MONTREAL, QUEBEC — Mark Carney arrived at the Liberal Party convention in April ready to play the hits that had carried him through a triumphant year in office.
“Hope isn’t a plan, and nostalgia isn’t a strategy,” he said in his keynote address, a version of a line that the Canadian prime minister has repeated in seemingly every major speech he’s delivered since 2025. “If we stand still during this rupture, we will surrender our future to others … This is not the time for politics as usual, for petty differences, for political point scoring.”
Yet for the 4,000 flag-waving admirers who had gathered at a sprawling convention center blocks from some of his country’s oldest monuments, celebrating a newly ascendant party that just over a year earlier had appeared on the verge of collapse, Carney’s political wins were the point.
In particular, the party faithful had tallied five major victories — the number of members of Parliament who were tempted, lured and cajoled to leave other parties and join the Liberals over the previous six months. The particulars of those so-called floor-crossings had little in common — there was Lori Idlout, an Inuit progressive lawyer and art gallery owner in remote Nunavut who bolted the labor-friendly New Democratic Party, and socially conservative Marilyn Gladu from a Tory stronghold abutting Michigan — except for the shock that had accompanied each when it was revealed.
Together they brought Carney’s minority government to the precipice of a 172-seat majority necessary to govern comfortably. A few days after the keynote address, three special elections — including one in a suburb a short drive from where Carney stood in Montreal that had once been a safe seat for the sovereigntist Bloc Québécois — went the Liberals’ way. After a year in office in which he was forced to collaborate with other parties to pass anything, Carney’s Liberals secured an iron grip on government.
Carney got there not as his predecessors had, selling voters coast to coast through a general election on their visions for a new Canada. He instead amassed his power through the kind of grubby backroom hustle all but unimaginable from the magnanimous statesman and technocratic economic policymaker that the former central banker plays on the world stage.
In just over a year, Carney has learned to navigate the deeply insular, often ugly game of Ottawa politics as a skilled tactician and ruthless party boss. The jetsetting king of Davos still clutches to the persona of a political outsider, more interested in the long arc of history than the petty grievances of the day. At home he benefits from an “informed naïvété,” in the words of one close Carney adviser granted anonymity to speak candidly. Carney now can do the ugly work of politics precisely because Canadians believe he is above it.
“I always knew Mark would be good at politics,” said Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and still a close adviser of Carney’s. “I didn’t know he would be this good at politics, to be honest. But who did? I’m not even sure he did.”
Over a decades-long banking career, Carney had worked hand in hand with politicians. He had watched and studied them. He had befriended some. But not until he was about to turn 60 did he become one.
Born in the Northwest Territories and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Carney was a star student and hockey player. As a backup goalie for the Harvard University hockey team, he touched the ice just once, before going on to graduate studies in economics at the University of Oxford. He then spent 13 years across the globe with Goldman Sachs and five as governor of the Bank of Canada that coincided with the 2008 global financial crisis.
George Osborne, who as the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer courted Carney for a year to lead the Bank of England, called Carney “the outstanding central banker of his generation.” Over seven years in that post, colleagues described him as having a steady hand and an even temperament for major policy challenges. Bank policymaker Danny Blanchflower said Carney was “the only adult in the room” during deliberations over Brexit, and the BBC dubbed him a “rock star” central banker.
That is a far cry from the natural resume for a future prime minister. But throughout his peregrinations through private and public finance, Carney was careful to never take a job or utter a statement that would impede his path to that office, as many of his associates pointed out to POLITICO Magazine. Over the years, he began to see some of his economic-policymaker peers and friends launch successful political careers of their own — first French finance minister Emmanuel Macron, who went on to become France’s president, and then European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, who became Italy’s prime minister in 2021.
Carney, who moved back to Canada after his Bank of England term ended, begged off requests from Liberals to run for office in 2021, citing other commitments. (Earlier in his career, he had rebuffed an offer from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative, to become finance minister.) But he did sign on to serve as the U.N. secretary-general’s special envoy for climate action and finance, an advisory position which allowed him to begin dipping his toes into the increasingly choppy waters of Canadian politics.
