OTTAWA — After years of speculation and teases, Mark Carney will finally take a post in the federal Liberal government: boss.

Having won a vote of party members in a blowout, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated former Goldman Sachs financier, governor of two central banks, UN climate finance envoy, chair of Brookfield Asset Management and Bloomberg, and hockey-goalie son of Fort Smith, N.W.T., will become prime minister amid Canada’s biggest fight with its southern neighbour since the War of 1812.

Justin Trudeau remains prime minister until Carney and his team are ready to take over, which should happen “in the coming days or week” Trudeau said last Friday.

Soon after, Carney will test his skills as a rookie party leader in his first election campaign as a candidate.

“I feel like everything in my life has helped prepare me for this moment,” Carney said to a ballroom of Liberals in Ottawa. Canadians face the gravest crisis in a generation, he said, and they want a positive leader who builds unity.

“The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” he said. “If they succeeded, they would destroy our way of life.”

Here’s what you need to know about Carney.

How he’s the same

Without having been a cabinet minister, Carney was just about as close as a person could get. He and Trudeau went back and forth forever over whether he would formally join the government before he ultimately took a Liberal party post as chair of a “leader’s task force on economic growth.”

Officially, the assignment was to generate ideas for the Liberals’ next election campaign platform, at a time when Trudeau expected to be leading the party in that battle. (The task force never got any more publicly announced members, nor produced any openly visible work.) Unofficially, it added Carney’s credentials and intellectual heft to a sputtering Liberal cause.

Carney racked up support from a raft of Trudeau ministers, including a big chunk of the front bench:

• Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc
• Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne
• Transport and Internal Trade Minister Anita Anand
• Public Safety Minister David McGuinty
• Defence Minister Bill Blair
• Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault

That suggests Carney’s not about to vaporize the whole Trudeau government record.

Breaks from the past

Shortly after he started his campaign for leader, Carney repudiated two economic policies into which the Trudeau government sank a lot of its political capital: the federal consumer carbon charge and changes to the tax treatment of capital gains that amounted to a hike.

Carney had previously praised revenue-neutral, progressive carbon taxes as good ways of attacking climate change, reflecting orthodox economic thinking. As a political candidate, though, he called Canada’s “too divisive.” He has promised to drop it in favour of incentives to buy greener goods like energy-efficient appliances and electric cars, funded by continued charges on “big polluters.”

His plan also includes more familiar Liberal measures, such as carbon taxes on imports from high-emissions sources and a suite of programs for things like home energy retrofits and EV charging stations.

Carney has not promised a particular replacement for the capital-gains changes, which the Liberals expected would raise $19.4 billion for the federal treasury over five years.

But he has promised to balance the federal budget (which the Trudeau government never did), with the help of a significant accounting change: breaking ongoing operating spending and one-time capital spending into separate components. 

A Carney government would balance the operating budget within three years but treat capital projects—such as housing, energy projects, trade infrastructure and defence equipment—as a category that doesn’t count in calculating the federal deficit.

Canadian city governments do this, borrowing for capital projects while generally planning balanced operating budgets, but it would be novel for the feds. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre calls it a “sneaky accounting trick.”

Waging a trade war

Carney’s primary task will be to manage the relationship between Canada and the United States, a close friendship that is turning into “something else,” as former prime minister Jean Chrétien said Sunday before the Liberals announced their new leader.

“We are going to be living in a very difficult time,” Chrétien said.

Part of Carney’s appeal is that he’s dealt with financial and economic crises before—the 2007-08 credit crisis as a senior Department of Finance official and governor of the Bank of Canada, Brexit as governor of the Bank of England. Canada is in one, and there’s no telling how long it will last or how it will morph as long as Donald Trump is in the White House.

Carney has staked out terrain similar to Trudeau’s: “Canada will not bow down to a bully,” he said in a statement. He called for dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs, policy that boosts investment and supports workers, and longer-term efforts to diversify trade away from the United States.

In campaign speeches, he’s gone elbows-up. United Canadians can withstand more economic trouble than Americans will, he said. If Trump keeps acting the way he has, Carney said, Canada’s economy will strengthen as the United States’ weakens.

Carney’s government will keep counter-tariffs on American goods “until the Americans show us respect,” he said.

Tripping on his own stick

Whatever Carney’s intellectual strengths, he said a lot of things during the campaign that were, at best, imprecise. Or, as the Conservatives put it about one claim, “Mark Carney lied.” A sample:

After a debate in Montreal, he deflected a question about Brookfield Asset Management’s decision to transfer its head office from Toronto to New York, saying that was done after he left the board. Indeed, shareholders voted on the very final decision Jan. 27, once Carney had resigned as board chair. But the board announced the shift in October as something it had already done, and Carney urged shareholders to ratify the move in a letter.

He should have been more precise, he admitted.

Carney also said he’d addressed potential conflicts of interest by resigning from all his many posts outside politics. He did quit paid corporate directorships, according to a National Post investigation. But he kept other prestigious gigs.

On the campaign trail in Kelowna, B.C., Carney said he’d use federal powers to push major projects through approvals; to a Quebec audience, he said he’d never overrule Quebecers’ opposition to oil pipelines.

He needed to “tighten up” his messaging, his campaign conceded.

In Barrie, Ont., Carney said the U.S. depends on Canada for its semiconductors. IBM’s microchip production chain runs through Bromont, Que., which is consequential but not the whole ballgame even in the U.S. domestic industry.

He misspoke, Carney’s campaign said.

People talk loosely off the cuff, but part of Carney’s pitch is that he’s a master of technical details.

The next fight

Once Trudeau announced his resignation and Trump put Canada in his crosshairs, Carney’s candidacy resurrected Liberals’ hopes for another turn in government. Some polls have found the Liberal party in the lead (others have found a smaller but still significant shift in voter intentions).

The Conservatives have tried different lines of attack. “Carbon Tax Carney” served for a long time and they’ve stuck with it, but have more recently thrown in “Sneaky Mark Carney” as well.

An election is coming this year, but exactly when Carney will face the people isn’t yet certain. In December, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said his party would stop propping up the Liberal government, but last week he said he wants Parliament to pass legislation first to support workers hurt by tariffs.

That would buy Carney time if he wants to settle in as prime minister rather than seek a democratic mandate right away.