Mark Carney
Mark Joseph Carney is a Canadian politician and economist who has served as the 24th prime minister of Canada since 2025. He has also been leader of the Liberal Party and the member of Parliament for Nepean since 2025. He previously was Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.
Carney was born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University in 1987, and earned a master's degree in 1993 and a doctorate in 1995 from the University of Oxford, both in economics. He pursued a career at Goldman Sachs before joining the Bank of Canada in 2003 as a deputy governor. In 2004, he joined the Department of Finance Canada as a senior associate deputy minister. Carney served as the eighth governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013. As governor, he oversaw Canadian monetary policy during the 2008 global financial crisis. He was appointed as chair of the Financial Stability Board in 2011, serving for two terms until 2018. Following his term as Governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney served as the 120th governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. The first non-British citizen to be appointed to the role, he led the British central bank's responses to Brexit and the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Afterwards, Carney held several roles in both the private and public sectors. He served as chair of Bloomberg L.P., co-chair of the World Bank's private sector investment lab, and vice-chair at Brookfield Asset Management, a subsidiary of Brookfield Corporation. From 2020, Carney was the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. Carney was also an informal advisor to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, before returning to the private sector. In 2024, he was appointed as chair of the Liberal Party's Task Force on Economic Growth. In January 2025, after Trudeau announced his resignation amid a political crisis, Carney entered the Liberal Party leadership election, winning a landslide victory that March. After he became party leader, Carney was appointed prime minister, becoming the first prime minister in Canadian history never to have held elected office. Carney then advised the governor general to dissolve Parliament and trigger a federal election. He led the Liberals to a minority government—overturning earlier poor opinion polling to win the party's fourth consecutive mandate since 2015—and was elected for the first time to the House of Commons in the riding of Nepean.
During his tenure as prime minister, Carney removed the federal consumer carbon tax, relaxed environmental regulations, enacted the One Canadian Economy Act to reduce interprovincial trade barriers and expedite major infrastructure projects in response to the ongoing trade war with the United States, and launched the Build Canada Homes agency. Carney's government also announced a sharp increase in defence spending, formally recognized the State of Palestine, oversaw an improvement in relations with China, and has continued support for Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Carney is ideologically characterized as a centrist, technocrat, and a Blue Grit Liberal.
Early life and education
Mark Joseph Carney was born on March 16, 1965, at St. Ann's General Hospital in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. He has three siblings: an older brother and sister, Seán and Brenda, and a younger brother, Brian. When Carney was six, his family moved to Edmonton, Alberta's Laurier Heights where he was raised.He is the son of Verlie Margaret, a stay-at-home mother, and Robert J. Carney, a high school principal and Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Alberta. His father was the Liberal candidate for Edmonton South in the 1980 federal election, placing second. His mother returned to university to pursue a career in education when Carney was ten. Three of his four grandparents were Irish, from Aughagower in County Mayo.
Carney graduated in the class of 1983 from St. Francis Xavier High School, Edmonton, Alberta. From there, he went on to study at Harvard University with a partial scholarship and financial aid. During his Harvard years, he was backup goalie for the varsity ice hockey team and was a roommate of future NHL general manager Peter Chiarelli and former ice hockey player Mark Benning. He lived at Winthrop House, and graduated in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in economics magna cum laude.
After Harvard, he travelled to Europe to study at the University of Oxford. There he undertook postgraduate studies at St Peter's College and Nuffield College, where he received Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in economics in 1993 and 1995, respectively. His master's thesis was titled "Competitive advantage and the advantage of competition: a theoretical analysis of national champions, learning-by-doing and spillovers", and his doctoral thesis was titled "The dynamic advantage of competition". His doctoral advisor was Margaret Meyer. While at Oxford, he was co-captain of the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club alongside fellow Canadian David Lametti, whom he would later appoint as Permanent Representative of Canada to the UN.
In 2021, he was elected to Harvard University's Board of Overseers through to 2027. He resigned in early 2025, around the time he assumed leadership of the Liberal Party.
