The counting has not finished, but the election certainly has. The Liberal Party of Canada, under the new leadership of Mark Carney, is set to form the next government, either with a majority of seats (172 out of 343), or at the head of the coalition.
The question now is, quite simply: How did this happen? Indeed, the outcome was a surprise for just about everyone, but three factors combined to turn things around. When former Liberal leader and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigned on January 6th, the gap in the polls seemed insurmountable: the Liberals were averaging 20% while their main challengers, the Conservative Party of Canada under Pierre Poilievre, were more than double, polling at 44%.
That was the first factor. Trudeau’s popularity was at an all-time low, and the Liberals’ prospects improved almost overnight, the gap narrowing to 40% for the Conservatives and 32% for the Liberals by the middle of March. It was then that the second factor played its part: the choice of a new party leader (and Prime Minister), Mark Carney, who immediately called a snap election.
After that, the polls narrowed further, all in the context of the third factor: President Donald Trump’s insistence that Canada should become the 51st state. Alongside his suggestion that the United States could acquire Greenland, the proposal—seen by many as a “threat”—alienated many voters from the party perceived as closest to Trump—Poilievre’s Conservatives. This cannot be overstated: amongst over-60s, “Dealing with Donald Trump” was the most important factor in deciding how to vote—and half of older voters intended to support Carney’s Liberals. The significance of Trump’s remarks cannot be ignored.
Will Carney be a continuity candidate, carrying on Trudeau’s policies, as the Conservatives claimed? Or will he be a cautious change of pace, being a “very different person” from Trudeau, and even—according to Poilievre—plagiarizing policies from the Conservatives’ platform?
It is, naturally, hard to say. Before the election, Carney had never held an elected office, so his trajectory as a politician is difficult to predict. But that is the point: Carney is not a politician. What we can assess is his past, especially in Britain, where he was Governor of the Bank of England for seven years, being the first foreign-born person in that role—following his five-and-a-half years as governor of Canada’s central bank.
During his time in the UK, Carney was always considered just a little out of step with the British labor market. In 2013, The Guardian described him as “the outsider,” who had “misread the flexibility” of our market by failing to predict how rapidly unemployment would fall. Carney insisted that interest rates should remain as low as possible, with only a “rapid fall” in unemployment resulting in their rise. That fall came: over the course of his governorship, British unemployment fell from 7.8% in 2013 to 4.8% in 2016, the lowest since 2005. Nevertheless, Britain’s interest rates flatlined at less than 1% during his tenure.
Carney’s time as governor is marked by an extension in operational independence that began nearly twenty years before, taking the bank increasingly out of step with the electorate. In response to criticism from then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, in 2015, Carney argued back that “the Chancellor’s influence over the bank would only occur in extreme circumstances.”
The great challenge—and change—to Carney’s attitude came in the lead-up to and aftermath of Brexit. Despite insisting that politicians, even and especially the Chancellor of the Exchequer, should stay clear of the Bank of England’s business, Carney was seen as abandoning this neutral stance in opposition to leaving the European Union, being accused by leading politicians at the time as being part of “Project Fear” for supporting the remain side. Moreover, he insisted on his attitude even after the vote was passed, arguing for an interest rate decrease in the vote’s wake.
This mix of defending operational independence at the Bank’s end and interference in political matters when it suited him is symbolic of Carney’s whole approach to governance: technocracy. So much so that Jacobin described Carney as a “Technocrat Extraordinaire,” while Sol White called him “a Technocrat in the Populist Age” and Jillian Kestler-D’Amours described him as a “technocrat on steroids.”
But is that what Canada needs? Part of the draw for then-Chancellor George Osborne in appointing Carney was his credentials and experience, which are certainly necessary for a position like Governor of the Bank of England, but the decidedly internationalist nature of his credentials meant that Carney was always a little aloof from the people his approach affected. Is this not true for Canada now? Apparently, “he spent much of the Liberal leadership campaign introducing himself to Canadians.”
Moreover, Carney’s time in Britain was in a radically different political environment, one that diverges both from Britain now, and from Canada since the early 2010s. As Yuan Yi Zhu pointed out, Canada faces: a stagnant economy with only 1.4% growth over the decade leading up to 2024; rocketing immigration that is compounding a housing crisis hitting the young the hardest; and, as pointed out by energy executives last month, an approaching energy crisis.
A technocrat has his place, for sure, but will Carney’s technocratic impulse override his political sensibilities? Given the lack of evidence for the latter, it would certainly suggest so.