Liberal Party officials and operatives were closely watching when Carney gave an April 2024 speech before Canada 2020, a progressive think tank with close ties to Trudeau’s government, at Toronto’s Omni King Edward Hotel. The speech, focused on the implications of the era’s technological and economic transformations, reflected the skills of someone gifted at explaining policy rather than selling it to the public. (Carney’s office did not make the prime minister available for an interview.)
“It wasn’t political language. It wasn’t sloganeering,” said Ali Ehsassi, a Liberal lawmaker from a Toronto district. “So I was a bit concerned, to be honest with you, at that particular event.”
Others in attendance saw a telling moment when Carney repeated part of the speech in French. Even though he demonstrated the language skills of an attentive schoolboy, not a potential leader of an officially bilingual nation, the choice to veer from English seemed to be an acknowledgment of Canada’s political landscape. The country’s elections are often won and lost in Quebec, where voters tend to punish candidates unable to speak French.
“You don’t make bilingual speeches in Toronto unless you’re going to be running for something,” recalled Max Valiquette, Trudeau’s executive director of communications from 2023 to 2025. “You want to make sure that is being seen.”
Months later, Carney agreed to become an economic policy adviser to Trudeau. He began speaking regularly to partisan crowds for the first time, honing his craft in ballrooms and convention spaces. Carney peppered dry macroeconomic analysis with barbs aimed at Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who was then surging in polls and seemingly destined to win power in the next election.
Trudeau’s fortunes had begun to fall after years of post-Covid inflation, punctuated by Canadians’ increasing belief that the government was ineffectual and had moved too far left. In early 2022, a “freedom convoy” consisting of thousands of trucks blockaded downtown Ottawa to protest Covid restrictions. Trudeau, who had struggled to manage his relationship with Donald Trump during the president’s first term and got off to a rocky start in the second, appeared to lose the trust of Canadians to take it any further. The prime minister’s approval rating would eventually sink to 22 percent.
“These were numbers and a situation,” said Canadian pollster Shachi Kurl, “that the Liberal Party had not seen since the Second World War.”
In December 2024, powerful finance minister Chrystia Freeland resigned from the Cabinet to distance herself from Trudeau and map an independent path to becoming prime minister. Few within the Liberal Party predicted Carney, despite his qualifications, had the political skill set to redirect the fortunes of a party many thought doomed in the next election.
Around that time, Carney began appearing at political events around the country. He traveled to Calgary to mingle with party supporters and convene a roundtable with the local chamber of commerce. He arrived in one of Canada’s most conservative large cities in full finance-man mufti — light blue shirt, a puffer vest and a long coat — to shake hands for one of the first times as a politician.
“I remember having conversations with colleagues, and some wondering about what kind of retail politics the [now] Prime Minister would have,” said Kody Blois, a Liberal member of parliament from Nova Scotia who serves as Carney’s parliamentary secretary. “How would he do at a local legion or at a tavern in a rural community in Canada?”
A moment abroad, viewed through the lens of television, changed how many Liberal insiders viewed his capabilities.
In January, Carney traveled to New York for an interview with the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, not a typical venue for a Canadian politician looking to create domestic buzz. Trump was days away from beginning his second term, and had already begun to make cracks about turning Canada into the 51st state. And just days earlier, Trudeau had announced he would be stepping down as Liberal leader, remaining prime minister until a new one was chosen. The race was on.
The sitdown was all but confirmation that Carney would participate in the leadership contest. Bit by bit, over 20 minutes in the drab studio far on the West Side of Manhattan, he laid out his political vision — and distanced himself from Trudeau’s governing record.
“Wages have not kept up with inflation, people are falling behind, not getting ahead, housing is very expensive,” he said. “Truth be told, the government has been not as focused on those issues as it could be.”
“I feel like I’m looking in a mirror. We just had that election,” Stewart replied. “Run. And when I say run, I mean not for office, I mean fucking run the other way.”
But then, the interview turned. Speaking to a comedian more in tune with the Washington and New York political elite, in the very country that was causing tremendous problems for its neighbors to the north, Carney explained to Stewart why he was different.
“Ah. But let’s say, a wild hypothetical, the candidate wasn’t part of the government,” said Carney.
“You’re running as an outsider,” parried Stewart, beginning to laugh.
“I am an outsider.”
