench dissent will remain muted—many MPs owe him their seats. Backbench Liberal MPs, many of them Trudeau-era politicians well to the left of Mr Carney on climate and energy, have already pushed him to backpedal on his initial support for Trump's war on Iran.
On June 29th 2025 Mr Carney scrapped Canada's digital-services tax—a 3% levy on local revenue from American tech firms—hours before it was due to come into effect, after Donald Trump threatened to abandon trade talks if the tax was not dropped. Mr Carney said he always expected to drop the DST as part of a larger deal to remove American tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminium and cars, but he was forced to concede it merely as table stakes to keep talking. Both leaders set a July 21st deadline for bilateral talks. Trump's spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, declared: "Prime Minister Carney and Canada caved to President Trump and the United States of America."
On October 7th 2025 Mr Carney made his second visit to the White House, seeking a deal on steel, energy and aluminium tariffs. No deal was announced, but his negotiators stayed in Washington. He told The Economist in an interview in Ottawa that a deal would benefit both countries in deeply integrated sectors such as carmaking, steel, aluminium and wood. He and Mr Trump have been texting and talking more frequently; he described Mr Trump as "very sharp" and "decisive".
Mr Carney believes America has changed permanently and will maintain barriers even after Trump leaves office. He has described the end of the decades-long integration process as "a rupture". His strategy is to liberalise at home—eliminating interprovincial trade barriers (federal restrictions were removed soon after he took office), cancelling a planned rise in capital-gains tax, speeding up regulation, and building infrastructure "at a pace and a scale that we haven't done for generations"—while leading a new free-trade revolution abroad. He has described Canada's close relationship with the United States as a "weakness" and wants to reduce reliance on a single partner by increasing trade with Europe, Asia and even China. Louise Blais, a former Canadian diplomat, reckons the pivot will barely "move the needle" on trade: roughly 70% of Canadian exports still go south.
In October 2025 Mr Carney shook hands with Xi Jinping on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea; both sides called it a "turning point" in Canada-China relations. Mr Carney accepted Xi's invitation to visit China. Because he was in London heading the Bank of England during the 2018 rupture over Huawei, China considers his hands clean.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20th 2026, Mr Carney declared: "We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition." He called for middle powers to form coalitions of the willing, accused the strongest states of weaponising economic dependencies, and urged countries "in between" to reduce reliance on great powers. He announced strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. During a visit to China from January 14th to 17th 2026, Mr Carney said Canada would import 49,000 Chinese-made electric vehicles on preferential terms—breaking with America's strategy of keeping Chinese EVs out of North America with 100% tariffs, a policy Canada had signed up to in 2024. In return, China agreed to cut tariffs on Canadian rapeseed (canola) and to exempt the country's lobsters, crabs and peas from retaliatory tariffs for at least nine months. Xi Jinping tersely advised Canada to forge ties based on respect; Chinese official media ventured that past bilateral tensions had revealed important "realities" to Canada.
On January 13th 2026 Mr Carney set off on his first major trade trip—to China, Qatar and Switzerland—to drum up foreign investment. His delegation included Scott Moe, the premier of Saskatchewan, suggesting hope of relief for Canadian farmers facing Chinese tariffs on canola. A key goal was securing Chinese investment in a proposed pipeline from Alberta's tar sands to the Pacific coast; with Trump's takeover of Venezuela's oil industry creating a gap in China's supply, Canadian crude is a natural substitute.
After his Davos speech, Trump threatened 100% tariffs on all Canadian exports if "Canada makes a deal with China". Scott Bessent, America's treasury secretary, encouraged Alberta's secessionist movement. A 30-minute phone call with Trump on January 27th confirmed Mr Carney's assessment: "Washington has changed. There is almost nothing normal now in the United States." Mr Carney responded with a tax break worth C$7,500 ($5,500) for poorer families over the next five years. In November 2025 he signed an agreement with Alberta to fast-track the construction of an oil pipeline sending 1m barrels daily to the Pacific coast. Mr Carney still leads a government one seat short of a majority.
His most ambitious proposal is to bridge CPTPP, the world's fourth-largest trade bloc (12 countries, 14% of global GDP), with the European Union. He argues that as countries tire of paying Trump's tariffs they will look for rules-based alternatives away from both America and China. He says eliminating Canada's interprovincial trade barriers would be worth "almost a quarter of a trillion dollars to the Canadian economy", enough to offset the damage from the worst-case tariff scenario. His government's slogan is "Build Canada Strong".
A person with one watch knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure. Proverb