Harry Potter-quoting Mark Carney will be the next Prime Minister of Canada.
Coming out on top today in a four-way race to succeed Justin Trudeau as the head of the ruling Liberal Party, former Bank of Canada and Bank of England boss Carney is expected to take office in the next week or so. As a digital balloting closed earlier Sunday, Carney received the vote of 85.9% of the 150,000 members of the Liberal Party who participated in the short leadership battle. The candidate was backed by most of the outgoing Trudeau’s cabinet, like Minister for Women Marci Ien.
Long a member of the global political and financial elite, Carney is a newbie to elected politics. He will be the one of the people in the history of the Great North to go straight into the top job without holding a seat in Parliament in Ottawa. In fact, the last PM who wasn’t an MP was John Turner, who succeed Justin Trudeau’s father Pierre Elliot Trudeau as head of the Liberals in 1984.
Turner’s time as PM lasted just 79 days before he and the Liberals were soundly defeated by Brian Mulroney and the Conservatives, who went on to hold power for a decade.
Hoping to avoid such an electoral tragic fate, Carney will find himself in tricky territory from the minute he officially becomes Canada’s 24th Prime Minister.
A harsh critic of Donald Trump and the MAGA POTUS’ flip-flopping tariffs policy and utterances to make Canada the 51st state of America, the ex-Goldman director will likely have to call a federal election within weeks.
If precedent is any indication, it’s a race that Trump will almost certainly try to big foot.
Fortunately for Carney and the Liberals, Trump’s economic and verbal attacks on our neighbor to the North has served for the most part to unite patriotic Canadians of all leanings. A consequence of which has been to see the once poll DOA Liberals now in a near dead heat with the MAGA inclined “common sense politics” of the Pierre Poilievre-led Conservative Party after two years of a double digit spread in the Tories’ favor.
Under the threat of potentially crushing tariffs, resource-rich Canada has seen the usually split 10 provinces and the territories come together under a Team Canada banner with the once toxically unpopular Trudeau Of particular note, that Team Canada even includes the traditionally strongly pro-USA and oil-producing Alberta.
Out on the hustle in February in Winnipeg, the usual mild Carney plugged into the O’Canada patriotic surge by comparing the erratic and punitive American President to the villainous He Who Shall Not Be Named from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.
“When you think about what’s at stake in these ridiculous, insulting comments of the president, of what we could be, I view this as the sort of Voldemort of comments,” he said of Trump’s repeated mocking of “Governor Trudeau” and the rather serious idea of annexing Canada. “Like I will not repeat it, but you know what I’m talking about.”
Having essentially announced on the Daily Show in early January that he was throwing his hat in the ring to replace Trudeau, who announced his resignation on January 6 after nearly a decade in power, Carney faced a close ally and fellow Albertan as his main rival to be PM. It was former Deputy Prime Minister and so-called “Minister of Everything” Chrystia Freeland’s sudden break with Trudeau late last year that plunged Canada into political upheaval.
A Financial Times and Reuters reporter and editor, and married to a New York Times Culture section writer, Freeland has reveled in Trump’s personal dislike of her. A dislike that has seen the one-time Foreign Minister and trade deal negotiator pummeled by Right Wing media on this side of the border since Trump’s return to power on January 20.
However, despite that media street cred, her very impressive CV and praise from Bill Maher on a recent Real Time stint, Freeland was never able to get out in front against Carney, the godfather of one of her children. To dull the poll distance between the two, Freeland even promised recently to make Carney her finance minister if she won the Prime Ministership The most significant drawback for Freeland, who once told Canadians they should cancel subscriptions to streamers like Disney+ to cut down on personal expenses in lean times, was differentiating herself from Trudeau and the government she was a pivotal part of for so long.
While Freeland has said she will run for her Toronto seat in the upcoming election, it is unknown what role, if any, she will play in a Carney government. With reciprocal tariffs from Canada in place against Trump’s on-again, off-again trade barriers and currencies fluctuations, it is also unclear if Carney’s government has a plan to work with Hollywood North provinces like BC, Ontario and Quebec to increase their respective film and TV tax credits to lure American production.
With that, as NATO members like Canada buck Trump’s apparent pro-Kremlin stance on the war in Ukraine, one of the first trials Carney will face as the PM-to-be is the hefty tariff on electricity to the U.S. that Ontario Premier Doug Ford says will kick in on March 10. “Canadians love Americans,” the just-reelected Ford told Fox Business on March 6 as Trump removed his own immediate tariffs for at least another 30 days. “I love Americans. It’s been 20 years of my life. But in saying that, no, we’re going to put a 25% tariff on electricity coming from Ontario to Michigan, New York and Minnesota.”
Electricity prices in the three states, all of whom have Democrats as governors, are expected to rise fast in response, which will permeate all over the economy of the United States. Despite the Canadian parliament buildings’ architectural resemblances to Hogwarts, it’s doubtful there’s any spell to make that pain disappear.
FYI – Trudeau was first elected PM in 2015, which makes his reign about five years shorter than that of his father Pierre Elliot Trudeau. First elected PM in 1968, the elder Trudeau was in power until 1979, served a brief period as Leader of the Opposition and then returned to office in 1980 until 1984.
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