It was effectively a campaign launch. Days later, Carney officially announced he would run to become the Liberal leader, with the U.S. television interview helping to convince some in the party that he could manage at least the mass-communication part of the job.
“I think for a lot of us, that Jon Stewart appearance was the first sign of, ‘OK, maybe this guy can do the retail side of the job, and not just the policy,’” said Ashley Csanady, a Liberal political consultant at the firm Vantage.
Over the six-week leadership election, Carney hammered home the idea that as a political outsider he could best lend credibility back to the party, unlike his closest rival Freeland. Quickly, he had an upper hand, in no small part thanks to appearances in precisely the type of venues where many Liberals worried voters would warm least to a global man of finance.
Blois, who represents a district on the Minas Basin in Nova Scotia, recalled a Carney campaign stop in early February at the Royal Canadian Legion, a veterans’ hall, in rural Enfield. Blois, who supported Carney’s bid, said that 200 of his constituents showed up “at the drop of a hat.”
At the beginning of 2025, as Trump continued his annexation threats, windows in Canada started filling up. In cities and small towns across the country, people dug dusty Canadian flags out of basements or drove to malls and supermarkets to buy new ones and put them in their windows. Many still had creases from their boxes.
Carney began to channel that dormant patriotism as it awoke. In Enfield, he spoke with businesspeople, students and retirees, all of whom were nervous about Canada’s future and wanted to hear from someone they thought would share both their local and national concerns. According to Blois, he leaned into his background — the son of two educators from the remote Northwest Territories and then Edmonton. He projected the image of a hockey-playing, authentically down-to-earth Canadian.
“People came away from that legion experience saying ‘My God, he was warm, he was comforting, he was just someone I wanted to have a drink with,’” Blois said. They went up the road to a sports bar with old wooden chairs and framed jerseys on the walls to do exactly that, where Carney turned up his regular guy-ness.
“He can draw in different personas,” Blois continued. “He can hang in some of the most elite circles in the world … and he can hang at Shooters Bar and Grill in Enfield, and have conversations with the average bear and make them feel heard.”
A few weeks later, Carney won the leadership contest overwhelmingly, with over 85 percent of the vote share. He became the first person in modern Canadian history to become prime minister with no prior elected parliamentary experience.
He did so just as Trump ramped up his rhetoric about annexing Canada. The jokes about turning Canada into a U.S. state turned from playful to menacing, and the policy threat was real: the U.S. leaving NATO and with it a security guarantee for Canada, looming trade wars that could destroy entire sectors of Canada’s economy with the stroke of a pen. Canadians now realized both a growing animus toward their southern neighbors and also how much they were dependent on America’s cooperation.
“It was when he put us in his sights and made us look like the bad guy,” Niagara Falls, Ontario, Mayor Jim Diodati — who previously supported Trump — told POLITICO Magazine in 2025. “More than anything, it was just hurtful … and then the 51st state talk, it went from hurtful to offensive.”
As soon as he came to office, Carney started running to keep his post. After a week on the job, he called an election that would five weeks later decide his fate. He faced a Conservative leader in Poilievre who had spent years successfully sharpening his knives against Trudeau’s zombie government.
All of a sudden, however, Canadians like Diodati — or the many who called themselves “reluctant Conservatives” because of their frustration with Trudeau — were in play again thanks to Trump scrambling the election’s stakes. At the same time, many on the left who had abandoned the Liberals for the more progressive New Democratic Party (or had never been Liberals in the first place) began to wonder if they needed to take more seriously the idea of working together to keep a Conservative out of office.
“If it wasn’t for that context, he wouldn’t have been the leader anyway, because he wouldn’t have run for us,” said Andrew Bevan, who served as the Liberals’ national campaign co-director in 2025. “[Carney] said that himself. No crisis, no Carney.”
Carney set himself up to lead that broadening coalition by presenting himself as a leader who could stand up to Trump. Carney appropriated the slogan “elbows up,” a hockey term used by players preparing for a fight, joining Mike Myers for a viral ad in which the Canadian-American actor returned to his homeland wearing a Canada hockey jersey that read “NEVER 51” on the back.
