Who is Mark Carney, Canada's new unelected prime minister? transcript

Hello friends my name is JJ and there sure is a lot of Canada related news these days eh but today I thought we would just focus on the fact that prime minister Trudeau's long goodbye is finally over more or less Canada now has a new prime minister Mark Joseph Carney well he hasn't been formally inaugurated yet but he was just elected head of Trudeau's Liberal Party which means he will be sworn in to finish the remainder of Trudeau's term sometime within the next few days he will then run to be elected to a term of his own in a national election expected to be held a few months after that so how did we get here and who is this guy and what's going to happen next well let me do my best to can Spain so as we have discussed in many other videos prime minister Trudeau was elected to three terms and wanted to run for a fourth trouble was Trudeau had grown quite unpopular and all the numbers suggested that if he did run again he would lead his party to an precedented Landslide defeat internal pressure from within his party for him to step down accordingly grew and near the end of last year it even started to be expressed openly which is a very unusual thing to happen in the highly disciplined world of Canadian Party politics and in the end the pressure finally got to him and on January 6 2025 Trudeau formally announced that he would resign explicitly citing tension within his party as the reason this country deserves a real choice in the next election and it has become clear to me that if I'm having to fight internal battles I cannot be the best option in that election Trudeau's Liberal Party then immediately began the process of holding an internal election to pick a new person to serve as both their candidate for prime minister in the 2025 election and incumbent prime minister to complete the rest of Trudeau's term this is a controversial tradition in Canadian politics this business that when a prime minister's party looks to be in danger of losing an election they install someone new to be prime minister and get that person to run for reelection as the incumbent in his place this then produces awkward periods in which the country is being run by prime minister that nobody voted for and is mostly using the powers of the Prime ministership to make himself and his party more popular in the leadup to the next election in other parliamentary democracies it is considered fine for there to be a brief period of time during an election where the head of the incumbent party and the Prime Minister are two different people but in Canada incumbent parties always want to control the Prime Minister ship but all times even if that results in some weird and short prime minister ships that barely last longer than an election campaign so the liberal party's election to pick Trudeau's replacement was fairly rushed and not particularly competitive the Press had long been speculating that a lot of Trudeau's cabinet ministers had prime ministerial Ambitions but after he resigned none of them wound up entering the contest to replace him instead it mostly wound up being a two-person race between Mark Carney and Christia Freeland neither of whom were current members of the Trudeau administration at all which was probably a good thing for the party because it guaranteed that whoever became the new prime minister would have some degree of distance from Trudeau himself which was obviously useful given Mark Carney was treated as the early front runner and was given mostly favorable press that grew increasingly Brazen and cocky and declaring just How likely he was to win the head of the conservative party Pierre POV even started making attack ads against him long before the voting had even started so yeah the conventional wisdom in his favor was pretty confident and I guess it wound up being right in the end but it was still pretty striking just given how little hard polling data there was voting for the new PM was only open to registered members of the liberal party and a morphis group of a couple 100,000 Canadians that's constantly changing ing in size making it quite difficult to identify let alone poll in the leadup to the election the party confirmed that nearly 400,000 registered liberals have signed up to vote but in the end only 150,000 people actually participated for a turnout rate of 37% of which Carney won an incredible 86% I mean there had been some polls and Carney had been bleeding in them but their reliability was considered low actually felt a bit nervous even making this video which as you can probably tell I had to film a few days before the results were even known I mean at this point we've all seen plenty of Elections where the supposed safe bet wasn't but yes Carney did win so let's talk about him Mark Carney is an interesting figure because I feel like he has always been vastly better known to like Canadian journalists and pundits and people who follow Canadian politics very very closely as opposed to the general public there was a poll taken back in July in which only 7% of the country knew who he was by the time of Trudeau's resignation in January when gossip abot Carney's Prime ministerial Ambitions had been filling the papers for months that number had skyrocketed to a mighty 24% and perhaps this is understandable given that Carney has never been an elected politician or even a guy most Canadians would have ever seen on TV he has spent most of his life as an investment banker and financial bureaucrat educated at Harvard and Oxford Carney spent over a decade working at the famous International Global Financial firm Goldman Sachs in Toronto New York London and Tokyo in 2008 Canada's then conservative Prime Minister Steven Harper appointed him to be head of the Bank of Canada Canada's Central Bank Carney's tenure in the job was most notable for overlap in with the Great Recession a global economic crisis that Canada weathered relatively well presumably at least in some part due to sane monetary policy from the central bank prime minister Harper at the time was certainly eager to give Carney some credit for that although partisanship being what it is he has since said that Carney's role was overrated in any case it was in the context of the Great Recession and Canada's comparatively high functioning economy that you first began to read stories that Carney was thinking of maybe making a transition into elected politics there is some dispute as to whether or not he was seriously considering joining the conservative party at this point but it does seem that prime minister Harper was openly courting him but Carney ultimately did not go into politics and instead he went into England in 2013 after his term at the Bank of Canada ended Carney made a dramatic and controversial decision to leave Canada altogether and move to Great Britain and work for the British government