Artur Widak/NurPhoto via AP
Mark Carney, the newly elected leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, addresses supporters in a victory speech, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, March 9, 2025.
After a swift and improbable ascent, Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada governor, took office as the country’s 24th prime minister on Friday morning. A crisis-less Carney, with his Bank of England, Bank of Canada, Goldman Sachs, Harvard, and Oxford credentials, likely would have had a more grueling race to the top if not for the U.S. trade war provocations, and been dismissed as a wealthy cosmopolitan banker type, far removed from the struggles of ordinary people. But he has emerged as a champion for many anxious Canadians consigned to a once-unfathomable dystopia: being held hostage to an American president bent on wrecking the North American economy.
Amid a rare surge of national pride, even voters who might be otherwise leery of his globalist gloss admit that Carney has serious “skillz,” as the kids say, to match the Trump team brain cell for brain cell in the trade war, which is preferable to the alternative of a career politician with no special expertise in Canada’s domestic or international economic policymaking.
Recent polling suggests that the once-hapless Liberals are within striking distance of a Conservative Party that once expected to waltz into power. Outgoing leader Justin Trudeau created the conditions for Carney’s accession. As Trudeau neared his ten-year milestone, the usual shelf life of a Canadian prime minister, he embarked on a journey of self-defenestration. When his perfunctory talks with President Donald Trump proved fruitless, he returned to Ottawa to talk his finance minister out of her job. Instead, she invited him to take the job and shove it, precipitating his downfall faster than a pronghorn across the Saskatchewan prairie.
What does it mean for Canada to have Carney meeting this moment? Much more, if it turns out that this political neophyte recalls another candidate who thrilled millions initially, only to falter in the transition from the shadows of policymaking into the unforgiving world of retail campaigning.
There was an outpouring of joy and jubilation over the journey of the accomplished and telegenic Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket. Polls showing narrowing margins in July and August left Democrats with the illusion that their candidate would step up to the podium on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, an illusion that persisted until screens displayed a bright-red map of the United States on election night.
Carney’s dilemma is more clearly defined. He arrives on the political scene with a clear meltdown in progress, and Canada’s sovereignty turned into a punch line by a hostile president. But like Harris, his predecessor’s baggage dogs him, and the entirety of his retail political experience spans the time it’s taken for the Trump administration to manufacture the North American trade war.
Carney will have to fend off the “Maple MAGA” elements of the Canadian political universe that are flocking to the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre.
Crisis-tested though he may be after helping lead Canada through the Great Recession and warning about the folly of Brexit in Great Britain, he comes into the limelight without political experience, raising questions about whether the onetime Harvard backup hockey goalie can turn “Elbows Up” into political hard currency.
Tim Walz’s recent critique of 2024 electoral tactics confirmed that Harris’s team played it safe, shying away from criticism of President Biden, failing to validate voter angst on inflation, housing, and other quotidian woes. Appeals about democracy and warnings about Project 2025 didn’t resonate with an electorate that reasoned life under Trump wouldn’t be “that bad,” nor did they persuade couch-sitters to get off their collective duffs. Walz, whom The Washington Post described as “a surprisingly bubble-wrapped campaigner,” lamented that he and Harris should have more forcefully countered the conservative bro-verse, and gotten off the swing-state treadmill and met voters where they lived by doing more town halls.
“The people who I think will pretty clearly stick with [Carney] are people who are on the sort of business/liberal side of the party. [They] find him very reassuring,” says Richard Johnston, a professor of political science emeritus of the University of British Columbia. Carney has gravitas, but the challenge is showing Canadians beset by housing crises, health care system strains, and high prices that he understands their daily lives. After a patron blurted out “Churchill” to Carney during a recent visit to an Ontario pub, he opined that it was “1938.” He’ll have to offer more than neo-Churchillian rhetoric about being on a wartime footing to convince most voters.