In two debates, Carney held his own, in both English and in French, against attacks from Poilievre and the leaders of the NDP and Bloc Québécois and used the prime minister’s bully pulpit to his advantage. As Trump escalated tariffs on automobiles, Carney paused campaigning to return to Ottawa, where he declared Canada’s “old relationship” with the U.S. was over. And in between, Carney sharpened his skills at retail politics, across legion halls and pubs across the country. But his advisers also keyed into the fact that he was never going to prevail on charisma, and set him up as someone who could turn down the temperature. Maybe being a little bit boring wasn’t so bad.
“We watched him develop political instincts in weeks and months that usually take years, if not decades, to hone,” said Marco Mendicino, a former Cabinet minister who was brought in as Carney’s first chief of staff and rarely speaks about his time in the Prime Minister’s Office. “He took a political party staring into the abyss, a country polarized and uncertain about its place in the world, and pulled off an electoral comeback that most predicted was impossible. He hadn’t campaigned a single day in his life before running to lead the Liberal Party.”
Carney’s stunning win involved a healthy heap of good fortune, matching his reputation as a steady hand amid chaos with Poilievre’s insistence on attacking his country’s institutions at a time Canadians were primed to defend them against foreign attacks.
“Taking a moribund party that was headed for absolute electoral doom and turning it around is no small feat,” said Cole Hogan, a Conservative political strategist at the consultancy Alberta Counsel and a former adviser to Premier of Ontario Doug Ford. “Justin Trudeau could not pull off a Canadian patriotism in the face of Donald Trump — Mark Carney was able to do that.”
Liberals were riding high on April 28, 2025, when federal elections delivered them 17 additional seats in Parliament, thanks in large part to the collapse of the progressive New Democrats and a poor showing from the Bloc Québécois, for a total of 169. But that still left them three short of a majority.
With at least four parties always maintaining a piece of Parliament, a full majority government is often hard to come by in Canada. Six of the last eight federal elections produced minorities. What instead takes place is governance by informal coalition, where any priority of the prime minister’s party requires the imprimatur of at least part of the opposition.
In this scenario, opposition lawmakers — who generally have little love for the prime minister’s agenda — maintain significant control of all-important committees, can summon witnesses, amend bills and throw various other wrenches into the legislative timetable. At any point they can also launch votes of confidence that trigger elections.
“A minority Parliament requires the government to find dance partners,” first-term Conservative lawmaker Andrew Lawton reminded his colleagues on the floor of Parliament in April.
To pass a budget in November, the Liberals won help from two smaller parties to their left. But that did not present a permanent solution for Carney, who wanted to tack his party back to the center on issues like energy development, defense spending and public finances.
With the geopolitical winds shifting rapidly, the Liberals were uninterested in going in front of voters again to secure that majority. But they saw dissatisfied lawmakers on both ends of the spectrum that they believed possible to pick off.
Changing parties is more common in Canada than in the United States, but still quite rare. No prime minister in Canadian political history pulled off what Carney’s advisers came to believe they might be able to do: move a minority government into the majority in between federal elections through persuading others to jump to their party. In 2005, then-Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin survived a razor-thin confidence vote with the help of a dramatic Conservative defection. Carney needed more than just one.
“I wouldn’t describe it as a grand plan that there was some board sitting in the [Prime Minister’s Office] where there was people’s faces on the board, saying ‘We’re going to go target these people,’” said Blois. “It was really organic.”
In August, Blois sought out Chris d’Entremont, a Conservative MP also from Nova Scotia, for lunch near the Halifax International Airport. D’Entremont had first run for provincial office over 20 years earlier as a member of the Progressive Conservatives — the major right-of-center party in Nova Scotia at the time. “You might be a Conservative, but you’re a Liberal under this prime minister,” Blois recounted telling his colleague. “That’s ideologically where you are.”
After Blois wasn’t laughed out of the restaurant by his compatriot, other members of parliament slowly got involved as well. In November, d’Entremont admitted to POLITICO he was considering a change. Conservative House leader Andrew Scheer and party whip Chris Warkentin then barged through his office door, according to d’Entremont, almost knocking over his assistant to tell d’Entremont “how much of a snake” he was. (Conservatives deny this account.)