as head of the bank of England the idea of a senior Canadian government official swapping his National loyalties this casually was pretty shocking and Carney got some bad press for it at the time because it seemed to signal that he was a man ultimately Guided by his own ambition rather than loyalty to his birth country like most Canadians I don't really know much about what Carney got up to in England I feel like it hasn't really been treated as something that's that relevant to his Canadian political career I understand that he had a sort of tense relationship with the Tory government over there because of his skepticism toward brexit and his outspokenness in demanding climate change be factored into Economic Policy noted five minute prime minister Liz truss has certainly been going around telling everybody in Canada that he was really terrible I know that much but anyway after his seven-year tenure at the bank of England ended Carney began working part-time at the UN on climate stuff as well as part-time at a big Canadian investment firm and part-time during Consulting work for the British and Canadian governments it's quite unclear to me exactly where he was living during this period given how much he was bouncing R between Canada the US and Britain he's expressed some self-consciousness about this recently that he's aware that he's sort of a quintessential example of an elitist globalist but that's not necessarily a bad thing I'm connected I I can deliver for the country and my weaknesses you know people will charge me as being elitist or you know globalist to use that term which is um well that's exactly you know it happens to be exactly what we uh what we need despite omnipresent rumors that Carney was planning an entry into Canadian politics any day now with him being out of Canada so much after 2013 I actually feel like his profile in this country was relatively low over the last dozen years or so unless of course you were somebody who followed Canadian political news like super closely I mean at some point Point you're judged for what you're actually doing not what you might do someday right and this is relevant because when Trudeau was first starting to look a little bit shaky the leading candidate to replace him was someone much more high-profile Christia Freeland was easily the most famous cabinet minister of the Justin Trudeau era she was one of the few people who had been in his cabinet since day one and held four very important jobs in succession trade Minister then foreign minister then Finance Minister during which she was also Deputy Prime Minister Deputy Prime Minister is kind of a nothing job but it can carry a lot of symbolic importance in that it shows that the Prime Minister trusts you enough to take over in a time of Crisis throughout the course of all of the big things that Trudeau did during his three terms in office Freeland was always there quite literally right by his side whether it was renegotiating NAFTA with Trump invoking emergency powers to end the truckers protest standing in solidarity with Ukraine or controlling Parliament to pass another backbreaking budget there was Christia as some Wags had dubbed her she truly seemed to be Trudeau's minister of everything and it is for that reason that it came as quite a dramatic shock to the Canadian political world when Freeland resigned from Trudeau's cabinet in rather angry Fashion on December 16th 2024 in a sharply Written Letter she said that she had lost faith in Trudeau's capacity to run the economy in a sane and pragmatic way at a time when the freshly reelected Trump Administration was promising to wage brutal economic war on this country in the form of devastating across theboard terrorists but this was also her attempt to get in front of the story and Define it on her own terms because it quickly came out that Trudeau had been planning to fire her anyway and replace her with dun dunon Mark Carney in subsequent interviews Freeland began to adopt a rather snarky tone with talking about the Prime Minister implying she felt very personally betrayed after standing loyal to him for so long how would you tackle that differently than what the experience you've had was well probably I wouldn't tell my finance minister I was going to fire her the day after she delivered the fall economic statement I probably wouldn't say that 3 days before she was supposed to deliver it in any case it was precisely because she had been a trusted Trudeau aid for so long that her resignation was framed by the press as basically representing the moment in which Trudeau's hold on the Prime Minister ship had become unsustainable and he wound up resigning less than a month later so you can probably get a sense of how the Dynamics of the race to replace Trudeau played out in theory both Carney and Freeland were Outsiders to the trau administration but in practice Carney was the continuity candidate because he was clearly in Trudeau's good graces while Freeland had become a Critic which was ironic because Freeland had of course served in Trudeau's government for 9 years while Carney haded served for zero but that's politics baby the fact that Carney has won the Prime ministership in turn suggests that there is still a lot of residual loyalty to Trudeau in the Liberal Party despite his unpopularity and presumably more liberals bought into the narrative that freand had betrayed Trudeau rather than the other way runed now In fairness to Carney it should be noted that he has put some effort into putting some space between himself and the soon to be former prime minister as well in a debate with Freeland the day for instance it was interesting to hear Carney offer some relatively pointed criticisms of the Trudeau economic record which actually mirrored some of the things that Trudeau's more conservative critics have been saying namely that what little economic growth Canada had experienced over the last few years hardly reflected anything good about the fundamentals of the Canadian economy I want to be clear about the quote strength of our economy our economy over the last 5 years has been driven by a big increase in the labor force which was largely because of a surge in Immigration is now trying to be controlled and by government spending that grew over 9% year after year after year twice the rate of growth of our economy okay so our economy was weak before we got to the point of these threats from president Trump so what is Carney promising to do differently well the idea he seems most proud of is his proposal for the government to start budgeting more like a business with cleaner delineations between program spending in which revenues and expenditures must always be balanced and long-term Investments on things like Grand infrastructure projects where it's okay to operate on a loss and again you can see this as a kind of explicit rejection of Trudeau's Legacy of