Will Canadians Warm Up to Mark Carney, the Liberal Party Front-Runner Eyeing Trudeau’s Job?
Mark Carney has pitched himself as the fix-it man who can set Canada back on track. As he seeks to lead the Liberal Party, the country’s biggest challenge may be President Trump.
This article was originally published before the Liberal Party announced the results of its election.
It was the summer of 2007. Deep inside Canada’s finance ministry, high-ranking officials were staring down the barrel of a global financial meltdown.
They weren’t sure exactly when, or how, the market would crash, but as Mark Carney tells it, “We knew that the thing was going to fall apart.”
It was a turning point for Mr. Carney, then a senior public servant, and began the next chapter of his career managing economic crises as the governor of national banks in Canada and Britain.
It was also a transformative moment in Mr. Carney’s political evolution: He saw the financial crisis as the catalyst for a yearslong and steep decline in public trust of Western institutions.
“People were betrayed by the system,” Mr. Carney, 59, said at a meeting of a research group in Ottawa, the Canadian capital, in November. “How do you rebuild that trust?”