Then-Thomson Reuters Editor Chrystia Freeland interviewing BoE Governor Mark Carney in 2013/Reuters

By Lisa Van Dusen

January 16, 2025

Of all the things that Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney have in common, their most timely shared quality for both the Liberal Party and the country may be their embodiment of the most overused political quote of the past three decades, the James Carville ’92 campaign exhortation, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The latest, most vivid example of this is that both Carney and Freeland have indicated they’d shelve the consumer carbon tax whose repeal has formed the basis of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s “Axe the Tax” stump speech, his economic policy, and his political raison d’être. With both Liberal frontrunners — one a former finance minister, the other a former central banker…who’s going to question their economic judgment? — embracing a repeal of the consumer price on carbon, not only is the carbon tax dead, the carbon-tax election is dead.

For Carney, who all-but-announced his candidacy to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show Monday, then did so officially Thursday at the same arena in Edmonton where he learned to skate (his family moved there when he was six), the question is whether his economic bona fides will outweigh any deficiencies in his retail politics game. In other words, we know he can skate, but can he skate?

Carney and Freeland share profile elements beyond economics and hours served on WEF panels. They were both born in small towns fetchingly west of the Laurentian élite — she in Peace River, Alberta, he in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. Both their fathers — hers a farmer, his a high school principal — were card-carrying Liberals.

Both studied at Harvard — she Russian history and literature, he, economics. Both went on to Oxford, Carney for his MA and PhD in economics, Freeland as a Rhodes Scholar, for a master’s in Slavonic studies.

Both are members of Canada’s globalized whiz-kid contingent of the late-last millennium — the Kearney and McKinsey trouble-shooters, the H-1B Wall Street vanguard, the EU ancestry-passport scorers who decamped for LBS and INSEAD before settling in Paris or Prague, Tokyo or London to work for Sumitomo or the Beeb. Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney are both people who not only could succeed anywhere in the world but have.

They have both worked in the upper echelons of international economic policy and global finance. Freeland, after working as a stringer covering Ukraine for The Economist, The Washington Post and the The Financial Times, rose through the ranks of global financial journalism from the Globe and Mail to Thomson Reuters and back to the FT again, where she edited the FT Weekend, one of those rare products in international journalism that remains both a writer’s and reader’s haven.

What that biography means to Canadians is that Freeland, who spent years interpreting the importance of economic events for a global audience, knows — the way only someone who’s been immersed in that process every day over time can know — how decisions made in C-suites and by the Fed and at 11 Downing St. and on Bay Street affect the lives of human beings across the globe.

For a political party supposedly on the ropes, the fact that both front-runners for its leadership are candidates who would have no shortage of much more lucrative, less exhausting, significantly less frustrating things to do speaks well of the state of Canadian democracy.

As Canada’s Foreign Affairs minister, she went up against the negotiating tactics of Donald Trump, a role for which her days being hounded by the KGB in Ukraine likely served as useful counter-operational prep. As Canada’s first woman finance minister, she delivered four federal budgets and annual financial updates without major incident.

Carney, who spent years based in multiple capitals from Boston to Tokyo to New York to Toronto for Goldman Sachs, used his knowledge of the post-deregulation culture that littered the US mortgage market with IEDs known as exotic financial instruments for good after arriving in the Department of Finance and by contributing significantly — as the youngest central bank governor in the G7 — to the buffering of Canada’s financial infrastructure from much of the carnage of the 2008 financial cataclysm.

The creativity and sangfroid Carney displayed in that role — including the legendary decision to cut the overnight rate by 50 basis points in March 2008, one month after his appointment — put his name on a very short list of possible replacements for Sir Mervyn King as governor of the Bank of England in 2013.

The outpouring of London-egghead ardor that greeted Carney’s arrival at Threadneedle Street was of a post-colonial fervour unseen since fellow Canadian Michael Ignatieff was still in town. Carney was dubbed the “rock star central banker” and the “George Clooney of banking”, not just by waggish columnists, but by the financial press.

In an email last year, Ignatieff eschewed comparisons between Carney’s political aspirations and his own fate as Liberal leader. “Mark doesn’t remind me of me at all,” Ignatieff wrote. “He knows something about economics. He’s had front-line experience in government.”

The more apt comparison might be between Freeland and Carney on the one hand and Ignatieff and Bob Rae, whose longstanding friendship was tested when they both ran for the Liberal leadership in 2008. Freeland and Carney have known each other for years, and Carney is godfather to Freeland’s son.

But for a political party supposedly on the ropes, the fact that both front-runners for its leadership are candidates who would have no shortage of more lucrative, less exhausting, significantly less frustrating things to do speaks well of the state of Canadian democracy.

We remain in the wake of a global pandemic whose economic knock-on impacts are still being felt — from inflation to supply chain kinks to the evolution of work. Meanwhile, a bullying American president is threatening border-obliterating warfare using not tanks or cyberwar but tariffs as a weapon of economic mass destruction.

The most pertinent quote for 2025 might be a hybrid of Carville’s immortal line and Tip O’Neill’s observation that “all politics is local” that doubles down on the premise of both: “All politics is economics.”

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, senior writer for Maclean’s and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.