The King is planning to meet Mark Carney this week, in a sign of the UK’s unwavering support for Canada amid continuing tensions with President Trump.
Sources close to Charles said there was a “determination” from the monarch to see the new Canadian prime minister when he visits the UK in the coming days. The Sunday Times revealed last weekend that the King was concerned about the discord between Canada and the US.
Since his re-election, Trump has repeatedly proposed to make Canada, where Charles is head of state, America’s “51st state” and has imposed crippling tariffs on the country.
• Royal support for Canada in discreet show of medals, music and red
After being sworn into office on Friday, Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, said he had no current plans to meet Trump, as is customary for a new Canadian leader. Carney has called on the US president to show “respect for Canadian sovereignty”.
Buckingham Palace and Carney’s team are understood to be looking into all options to make the meeting happen, despite both men having full diaries. The King has also written privately to Carney, who turns 60 on Sunday.
In February, Sir Keir Starmer delivered a letter from Charles to Trump at the White House, inviting him to visit the King in Scotland to discuss plans for a second state visit for the US president. But Charles’s “determination” to meet Carney first will send a clear signal that the UK is prioritising a “special relationship” with its Commonwealth realm. Charles and Carney forged a warm relationship during the latter’s seven-year tenure at the Bank of England.
Before he meets the King, Carney has a milestone birthday to celebrate — although the party was never going to be raucous. Known as the George Clooney of international finance, he is a svelte and health-conscious runner who likes to get up before 6am and do ten kilometres around Ottawa. But this birthday is a critical point in another sense too — one that brings with it immediate, weighty decisions to make.
On Friday, Carney achieved a long-held ambition when he was sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister. His privy council office has not yet said whether he will move from his home in the capital’s affluent Rockcliffe Park area to Rideau Cottage, the grace-and-favour residence vacated by Justin Trudeau, who announced his resignation in January after months of pressure.
Two more urgent questions are whether Carney, who is not yet even an MP, will call a snap election — and how he will deal with the existential threats posed to Canada by Trump. Trump’s belligerence, and Carney’s resounding victory over the former finance minister and Financial Times journalist Chrystia Freeland for the Liberal Party leadership, have radically altered Canada’s political landscape in a few short weeks.
Pierre Poilievre, the aggressive populist who leads the Conservative opposition, entered the year with double-digit poll leads over Trudeau. Poilievre, 45, styles himself as a political outsider but enrolled in the now defunct right-wing Reform Party before he was old enough to vote. He wrote a student essay outlining his prime ministerial ambitions, arguing that the role of government was “constantly to find ways to remove itself from obstructing” freedoms.
Poilievre and his team have been adept at using social media to lambast Trudeau over Canada’s cost of living crisis and embrace of net-zero policies (Carney immediately repealed a controversial carbon tax on consumers, having previously spoken favourably about it, and has promised to reverse an increase in capital gains tax).
Amid a febrile national mood, with software developers creating apps that allow shoppers to avoid buying American products, the Conservatives’ poll lead has evaporated. George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor who turned to Carney as a “rock star” option for Bank governor in 2012, said: “There’s been an assumption that the whole world is going to go Trumpian — that Trump was the leading indicator of a further move towards the populist right. Six months later, you go, ‘Well, actually, Keir Starmer, Mark Carney, Friedrich Merz …’
“Every action has an equal opposite reaction and we might be in the reaction phase. Being a very experienced international player who’s spent their entire adult life at the G7 and the G20 is turning out to be a huge advantage. Who knew that someone who actually knows how the world works might be a better person to run a country than someone who doesn’t?”
Carney’s line of attack against Poilievre is obvious. He views the younger man as a mini-Trump who espouses the US president’s post-truth brand of politics. “A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said after winning the Liberal leadership. He is already asking why Poilievre has not submitted himself for security clearance so he can receive intelligence briefings, hinting at foreign influence.
“Trump has written their campaign for them,” remarked a senior UK Labour figure. “If I was running the Canadian Liberal campaign right now, it would be quite a fun prospect in terms of memes.”
Poilievre’s critique of Carney is also obvious. On Friday he congratulated him for becoming prime minister “only three months after he moved his company headquarters out of Canada to New York”. Poilievre said Carney was part of “the same Liberal gang” as Trudeau, the son of the former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Poilievre and Carney have sparred in the past: in a parliamentary committee hearing in 2021, Poilievre accused Carney of supporting Trudeau in blocking the Northern Gateway oil pipeline project in northwest Canada while the investment giant he chaired, Brookfield Asset Management, was buying similar infrastructure in Brazil and the United Arab Emirates. Poilievre said this was “flagrant hypocrisy” that “smacks of the Davos elite at its worst”.