As he considered his options that November, d’Entremont decided it was time to speak directly with Carney, whom he had never met before. Within 45 minutes of requesting a one-on-one meeting with Carney, he found himself in the prime minister’s office. “It was just like we’re two guys sitting down, having a chat at a ballgame,” d’Entremont recalled.
It might have been a wee bit more policy-focused than a usual trip to the SkyDome. Carney impressed d’Entremont by beginning with a discussion of funding for National Acadian Day, a celebration important to the people of d’Entremont’s Nova Scotia riding, before moving on to fisheries. Carney focused less on dangling prominent positions in his Cabinet and more on delivering budget pork to d’Entremont’s riding. Soon after, d’Entremont announced he would join the Liberals.
That success inspired Carney’s team to search for other potential floor-crossing targets. According to a Liberal consultant who works regularly with the Carney government, the prime minister turned to Minister of Energy Tim Hodgson, a fellow Goldman Sachs alumnus whom Carney had brought in as an adviser at the Bank of Canada. After learning Hodgson’s family was close with Conservative MP Michael Ma — their wives played cards together — Carney asked Hodgson to pitch Ma on a switch. It worked.
One evening in December, Ma went to the Conservative Party’s Christmas party to receive a Secret Santa gift from a colleague. Then the next day he went to the Liberals’ holiday festivities as the party’s newest member.
The next month, Carney traveled to Davos, where he used the stage to propose a new global alliance of “middle powers,” working together to advance their own goals. It was “elbows up” translated into geopolitical doctrine, an attempt to grapple constructively with Canadian insecurity about its place in a new world order.
Watching at home in Alberta was Matt Jeneroux, who had resigned from the Conservative caucus in November and was considering retiring as a lawmaker altogether. Carney’s speech from Davos gave him reason to reconsider, as Jeneroux concluded that the prime minister had delivered a positive, affirmative message for Canada. In February, after months of uncertainty about his next move, he contacted the Prime Minister’s Office and joined the Liberals, leaving them just three votes short of a majority.
“It shows that he’s a larger thinker,” d’Entremont said of the role that Carney’s international agenda played in his domestic political gains. “It’s not about the issue du jour that I find right now the Conservative Party gets stuck on … He’s planning, he’s trying to figure things out.”
Polling after the speech showed an eight-point bump in Carney’s approval rating as prime minister, bringing it to the highest of his time in office. The far-off location of his treatise, just like that of his blockbuster Jon Stewart interview that set up his run, may have been no accident. The broad, global focus of his biggest appearances gives Carney’s top lieutenants the space to cajole those on his right and on his left to join the party while Carney steers clear of the domestic issues that divide coalitions.
“They will use international media to set national media here at home in Canada,” said Hogan, the Conservative commentator. “There’s little to no accountability when you do something like that … There’s no scrum afterwards. That works to their advantage, because foreign media isn’t going to ask the same level of detail as someone might in the parliamentary press gallery here.”
After watching the NDP’s Lori Idlout carry her rural Nunavut district by just 41 votes, Carney’s advisers added her to the list of potential floor-crossing targets. Far from a chummy Ottawa politician, Idlout has long advocated for greater rights for a sprawling Inuit region — which sits atop natural resources that the Canadian government wants to sell to the world — from which she comes.
Idlout did not immediately take well to the entreaties from Carney’s circle, asking privately for “space.” She said the request was respected, and she gradually warmed to guarantees that by joining the Liberals she would have more say in a government quickly building toward a majority. By March, she had concluded that sticking with the shattered progressive party that had first sent her to office was “betraying” her constituents.
“With leaving the NDP, I feel like I’m betraying them, too, but at least I keep my focus on making sure that my constituents always come first,” Idlout told the Canadian Press. Idlout has little in common with the Conservative floor-crossers, but for the fact most came from tightly contested districts that could easily swing Liberal. Despite vast differences in policy and personality, the reasoning behind their decisions was similar — Carney was on a winning streak, and anyone who remained on a losing team was settling for less influence in government.
Marilyn Gladu, however, was not on anyone’s “bingo list” for a potential floor crossing, said Blois. Gladu was first elected to parliament in 2015 from a district bordering Port Huron, Michigan, and carried her riding by over 15 points in 2025. Throughout, she governed and talked like a member on the right of the Conservative caucus, staking out positions that put her at odds with the Liberals on issues like gun control, conversion therapy legislation, cannabis legalization and crime. In March of 2025, she said that Carney was part of the “disastrous mess” of inflation from the Trudeau government, and that she didn’t think he would “bring any change at all.”