constant and Unapologetic deficit spending on the pretense that balance budgets are a luxury or even slightly cruel but in any case Carney probably won't have much time to do any serious Prime ministerial type things before having to face voters in a national election which is expected sometime this spring so in that sense let us just size him up as a marketable political product with pros and cons I feel like most Canadian political pundits would say that carne's four biggest assets are number one he's not Trudeau but still a liberal a lot of Canadians really like voting for the Liberals as their default party and only really sour on it when the guy in charge is super unpopular you have to go all the way back to 1984 to find a incumbent liberal prime minister who couldn't win election at least once number two he seems willing to come up with new ideas and criticize the Trudeau record rather than just playing defense for the last N9 years and this when coupled with his Outsider status can make him plausibly seem like a bit of a change candidate in what the journalists are calling a change election number three he gives off the vibe of being a very accomplished professional guy who knows how to competently run a big complicated organization like a national government despite having no political experience you could easily argue that Carney is one of the most qualified prime ministers in Canadian history just because he has so much experience running large complex institutions our last two prime ministers by contrast hadn't ever run much of anything and number four he is a relatively good communicator throughout his long career as a globalist elitist he has often gone on podcasts and things and generally displays a pretty good skill at talking to complicated issues in a clear and straightforward way we saw some of this when he soft launched his campaign on the John Stewart show which was honestly the first time a lot of Canadians had ever seen him and it got mostly positive reviews the world's more divided it's more dangerous what are we going to do all right and now for my conservative viewers let us discuss the conventional wisdom on Carney's four biggest flaws number one he has a long record of having advised and counseled the Trudeau Administration in various ways behind the scenes so he can't claim to really be as independent from the Trudeau record as he might like in between all of the other things that he's been doing since leaving the bank of England it has been widely reported that Carney has repeatedly found the time to advise prime minister Trudeau on various aspects of Economic Policy whether or not this proves that Carney was the architect of Trudeau's policies as the conservatives like to claim given that the economic record of the last nine years is not terribly popular this is an obvious liability number two his professional guy Vibe might not be what people want and instead make him seem snobby and the Western world is supposedly in a populist age of politics at the moment in which the most successful politicians are the ones who are the most unvarnished and authentic a rich Central Banker who has spent so much time living and working outside of the country is a marked contrast to the conservative leader Pierre POV who has made a name for himself demagoguing against these sorts of self-important know-it-all Big Shots you're at home that is the kind of hpy number three it is easy to accuse him of having a lot of conflicts of interest and divided loyalties given his business career and the amount of time that he has spent in other countries among other things it has been revealed that during his years working in High Finance he often supported investing in projects on behalf of his clients that either contradicted his Progressive beliefs or acted against the best interests of Canada this strikes me as something something that could be a particular liability with the left given that he really wants to be seen as Mr climate change but also has a history of making investments in coal and fossil fuels and number four he apparently does not speak French very well I mean he speaks it fluently enough to debate Politics on live TV but alas in Canada that is not quite good enough at least when it comes to our old Pals in Quebec a lot of Voters tend to put a high premium on being culturally French Canadian in some way the Liberal Party relies very heavily on Quebec voters to win and historically the Liberals tend to perform worse in Quebec when they run a non-french Canadian candidate Carney is from an Irish Catholic Family who was born in the Northwest Territories of all places nothing I'm aware of in his biography suggests any meaningful connections with Quebec and he speaks a sort of stiff Canadian bureaucrat French that I assume represents the minimum he has to possess to qualify to work as a senior figure in the Federal Government Can respons [Music] minad strategy all of this won't necessarily work to the advantage of noted French Canadian Pierre holv however as Quebec voters tend to be pretty reliably anti-conservative as well the bigger fear would probably just be that Carney would drive a lot of Quebec voters to support support the Nationalist block Quebec W party and deny the Liberals victory that way all right so in conclusion at the moment the Canadian liberals seem to be cautiously optimistic about Carney for the next election polls have shown a big increase in support for the party since Trudeau announced his departure which does suggest that Trudeau was much more of a Rocko the neck of the party than was previously realized Donald Trump's tariffs and threats of annexation similarly play into one of the liberal party's great strengths which is appealing to a progressive sense of anti-American Canadian identity and patriotism it's actually kind of unclear as to whether or not Trudeau leaving or Trump's belligerence was the more consequential variable but in any case the net effect seems to be stronger support for the incumbent party there is a palatable sense of concern among Canadian conservatives in response as they begin to worry that all of their assumptions about what this election was going to be like have now been thrown out the window by the politicians arch nemesis events but we'll talk more about all of that in some future video Once the 2025 Canadian election campaign formally kicks off whenever that will be for now let us all just enjoy this brief moment in which Mark Carney feels like a relatively fresh and interesting character with a hazy and illd defined political identity and most of our minds because if there is one thing I know about politics it's that sort of thing never lasts long do you know much about Mark Carney putting your own political views aside do you think the Liberals should be optimistic about him let me know in the comments and I will see you next [Music] week hello friend