“That’s part of his vulnerability to demonstrate that he actually gets it about ordinary people and in contexts not involving trade war with Donald Trump,” says Johnston. “The question now is whether those things, which a year ago might have been vulnerabilities, are actually assets. We don’t yet know what he’s like on the sidewalk.”
He will also have to fend off the “Maple MAGA” elements of the Canadian political universe that are flocking to the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre. Though his parliamentary record is less than stellar, after 20 years in Parliament, Poilievre is an experienced campaigner.
Canada has two distinct electorates: the Francophone province of Quebec and the rest of the country. There is what Johnston calls the “ethnonational dimension” that runs through the Carney-Poilievre election contest in Quebec. Even though Francophones are a minority nationwide in Canada, they are the majority in Quebec and their relations with various immigrant groups and native English speakers are “fraught,” a dynamic that could pose problems for Carney. “There are some awkward questions that are almost certain to come up in a debate, and he could find himself falling into a trap in Quebec,” Johnston says, “and once that starts to happen, then things might start to unravel in the rest of the country.” Poilievre is fluent in French. But Carney’s French is not as polished: He has already had one embarrassing mistake during a Liberal leadership debate.
But though the province is often at odds with English Canada, Quebec has resolutely lined up with the rest of the country on the tariff war and the mission of finding a strategy to deal with the American president, which has elicited a combination of amazement and relief.
Just how conservative is Poilievre? Maple MAGA, as far-right conservatives are known in Canada, is similar to its U.S. counterpart: Its fans are mostly rural and disgruntled working-class (though not union member) Canadians. “You don’t actually have to go very far to find people who are perfectly comfortable saying the sort of things that MAGA says in the U.S., and believing many of the same facts or factoids in relation to Canada as well as to the U.S.,” says Johnston. Poilievre “is an appealing figure for the more MAGA side of Canada [but] even there he’s an equivocal figure, he’s not MAGA enough.”
Canadian elections are won in the major metro areas of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. People of color, who tend to be concentrated in the suburban and exurban areas, are critical to the Liberals’ calculus. South Asians are the largest ethnic group, followed by the Chinese and Black Canadians. The First Nations, who are more politically powerful than indigenous groups in the U.S., have issues with both parties. Many, but not all, voters of color have lower voting rates than whites.
Another test for Carney is securing a seat in Parliament. He must find a “safe” Liberal seat where he can be easily elected. For example, Johnston suggests that a downtown Toronto or Vancouver riding (district) with a high percentage of university graduates could be doable. A riding in Ottawa, where he lives, or Edmonton, where he grew up, might also be on the table. But Alberta, as a whole, is a Conservative stronghold with a premier, Danielle Smith, who has ties to the American right.
To form a majority government, Liberals would need to capture 170 of 338 seats in the House of Commons. A Liberal or Conservative minority government would need the support of smaller opposition parties like the left-of-center New Democratic Party or the Bloc Québécois, which advocates for Quebec’s independence. The downside is that minority governments usually last two years or less.
A Conservative government would face special pressures. “Cozying up to Trump would be a big mistake,” says Johnston.
The Liberals appear to be keen to call an election as early as possible, perhaps before Parliament reconvenes on March 24. The vote would then be held at the end of April or in early May.
Yet Kamala Harris’s warnings weren’t heeded by Americans, and both countries are living with the psychic and economic whiplash of that seminal miscalculation. Will Pierre Poilievre’s “Canada First” rhetoric, with its MAGA-adjacent “America First” tones, stoke fears of “cozying up” and precipitate a strong enough backlash to disable the Conservatives? Can Mark Carney convince Canadians that he is the one to keep their country on an even keel as it tries to discern exactly what it is that the United States really wants? An American-instigated trade war is more fraught than the Great Recession or Brexit.
“Maybe Trump has changed the agenda for trade policy forever. It was changing anyway—the Biden administration was pretty protectionist,” says Johnston. “It’s really a decade-long pivot by the U.S. away from the liberal international order that it created; we’re going to have to think about what a new order is and how we fit into it.”