A problem for Carney is that he is undeniably a member of that elite. It is a charge that has counted against a Liberal candidate before. In 2011, the Conservatives crushed Michael Ignatieff, an academic and writer who had spent three decades working in the US and UK. They ran campaign ads saying Ignatieff was “just visiting” and that “He didn’t come home for you”. In his political memoir, Fire and Ashes, Ignatieff reflected that this took away his “standing” — his authority to make his case to voters.
Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, said Carney was “more of the same” but acknowledged that “the 51st state row” has done Poilievre great harm. “I would say the Canadian election is very, very hard to call when it comes,” Farage said. “The reasons that Poilievre was in the lead haven’t changed — dissatisfaction with what is seen as the most incredibly woke government in the West. It’s just the circumstances with America that have changed.”
Carney was born in Fort Smith, a town in the Northwest Territories, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. His father was a head teacher and later a history professor. His mother gave up teaching to look after their four children. He was educated at Harvard and Oxford, where he met his wife-to-be, Diana, through the university ice hockey club.
He enjoyed a steep career trajectory, spending 13 years at Goldman Sachs before becoming deputy governor of the Bank of Canada. Carney left for a finance ministry job before returning as the Bank’s governor in 2008. His deft handling of the financial crisis persuaded Osborne, who became chancellor in 2010, to pursue him for the Bank of England governor’s job. After saying no twice, Carney finally relented over a fruit breakfast at the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Mexico City.
Carney had a bumpy time at the Bank. His flawed policy of providing “forward guidance”, tying a rise in interest rates to the unemployment rate, earned him the sobriquet of the “unreliable boyfriend”. Poilievre revived the tag last week. Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister who came up with it while a member of the Treasury select committee, said: “That was about the utility of forward guidance, rather than any comment about him. He’s obviously a person of enormous talent and he’s done a very brave thing going into politics when he could have had a gilded career as an ex-central banker.”
Carney was also criticised for continuing for too long with quantitative easing — the printing of money to ease the economy — and for warning that Brexit might trigger a recession. He became an increasingly vocal advocate of net zero, using his invitation to deliver the BBC’s Reith Lectures after he left the Bank in 2020 to address the issue of climate change. Carney and the media billionaire Michael Bloomberg set up a net-zero alliance for financial institutions, but it has partially unravelled since all six of America’s biggest banks quit before Trump’s second inauguration.
Carney’s wife Diana — who was photographed at the 2013 Wilderness music festival in Oxfordshire speaking to Ghislaine Maxwell, who has since been convicted for child sex trafficking — for a while had a blog called Eco Products That Work. It caused amusement by questioning the role of teabags — “Do we really need an extra 40cm² of bleached ad printed paper with every cup of tea?” — and recommending the use of plant pots made from fired cow dung.
As governor, Carney was suave and smooth, although he could sometimes come across as arrogant. He was known for outbursts of temper inside the Bank and he could be prickly with journalists. The Sunday Times economics editor David Smith recalls Carney raging at him over a headline on a column telling him to stop dithering over interest rates. Smith protested that he didn’t write the headlines (he later admitted that he had, in fact, written that one).
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Conservative MP who called Carney the “high priest of Project Fear” before the Brexit vote, said: “The fact he’s become the Canadian prime minister shows why he was entirely unsuitable to be governor of the Bank of England. It underlines all the concerns I had about him being a political, rather than an impartial, governor.”
After chopping and changing several times, Trump has imposed 25 per cent tariffs on steel, aluminium and goods that do not comply with Canada and America’s free-trade agreement, plus 10 per cent on imports of Canadian crude oil. Canada has responded by putting tariffs on about $20 billion of American-made products such as steel and aluminium, and about $20 billion of consumer goods including alcoholic drinks and peanut butter. Trade with its neighbour accounts for almost a fifth of Canada’s economy. Some 77 per cent of Canada’s goods exports go to America and 63 per cent of its imports come from the US.
Trump has justified the economic warfare on the grounds that Canada allows fentanyl to flow over the border into the US. Trudeau said in March that this was “completely bogus”, adding: “What he wants to see is a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” Trump is reported to have told Trudeau he does not believe the 1908 treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries is valid.
While dealing with his antagonist in the White House, Carney — who leads a government on its third term and without a majority in parliament — must decide when to call a federal election. The deadline is October 20, but informed observers think he may go sooner to take advantage of his newness and Trump’s disruption. He would need to win a seat; reports in the Canadian media suggest he might contest one in Alberta. It remains a long shot, but the unreliable boyfriend has a chance to form a more lasting union with the country of his birth.
