Depth, discipline and determination are what make Mark Carney what he is - will he be elected as Prime Minister?

By Pepper Parr

April 25^th, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

If you thought Mark Carney became very interested in becoming the Prime Minister when it was evident that Justin Trudeau was in his way out the door – you have not be keeping up on the man and what he has been up to.

Carney was talking to associates about becoming Prime Minister when he was being considered as the Governor of the Bank of England. At the time he was concerned that being the Governor of the British bank might not look all that good to Canadian electors.

Those who talk openly about Carney will say: “You probably couldn’t sit down and design a person who has a better set of tools to deal with economic anxiety,’ Liberal powerbroker Frank McKenna says of party leader Mark Carney.

Hurricane Trump is an untamable force, but sensing where the wind is blowing and planning meticulously is the way Mr. Carney functions.

Mr. Carney is so strategic in his approach to the world that for years he’s been a dedicated runner and careful eater, in part because he believes he needs to be in good physical shape to work at a certain level, with long hours and punishing travel. He has to be truly wrung out to abandon that and lay into some French fries or a bag of Doritos.

Hurricane Trump is an untamable force, but sensing where the wind is blowing and planning meticulously is the way Mr. Carney functions.

“If this were an ordinary election with ordinary issues, he would never be able to distinguish himself,” Liberal powerbroker Frank McKenna says. “But this is not an ordinary election. There really is one issue and one issue only, and it’s around economic anxiety.

Pretty much everyone who’s crossed paths with him comes away impressed by his intelligence, which has a distinct sifting quality: distilling, making connections, putting things in order.

He’s often charming and very funny.  He can also be impatient, caustic or condescending when he feels like someone isn’t keeping up their end of the bargain; the phrase “doesn’t suffer fools” comes up a lot. When he was governor of the Bank of England, the Financial Times reported that staff called encountering this side of him “getting tasered.”

Some people see this as a function of how he absorbs information: asking question after question to peel an idea down to its foundations and figure out how it fits with what else he knows. It can read as a dominance move, leaving the person he’s questioning to feel like they’ve been stripped for parts, too.

And virtually everyone makes the same point about his career path: He gave up boatloads of cash when he left investment banking for the public sector.

It’s influence rather than money that drives him. Not power for power’s sake, but a seat at a table where he can make big calls that matter, because he believes he’s equipped to do so. Public policy offers that like nothing else can.

Carney absorbs information: asking question after question to peel an idea down to its foundations and figure out how it fits with what else he knows.

Mark Carney is one of four children: Mark, the third child, Brian, Brenda and Sean

Two to the boys went to Harvard, one to Notre Dame. Brenda went to the University of Alberta and then on to Vancouver where she earned a Masters degree in education.

The parents were educators, They saw education as a gift that opens doors.

At the age of 14 Mark wrote a Letter to the Editor of the local newspaper saying “While your paper does have the right of freedom of the press your personal views should be kept on the editorial pages.”  In another letter. “Although your position may be the more popular one, that does not excuse your lack of responsible journalism.”

When Mr. Carney started at Harvard, he and Peter Chiarelli, another freshman from Ottawa, were assigned rooms on the same corridor. They had hockey, their home country and their middle-class upbringings in common, so they became fast friends.

Chiarelli, now an NHL executive with the St. Louis Blues, is a close friend who calls Carney cheap.

“His study notes were three different levels above everyone else’s study notes,” Mr. Chiarelli says. “It wasn’t a summary, it was substantive questions about what he was learning. So it was almost like he was answering the exam in his study notes.”

Chiarella describes Carney as disciplined and compartmentalized, a system for everything, and a bone-dry wit that snuck up on you.

After  graduating from Harvard with an economics degree in 1988, Carney got a job with Goldman Sachs. He worked for the investment firm in London and Tokyo as an analyst in the credit risk department.

In 1991, he left for the University of Oxford to get his master’s and PhD, figuring that would be useful for the public policy career he eventually wanted.

Mark Carney and his wife Diana Fox: She was a better hockey player than he was.

He was co-captain of the Oxford Blues hockey team. Diana Fox, a player on the women’s team, caught his attention when she scored a hat trick over Cambridge. He and the British-born economist married in 1994, and would go on to have four children.

Margaret Meyer, official fellow in economics at Oxford’s Nuffield College, supervised Mr. Carney’s doctoral thesis, which examined how domestic competition might improve the national competitiveness of companies.

His was the longest thesis she ever supervised, and also one of the most quickly completed.

After Oxford, Goldman offered Mr. Carney a job in London, and he stayed at the investment bank for the next decade.

He returned to Canada to work at the Bank of Canada and was loaned to the Finance department to work on the G8 conference.  He stayed at Finance until the spring of 2007, when Mr. Dodge the then Governor of the Bank of Canada, announced that he wouldn’t accept a second term as governor.  Carney returned to the bank, then took over as Governor in early 2008.

In the fall of 2008, when the bottom fell out with the financial crisis, Carney’s arrival at the bank looked prescient. He had a wide network of financial market contacts, and they viewed him as someone who spoke their language when “the world was falling apart pretty fast,” as Dodge put it.

Carney uses the phrase: “Plan beats no plan.”

This means both that someone needs to take charge, and that picking a plan and running with it is better than dithering forever in search of the perfect plan while the crisis overtakes you. It’s something Mr. Carney learned at Goldman.

“At some point you have to make a decision – you’re never going to have perfect information,” he told The Globe and Mail when he was governor of the Bank of Canada. “People will make mistakes – that’s natural. The issue is not that things turn out wrong. The issue is you’ve made the effort and done the right preparation before you make the call.”

That has been the approach Mark Carney has taken to winning the current federal election.

His French language skills needed a lot of polishing.  He polished.

He learned how to politick on the job.

He had little in the way of politicking skills – he got out on the stump and politicked.

The way he did his job while at Brookfield Assets has been a concern to many.  The job was to get the best deal he could for the shareholders, and he did that quite well.

The Prime Minister chooses the members of his Cabinet – they serve at his pleasure.  He will be a tough task master.

He will make mistakes, but based on what we have seen this man do so far in his career, he will serve the public well if he is elected.

Much of the content in this article was picked up from the Globe and Mail.