January 17, 2025 - 6:30pm

After months, if not years, of speculation around his political ambitions, Mark Carney has officially announced his intention to succeed Justin Trudeau as the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Should he prevail, the former governor of the central banks of England and Canada could become prime minister by early March. He held his campaign launch in his hometown of Edmonton, capital of Alberta, in a gesture meant to impart a message of national unity and pan-Canadian representation on behalf of a Liberal brand that has historically struggled to win seats in the Western prairie provinces.

Alternating between English and passable, rusty French, Carney cast himself as an outsider who could save the party amid cratering popularity and make it competitive once more against Pierre Poilievre’s rising Conservatives. Describing himself as “not the usual suspect when it comes to politics”, he bragged of his record of clashing with pro-Brexit populists in the UK. In an effort to reestablish the Liberals’ centrist pedigree, Carney criticised far-Left ideas, asserting that “we can’t redistribute what we don’t have,” an apparent jab at Trudeau’s fiscal record. He also called on voters to entrust him with the task of standing up to Donald Trump’s tariff threats.

The “outsider” narrative can be read as a counterpoint to Poilievre, who has been in parliament for most of his adult life. It is also a challenge more immediately to Chrystia Freeland, Carney’s only serious rival for the Liberal leadership, who served as a prominent cabinet minister and ally to the unpopular Trudeau for most of the last decade before turning dramatically against him.

However, the Conservatives are not letting the claim go unanswered, with their social media channels seeming to go into overdrive in the past few days, churning out aggressive anti-Carney content. The Tories like to point out that Carney has lately served as an economic adviser to the Trudeau government, pinning the sitting Prime Minister’s carbon tax on him — “Just like Justin” is a new slogan — while noting his status as a perennial member of the transatlantic Davos set. Conservatives have even uncovered footage of Carney speaking to one such audience and referring to himself “as a European”, an embarrassing faux pas that harks back to another cosmopolitan Liberal leader: Michael Ignatieff, who was famously pilloried for “just visiting”.

However, Carney supporters, if not the candidate himself, saw signs of hope in a Daily Show appearance earlier this week in which he displayed neither the celebrity airiness of Trudeau nor the academic dreariness of Ignatieff. Instead, as even those members of the Canadian political class not disposed to praise Carney acknowledged, he came across as affable and charming. While brandishing his credentials as Canada’s monetary policy chief in the 2008 financial crisis, he previewed a line of attack against Poilievre, describing him as one who “worship[s] the market [but] never actually worked in the private sector”. He returned to the theme again in his Edmonton speech yesterday, during which he painted the contest between him and the Conservative leader as one of “experience vs incompetence, plan vs slogan, calm vs chaos”.

But the fact remains that no matter how politically talented or inept Carney ends up being, he has been dealt an incredibly difficult hand by the outgoing Trudeau. Poilievre’s Tories now sit in super-majority territory after leading in the polls for more than 18 months. And while a change of leader will surely help the Liberals recover some of that lost ground, there’s a good chance it will not be enough.


Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.
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