pc28����

U.S. President Donald Trump’s potentially devastating tariffs and 51st state threats persuaded the trim, tailored, former central banker to run for public office, he says.

“No crisis, no Mark Carney in this election campaign,” he told a group of Radio-Canada interviewers.

Carney articulates the no crisis-no Carney proposition most clearly in French where his still-wobbly language skills force him to distil his thoughts when asked about his motivation to enter politics. He’s said it on a couple of occasions in a modest tone, but you might mistake it for a polite and somewhat earnest Canadian equivalent of U.S. political strategist James Carville’s succinct “it’s the economy, stupid.” You haven’t heard him say it quite that way in English, and you didn’t hear him say it in the formal debates.

It has a tinge of arrogance, as if telling Canadians they are lucky to have him. Arrogance, said a longtime Liberal strategist, “is the Liberals’ kryptonite,” and Carney knows it.

So, when Radio-Canada news anchor Sébastian Bovet asked which is the real Mark Carney — the elite globalist who’ll side with corporate interests like those of investment giant Brookfield, the firm he left in January, or with ordinary Canadians in the face of Trump’s threats — Carney quickly elaborated on what drives him.

“I am at heart a public servant,” he said. Canada gave him “everything” and he wants to give back.

So, here he is. On the campaign trail. On French television where he mangles answers he might otherwise ace in English. On podcasts and YouTuber Nardwuar’s channel. And on rally stages, facing moments that demand instant and tone-perfect responses to shouted demands for action on the “genocide in Gaza” — a loaded legal term the Trudeau government has not used — or to that lusty call from a female Liberal supporter who hollered: “Lead us, big Daddy.” 

Momentarily taken aback, Carney blushed, grinned, and quipped that some Canadians are more passionate than others. (A parody soon followed.)

The stakes for the rookie Carney, for the Liberals fighting for a fourth term in power, and for the country in the face of Trump’s predatory eyes on Canada’s resources and sovereignty, couldn’t be higher. That much even Carney’s rivals agree.

It’s a crash course in retail politics.

Carney has been running since January, first in a hasty Liberal leadership race to replace Justin Trudeau, and now on the federal election hustings, stumping for votes when he’s not on Parliament Hill rolling out counter-tariffs, marshalling arguments for looming trade talks Carney says he persuaded Trump to start in May.

Those consequential talks will be led by whoever becomes Canadian prime minister. 

So, the education of Mark Carney is ours, as well.                                    

At 60, he is learning how to be a politician. We are learning what kind of prime minister he might be.

What have we gleaned? Quite a bit, it turns out.

Let’s start with the messy art of campaigning.

Carney often says, “I am not a politician.” That he’s not Justin Trudeau. That he represents a better choice than his main rival Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre who’s never worked in the private sector, and that he has a better plan to transform Canada into an economic powerhouse and help people.

But for a non-politician, Carney is a quick study on the steep learning curve of national politics. Even that line is not only a way of excusing awkward photo ops or his boring speaking style, but also his main selling point to Canadians. The Liberal campaign is deliberately pitching the brainy technocrat as the leader purpose-fit for managing The Crisis.

His retail skills are improving. Carney used to leave people hanging as he walked through a crowd, ignoring outreached hands of key backers. On the night of the French debate, Carney waved to Liberal supporters standing out in the freezing cold and holding signs as a backdrop for his arrival. The next night, he ran over to offer handshakes, hugs and autographs.

He is self-editing and shortening otherwise long, policy-heavy answers, but remains often unable to stick a landing, or digressing before returning to whatever the point was. “Three points,” he’ll say. First point. Second point. Third. And last. “And I’ll just make one more point, if I may.”

Under pressure, Carney is learning to switch tracks. He retorted to a Poilievre debate attack on his ties to the Trudeau team with a succinct “I do my own talking points, thank you very much,” before pivoting to his main message: “The biggest risk we have to affordability, the biggest risk we have to this economy is Donald Trump. So first and foremost, we’ve got to get that right.”

And Carney, who has shown a testiness when he perceives his integrity is challenged, and a willingness to be evasive, is reining in both instincts.

