Mark Carney, the former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor, won the Liberal leadership race by a landslide on Sunday.
Carney received 131,674 votes (86.84 per cent) and 29,456.91 points (85.9 per cent) of the total turnout of 151,899 registered Liberal party members. Chrystia Freeland, the former Liberal deputy prime minister and finance minister, was well behind in second place with 11,134 votes (7.34 per cent) and 2,728.57 points (8 per cent).
That Carney, a longtime economist, became Liberal leader and prime minister-designate wasn’t surprising. He had led the polls since late January.
What was surprising was the sheer scale of his victory. Leger, the most reliable polling firm during this leadership race, had Carney ahead of Freeland by 68 to 14 per cent on Feb. 10. That’s a massive lead, but still smaller than the 77.9 per cent gap recorded on Mar. 9.
This means Freeland lost nearly half her supporters in the final month of the leadership race. They abandoned her at the end to help coronate Carney.
Another significant takeaway: of the “nearly 400,000 Registered Liberals” the party about in a Jan. 30 press release, only about 38 per cent actually voted. While it’s rare for every registered member of a party to cast a ballot in a leadership race, that’s still a weak turnout.
Why was participation so low? Some Liberals may have been unimpressed with the leadership candidates. The of former Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla on Feb. 21 could have played a role, though the extent of her support was never clear. There were also reports of registered Liberals expressing that they couldn’t vote due to issues with the party’s online system. Carney’s commanding lead likely discouraged some members from bothering—when the outcome is a foregone conclusion, why participate?
Whatever the reason, Carney now has the job and will soon be prime minister.
Alas, the Liberals have handed power to someone with no political experience. Carney has never held or even run for elected office. (His father, Bob, ran as a Liberal in Edmonton-South in the 1980 federal election but finished a distant second to Progressive Conservative candidate Douglas Roche.) When he takes office, Carney will become the first Canadian Prime Minister never to have held elected office.
That doesn’t seem to bother most Liberal cabinet ministers, MPs, and party supporters. They point to his experience leading two central banks. His role as chair of Brookfield Asset Management (now Corporation), the Financial Stability Board, and Bloomberg L.P.’s board of directors. His position as United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance. The fact that he the Liberal Party Leader’s Task Force on Economic Growth.
While no one questions these credentials, they have little to do with governing.
Transferring one skill set to another is rarely seamless. It can be done, but the failure rate is high. A few economists have succeeded in politics—Argentina’s Javier Milei, for instance—but they had at least some political experience before assuming office. Carney has none.
Politics is a different beast. Even the most inexperienced politicians have had something under their belts—whether it was Trump’s business empire, Obama’s time in the Senate, or, believe it or not, Trudeau’s brief teaching career and family name.
What about policies?
Carney has long left-leaning environmental policies, including net zero climate solutions, wealth redistribution, and a “sustainable world economy.” He even that the radical 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests were “entirely constructive”—despite being a member of the top-earning one per cent the movement was protesting against.
During the leadership race, Carney suggested he would scrap Trudeau’s crippling carbon tax. In its place, he would “a system of incentives to reward Canadians for making greener choices.” As devastating as the carbon tax has been, it remains to be seen how much this new initiative will cost taxpayers in the end.
His fiscal policy includes running deficits “to invest and grow” the Canadian economy. He wants to penalize “high-polluting foreign imports.” He’s pledged to meet the NATO two per cent defence spending target by 2030—something Trudeau refused to commit to. He plans to eliminate Trudeau’s capital gains tax increase and cut taxes for the middle class. He promises to double housing construction over a decade. He also supports retaliatory tariffs against the U.S.
It’s a mixed bag. Different in some respects to Trudeau’s agenda, but essentially the same when it comes to left-wing policies related to high taxes, massive amounts of public spending, wealth inequality and environmentalism.
The politically inexperienced Carney doesn’t seem up to the task of leading this country. Whether Canadians share the Liberal Party’s confidence in him remains to be seen.
Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.
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