Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney leaves after speaking to reporters at the Liberal caucus retreat in Nanaimo, B.C., on Sept. 10.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Timing is everything in politics, and it has never seemed to be Mark Carney’s friend.
In 2012, as the former Bank of Canada governor won international plaudits in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the then-46-year-old was already being touted as the next leader of the federal Liberal Party – the person who would return the flailing Grits to glory.
Those plans fell through when Justin Trudeau threw his hat into the Liberal leadership race. Mr. Carney assessed his odds of winning a leadership contest against Liberal royalty and promptly left for London to become governor of the Bank of England. It was a better gig than being leader of the third party in Canada’s House of Commons, but it distanced him from his eventual goal of becoming prime minister.
Mr. Carney could have become Mr. Trudeau’s finance minister, and heir apparent as leader, when he returned to Canada in 2020 and Bill Morneau quit the government. But he opted instead for a big job at Brookfield Asset Management and sideline work as a global climate-finance guru. Who could blame him? At Finance, Mr. Morneau’s hands were tied by an ever-meddling Prime Minister’s Office obsessed with quick-hit communications wins. Mr. Carney had better things to do with his time and talents.
Mr. Carney, a serious economic thinker who had been developing a long list of policy prescriptions for green growth, would likely have ended up as frustrated as Mr. Morneau became with the Trudeau government’s overemphasis on income redistribution and underemphasis on wealth creation. Better for him to remain on the sidelines until there was an opening at the top.
Alas, as Mr. Trudeau has continued to show no inclination toward stepping down, Mr. Carney has been left with the Hobson’s choice of putting up or shutting up. If he wants to become prime minister, he can hardly decline Mr. Trudeau’s invitations to take a more active role in Liberal politics when the party is down. His future leadership rivals would use it against him if he did.
“I have been talking with Mark Carney for years now about getting him to join federal politics,” Mr. Trudeau said in July after The Globe and Mail reported that the Prime Minister had sought to replace Chrystia Freeland as Finance Minister. “He would be an outstanding addition at a time when Canadians need good people to step up in politics.”
Mr. Carney finally took a tentative step in that direction this week, agreeing to chair a task force on economic growth whose “recommendations will be shared in a report with the Leader and Liberal Party’s Platform Committee as the party prepares for the next election.” This, as alarm bells ring out about Canada’s chronic economic underperformance under the Trudeau Liberals.
From Mr. Trudeau’s standpoint, the move neutralizes Mr. Carney as a critic of his government’s economic policy and, at least nominally, makes him an architect of it. As such, it publicly ties Mr. Carney to an unpopular government, if not a sinking ship, without giving him any decision-making authority.
Asked whether his decision to take on this advisory position was a prelude to running for the Liberals in the next election, Mr. Carney claimed he was “interested in doing something, not being something.” But, in politics, you usually need to be something to do something. Unelected advisers can sometimes wield influence. But it is the leader and prime minister who always decides in the end. Mr. Carney knows that.
It must be supremely frustrating for “one of the country’s most impressive economic minds,” as the Toronto Star called him this week, to watch the current government lurch from one economic-policy failure to another when the right course to follow seems so obvious to him. After all, he wrote a 600-page book on it in 2021.
The clock is ticking, however, on Mr. Carney’s ambitions. Even if Mr. Trudeau were to step down in the coming months, the Liberals appear destined for a stint in opposition after the next election, the length of which will depend on how quickly Canadians sour on a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre. Four years? Eight years? Either way, it might be too long for Mr. Carney.
Politics is a tough game to master at any age. But Mr. Carney, who will turn 60 in March, is late to the game by any measure. In an earlier time, the graduate of Harvard and Oxford might have made for a prime minister plucked out of central casting. But the Canadian scene is now dominated by much younger career politicians who are at ease in the social-media universe in which political agendas are made – and unmade.
“We need solutions, not slogans,” Mr. Carney insisted in his debut press scrum as chair of Mr. Trudeau’s economic task force. Except that “solutions, not slogans” is also a slogan. And sadly, it is no match for “Axe the Tax.”