When pressed about allegations he moved Brookfield Asset Management’s Canadian headquarters to New York, Carney said he was no longer at the company when the decisions were made. When it turned out he was, the Liberal campaign differentiated between the parent company, that remained in Toronto, and the move of the subsidiary Brookfield Asset Management — which it said was on paper, and did not involve any job transfers. Carney said he had simply failed to be “precise” enough in his answer.

Challenged about whether his Brookfield and other corporate assets ownership — which he put in a blind trust — could put him in future conflicts of interest in the prime minister’s office, Carney bristled at reporters, telling one: “Look inside yourself.”

“I have served in the private sector. I have stood up for Canada. I have left my roles in the private sector at a time of crisis for our country. I’m complying with all the rules.”

More recently, he has curbed that temper. In the English debate, Carney defended his work at Brookfield, touting it as the largest infrastructure investor and developer and “one of the largest, if not the largest developer of renewable power in the world.”

By his own description to confidantes, Carney is not charismatic. He does not have the energy that Trudeau, a self-described introvert, radiated in a crowd.

But the polls show voters don’t care about that: they’re not looking for charisma, but competence — at least that’s what large numbers are telling the pollsters, and Carney’s personal story has convinced many he’s got what they want.

There is no question Carney is ambitious. For himself and the country.

Carney wrote a brick of a book entitled “Value(s)” that sets out his economist’s view of how governments and markets can harness resources in the aid of ordinary people in battles like the pandemic or climate change.

However, his political notion of the Canada he envisages is only starting to come into view.

Carney wants Canadians to stop defining our identity by what we aren’t — i.e. not American — and more by an embrace of this country’s trio of founding identities: French, British and Indigenous.

Carney used his first trip as prime minister to fly to Paris, London and Iqaluit — not Washington where The Crisis is brewing — as a “deliberate” act to underscore those historic ties, and to breathe life into new ones. He wants Canada to wean itself off its overreliance on an America that’s proving unreliable, and is demanding Trump show “respect” to this country.

Yet when it comes to a modern or broader diversity of identities in Canada, Carney talks in the abstract, or in dated notions.

Modern-day Quebec is not modern-day France, nor is it content with the idea of merely being a “distinct society” as Carney has called it. Former prime minister Stephen Harper long ago recognized Quebecers as a “nation” within a united Canada. And Carney is struggling to walk the razor-sharp edges of siding with Quebec’s goals to protect language and its notion of secularity, opposing Quebec’s (or any government’s) pre-emptive use of the Constitution’s “escape clause” — which gives governments the power to override Charter rights and enact laws that otherwise trample the religious freedom to wear hijabs, turbans or kippahs, or English minority language rights.

Carney said he understands Quebec’s goal, but then went so far as to say, in French, that “for me, secularism across Canada — the state must be neutral.” Does that mean he believes Mounties should not wear turbans? It’s unclear.

The Liberal leader’s “no crisis-no Carney” framing sounds refreshingly candid until you realize it’s not entirely accurate. The Trump threat may have been the catalyst to finally lure the avid runner into running for elected office.

But Carney has been weighing this, deking and bobbing as if he were entering a double-Dutch skipping contest, waiting for just the right moment, for more than 13 years.

In 2012 after he dampened speculation he’d been courted to run for the Liberal leadership, and was then pressed if he would ever run as an MP, Carney suggested the notion was preposterous: “Why not become a circus clown?”

Now Carney is on a tightrope, in the glare of a national spotlight, with just 10 days left to persuade Canadians he can perform in the three-ring circus of Trump’s design.

�³�����Tout le monde en parle host Guy A. LePage suggested it’s more fun to lead a tariff war than to campaign, Carney admitted that being prime minister — the job he’s held for less than five weeks — is “easier” because, he says “I have a lot of experience with crises.”

“In a crisis, you have to act, you have to take big decisions, you have to be bold,” Carney said. “To be a candidate? Well, it’s different. You do speeches, you shake hands, you watch cows,” he said, a wry smile creasing his face.

Then he quickly added that it’s “important” to run and win voters’ confidence to be able to do the other job. Goaded by LePage’s co-host, Carney admitted, “life is simpler in the private sector.”

“And better pay?” 

“Simpler,” said Carney. “Pays more. Easier, but this is too important.”