Following Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement in January that he will resign, two candidates have early leads to replace him as head of the Liberal Party and, potentially, in the premiership.
Mark Carney, a veteran investment banker from Goldman Sachs, has never run in an election, making him an outsider to most of his fellow citizens if not the governing elite. He served as the governor of the Bank of Canada starting in 2008 and was the first non-Briton to take the top position at the Bank of England in 2013. He has also served as a chair of Bloomberg LP and as a UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance.
Carney’s most recent job was chair at Brookfield Asset Management, the Toronto-based alternative investment manager.
“I’m not the usual suspect when it comes to politics,” he said in his candidacy announcement, “but this is no time for politics as usual…. I’m doing this because Canada is the best country in the world, but it still could be even better.”
Carney’s closest rival is Chrystia Freeland. A former journalist who has served in Parliament since 2013, she became more prominent when Trudeau and the Liberals came to power with his first (and only) majority government in 2015. Since then, she has held a series of high-profile portfolios, including foreign affairs minister, Canada’s first woman finance minister, and deputy prime minister.
Freeland is often credited with a hard negotiating style that secured Canada’s position during the first Trump administration’s negotiation of United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
In December, she stepped down as finance minister and deputy prime minister. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she had no choice after being asked to move to another cabinet role and denounced her former boss’s “costly political gimmicks.” While most observers consider Freeland or Carney to be the frontrunners, others have joined the race, including Karina Gould, the government leader in the House of Commons; indigenous MP Jaime Battiste; and Liberal Party backbenchers Chandra Arya and Frank Baylis. Party members will elect their next leader on March 9.