But she was equally dissatisfied with the leadership of Poilievre, arguing directly after the federal election in 2025 that the “Conservative Party needs to reflect on this election and what was not a resonating message.”
The prime minister’s office dispatched someone who had first encountered Gladu when she emerged as a leading critic of the Trudeau government’s Covid policies. In 2021, she had been interviewed by Evan Solomon, then a CTV television anchor, about vaccines — an interview for which she later apologized for “shar[ing] misinformation about the severity of Covid-19 and the safety and efficacy of vaccines.”
Solomon has since left journalism for politics, with Carney recruiting his former jogging buddy to serve as Canada’s first minister of artificial intelligence. Gladu and Solomon started speaking about a floor-crossing earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the discussions granted anonymity to speak candidly. Few beyond the Prime Minister’s Office knew about their discussions, and Gladu kept bashing the governing party even as she was negotiating to join it.
“When will the Liberals accept responsibility for what they can control and remove their policies that make life more expensive for Canadians?” she said on March 6.
A month later, texts, calls and emails began to bounce around Ottawa insider circles, quickly widening to a group of political junkies who had grown obsessed with the floor-crossing machinations. All of the missives contained the same general concept: Her? Really?? The first four defections were within the realm of possibility for a Liberal government riding high.
The fifth was from another planet.
The next day, Gladu strode into the convention hall in Montreal as a newly minted Liberal. Not everyone was convinced. The Liberals’ progressive wing spent the weekend coming to terms with their newest recruit, who had faced a press-scrum beating in which she had to defend her past positions in light of her recent change of heart. And then she walked away, as a member of a majority in the making.
Carney has enjoyed an unusual sequence of back-to-back political honeymoons — after winning the party leadership contest, then a general election, then a parliamentary majority — that can’t possibly last forever. His job approval sits at almost 60 percent. A recent horse-race poll gave the Liberals 50 percent support, a rare feat not seen in almost a decade.
He now has the governing power to match. The three special elections in April gave the Liberals the majority to deliver on Carney’s vision of a Liberal Party that will tack back to the center.
Since taking office, Carney has slashed immigration targets, canceled a proposed capital gains tax hike, supported the building of new gas pipelines and eliminated a consumer carbon tax — all moves that frustrated progressive groups that made up the base of the Trudeau-era Liberals.
“He’s trusted by the Liberal Party and cabinet ministers and staffers about his instincts,” said the close adviser granted anonymity to speak freely, “even though they seem to run in the face of what were once considered inalienable truths about certain stakeholder groups that must never be offended, or geographic sensitivities.”
It is not, however, an easy time for governments to make long-term plans. Gas prices are surging in Canada, and for all of the talk of a middle-powers alliance, Carney still has to navigate an increasingly ugly relationship with the United States as he attempts to secure trade commitments in other markets. The framework of a trade deal with Trump last October quickly fell apart, as POLITICO reported, and talks have sputtered ever since.
“I’ve spent the last year saying it’s that moment where Wile E. Coyote is over the cliff and looking down, putting up the sign, going, ‘uh oh,’ but the drop hasn’t happened,” said Kurl, the pollster.
The jetsetting corporate banker is not a popular character within our global populist politics. The natural inclination for someone with Carney’s background might be to lean away from it — to swap Canali for Carhartt and Davos for Drummondville. Instead, he has leaned into his international flavor, traveling frequently while in office and using foreign podiums to his advantage domestically. It allowed Carney to explain himself as someone who wanted to dream big, who believed in more than just petty grievances.
The deep irony is that the chase for the majority may have been as good as it gets for Carney’s position atop Canadian politics. The parliamentary stranglehold that he built on what Poilievre has labeled “dirty backroom deals” will help the prime minister speed up his agenda. But it will also leave no one to blame for any failures of his government. Now, he has to deliver for a country newly protective of its sovereignty and searching for its place in the world, all while managing a much broader party tent — one that keeps Lori Idlout and Marilyn Gladu under the same roof.