Financial career
Carney spent thirteen years at Goldman Sachs and worked in their Boston, London, New York City, Tokyo, and Toronto offices. His progressively more senior positions included co-head of sovereign risk, executive director for emerging debt capital markets, and managing director for investment banking. He worked on South Africa's post-apartheid venture into international bond markets, and was involved in Goldman's work with the 1998 Russian financial crisis.In 2003, Carney left Goldman Sachs to join the Bank of Canada as a deputy governor. One year later, he was recruited to the Department of Finance Canada as senior associate deputy minister, beginning on November 15, 2004.
From November 2004 to October 2007, Carney was the senior associate deputy minister and G7 deputy in the Department of Finance Canada. He served under two finance ministers: Ralph Goodale, a Liberal; and Jim Flaherty, a Conservative. During this time, Carney oversaw the Government of Canada's controversial plan to tax income trusts at source. Carney was also the lead on the federal government's profitable sale of its 19 per cent stake in Petro-Canada.
Governor of the Bank of Canada (2008–2013)
In October 2007, Carney was appointed Governor of the Bank of Canada. He immediately left his position at the Department of Finance to become an advisor to the outgoing governor, David Dodge, before formally assuming Dodge's position on February 1, 2008. Carney was selected over Paul Jenkins, the senior deputy governor, who had been considered the front-runner to succeed Dodge.Carney took on this role at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis. At the time of his appointment, Carney was the youngest central bank governor among the G8 and G20 nations.
2008 financial crisis
Carney's actions as Governor of the Bank of Canada are said to have played a major role in helping Canada avoid the worst impacts of the 2008 financial crisis.File:G7 Finance ministers.jpg|thumb|Carney, then governor of the Bank of Canada, stands in the back row with other central bank governors during the 2008 G7 finance ministerial summit.
The epoch-making feature of Carney's tenure as governor remains the decision to cut the overnight rate by 50 basis points in March 2008, one month after his appointment. While the European Central Bank delivered a rate increase in July 2008, Carney anticipated the leveraged-loan crisis would trigger global financial contagion. When policy rates in Canada hit the effective lower bound, the central bank combated the crisis with the non-standard monetary tool "conditional commitment" in April 2009 to hold the policy rate for at least one year, in a boost to domestic credit conditions and market confidence. Output and employment began to recover from mid-2009, in part thanks to monetary stimulus. The Canadian economy outperformed those of its G7 peers during the crisis, and Canada was the first G7 nation to have both its Gross Domestic Product and employment recover to pre-crisis levels.
The Bank of Canada's decision to provide substantial additional liquidity to the Canadian financial system, and its unusual step of announcing a commitment to keep interest rates at their lowest possible level for one year, appear to have been significant contributors to Canada's weathering of the crisis.
File:Mark Carney - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2012.jpg|thumb|Carney, then the governor of the Bank of Canada, speaks at the 2012 World Economic Forum's "Beyond Basel: Financial Institution Regulation" panel".
The commitment to ultra-low lending rates led to a spike in housing prices and household debt. In April 2012, Carney acknowledged there were "issues in some segments of the housing market" and some properties in Canada were "probably overvalued" but he was not overly concerned. He stated low-interest rates were not to blame but the onus was on individuals who take out the loans, the banks, and the federal government's mortgage lending rules. Before Carney left for the Bank of England, there were calls to raise rates as Canadians were holding record-level debt and the housing market was overheated.
Canada's risk-averse fiscal and regulatory environment is also cited as a factor. In 2009 a Newsweek columnist wrote, "Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize."
Carney earned various accolades for his leadership during the 2008 financial crisis: he was named one of Financial Timess "Fifty who will frame the way forward" and of Time Magazines 2010 Time 100. In May 2011, Reader's Digest named him "Editor's Choice for Most Trusted Canadian". In October 2012, Carney was named "Central Bank Governor of the Year 2012" by the editors of Euromoney magazine.