Mark Carney Is a Very Demanding Boss

Now that the honeymoon period is over, he’s ready to run the country like Bay Street. Canada’s first CEO PM has arrived.

- STEPHEN MAHER

MARK CARNEY TALKS A LOT ABOUT STAYING HUMBLE. In his 2021 book, Values, he wrote that humility is one of the “five essential and universal attributes of leadership.” In March of this year, after he became leader of the Liberal Party, he stood on stage in an Ottawa convention centre and described the principles he’d learned from his childhood hockey coaches: ambition, teamwork and, “because it’s Canada,” humility.

Carney, a onetime Goldman Sachs executive and former governor for both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, had won the race in a landslide, despite having zero political experience. The evening of his victory, he gathered with jubilant advisers for a victory party in a backroom. There, they got a text from a staffer for Karina Gould, the 38-year-old MP from Burlington, Ontario, who'd run against Carney for the party leadership. Gould had made a few mild pokes at Carney during the campaign. In one debate, she took a jab at his reputation as a fiscally focused technocrat: “You can’t bring a calculator to a knife fight,” she said, referring to the trade war with the U.S. The attacks were genteel compared to most political mudslinging, and Liberals warmed to her during the campaign. They embraced her as both a cherished member of the Liberal family and, increasingly, the standard bearer for its left flank. But her needling got under Carney’s skin, even though he was the front-runner (she ultimately received only three per cent of the vote). He and his staff made their irritation plain; one member of Gould’s team told me that many of them were aggressive in their vitriol toward her.