In Canada’s House of Commons, the Conservative leader of the opposition, Pierre Poilievre, often taunts the Liberals by speaking past the faltering prime minister Justin Trudeau and instead making reference to “the next Liberal leader”: by this, he means none other than Mark Carney, the central banker who is suspected of harbouring grand political ambitions.
After years rising through the ranks of the transatlantic financial elite, Carney has done little to deflect such rumours: in fact, a spate of high-profile speeches in recent weeks convey the impression that he is angling for something more than a plum retirement spent writing ponderous meditations on the future of capitalism. But if the ex-governor of the Bank of England is indeed biding his time for a shot at the top job, Carney will have to distance himself from Trudeau’s most unpalatable policies, while also positioning himself as the better alternative to Poilievre. And it appears he is doing just that, with public statements criticising Trudeau’s signature carbon tax and the recent, much-hyped federal budget, which he argued could have been delivered with more fiscal prudence.
Naturally, Carney has attacked Poilievre as well, for being a “lifelong politician” — as opposed to a Harvard-trained economist like himself — whose tax cut-heavy programme is a “Pavlovian reaction of extreme conservatism… based on a basic misunderstanding of what drives economies.” So far, his strategy for outshining both Trudeau and Poilievre involves brandishing his credentials as a technocrat who can pontificate on interest rates and business cycles in a way that his two would-be rivals never could. However, Poilievre, who has excelled with his pugilistic, anti-elitist rhetoric, will no doubt relish this contrast of images and may take notes from the likes of Jacob Rees-Moog (a Poilievre lookalike both physically and ideologically), who clashed with Carney in the lead-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum.
The battle lines for Carney in Canada would be very similar to the contest between Remain and Leave: making an explicit connection between his enemies in Britain and those in his home country, Carney reminded his audience: “Brexiters promised that they were going to create Singapore on the Thames, [they] actually delivered Argentina on the Channel… Broken Britain… sound familiar?” — a reference to Poilievre’s case that “Everything is broken” in Liberal-governed Canada.
Indeed, Carney would make for a far more intellectually compelling opponent and foil to Poilievre than the distinctly non-intellectual Trudeau, since the two represent two diametrically opposed conceptions of capitalism. On the one hand, Poilievre, like his UK counterparts Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, believes in the primacy of unfettered markets and the individual as the surest agents of prosperity — to the near-total exclusion of the state, a view generally referred to as “neoliberalism” or what their common inspiration Margaret Thatcher dubbed “popular capitalism”, Right and Left-wing versions of which have, of course, predominated in the West since the Eighties, corresponding with a rise in inequality. On the other hand, Carney embodies a distinct form of political economy with roots in Canada’s past, in which states and corporations alike work to harness market forces toward common good outcomes, what Carney calls “mission-oriented capitalism” (something his frenemy Boris Johnson might have endorsed in his more communitarian phases). This is an approach that may in theory hew close to social democracy, but which in practice elevates a class of corporate elites to manage society’s competing interests. Neither seems particularly inspiring but Canadians may soon have to make a choice between them.
Today, the neoliberal model that Poilievre holds to has been much dissected and debated: he will try to roll back superfluous local regulations in the hope that market forces will deliver, without further need for guidance. But much less is known about the paradigm and lineage that Carney belongs to. What exactly would a Carney government look to do?
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