Will Canadians warm up to Mark Kearney, the top liberal runner who looks to Trudeau's work?

This article was originally published before the Liberal Party announced the election results.

It was the summer of 2007. Deep inside Canada's Treasury, senior officials stared at the barrels of global financial meltdowns.

They weren't sure exactly when or how the market would crash, but as Mark Carney puts it, “we knew it was going to fall apart.”

This was a turning point for Mr. Carney, a senior civil servant at the time, and began the next chapter of his career managing the economic crisis as governor of the National Bank of Canada and the UK.

It was also a transformative moment in Mr. Carney's political evolution. He saw a financial crisis with a catalyst for a long and sharp decline in the public trust of Western institutions.

“People were betrayed by the system,” Carney, 59, told a study group meeting in Ottawa, Canada's capital, in November. “How do you rebuild that trust?”

The Canadian liberals have delayed their voters' support after nearly a decade of power, and now they look in the mirror and ask the same questions.

Mr. Carney won the leadership of the Liberal Party on Sunday, becoming prime minister, and answered himself as he succeeded in both roles.

Elite Picks

The establishment of the Liberal Party gathered around Alberta economist Carney and became a prominent leader in global monetary policy and later green investment. Polls show that he is a major candidate and his lifelong friend, Christia Freeland, is following him.

There have been a lot of changes in the two months since Trudeau announced his resignation. From immigration to inflation, domestic issues that helped him fall have been hidden by the threat of Trump's tariffs that have become a reality on Tuesday. By Thursday afternoon, Trump had temporarily reversed some of them. However, he made it clear that he intends to continue his surcharge policy against Canada.

For many voters, Carney's financial qualifications and measured disposition are good for assuming him as Trump, but it is unclear how long Carney will become prime minister. The Liberals are not a majority in Congress, and Mr. Carney has to call for elections and it has to be held by October, but it could come sooner. As he is not currently a member of Congress, his campaign shows that he will move to a swift federal election.

When it comes to Trump, Carney is largely cautious and simply waking tariffs doesn't provide a sense of his strategy to deal with the US president who spoke about the annexation of Canada.

In a recent interview with a Canadian broadcasting company, Carney argued that discussing Trump's views would be a bad form and would give him a “conflict signal” during Trudeau's negotiations with Washington. In contrast, Freeland said it would make tariff retaliation accurate for the dollar.

Mr. Carney also faces criticism that he is too privileged to touch the lives of many Canadians.

He is also more wary of the campaign trajectory compared to his opponents, often withholding basic details of events such as their location and rarely interviews. His representatives did not respond to multiple requests from the New York Times for interviews.

I'm not a politician

Carney's education at Harvard and Oxford University and his vast resume have stood up to Goldman Sachs' managing director and sat on the World Economic Forum Foundation's board of directors, adding to his perception that he is part of the global elite.

However, he pitched his banking sector background as an asset to attract private investment in Canada and address its long-standing productivity issues.

“I'm not a politician,” Carney pointed out in a recent campaign ad, as he worked as a senior official in the Liberal government's Treasury Department in 2004, followed in 2006 when a conservative government was elected.

Mr. Carney was then tapped in 2008 to lead the Bank of Canada. In his month of tenure, he cut interest rates significantly as part of his response to the global financial crisis. For his prompt action, a Canadian financial paper named him “one of the world's most wise central bankers.”

McLeans, a Canadian magazine, gave Carney a homepage spread called “Canadians hired to save the world.”

Mr. Carney was born in Fort Smith, a small river town on the northern border of Alberta, and is home to Canada's largest national park. He grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and both his parents were teachers.

His father is deeply involved in the state's Catholic community, and Mr. Carney says he regularly attends churches and serves on the committee of the Inclusive Council of Capitalism with the Vatican. He is married to economist Diana Carney and has four daughters.

In 2013, Mr. Carney became the first person not a British person to be hired as governor of the Bank of England who ran until 2020. The consensus is that he was able to tackle the crisis competently, but critics found him to be too political for the central bank governor, and Brexit supporters disliked him. They gave him his warning that Brexit could incite fear unnecessary the economy.

Former Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Carney's overseas appointment has sent an important signal to the world that Canada is managing economic issues in a stable way.

However, Carney's opponents accused Canada of exaggerating his influence in helping him survive the 2008 financial crisis.

Stephen Harper, the conservative prime minister who preceded Trudeau, wrote this week in a letter to conservative donors.

Conservatives also asked Mr. Carney to disclose his financial assets and conflicts of interest. Carney's campaign said Thursday that if he wins, his assets will be placed in blind trust “quickly” meaning he will not control them, in order to avoid a possible conflict of interest.

Same, but different

With a chorus of support from liberal members of Congress, Carney has to do a delicate dance to convince voters that he is setting a different path from the Trudeau government.

He also had to personally distance himself from Mr Trudeau, who tapped him in 2020 and tapped him to become a financial adviser.

However, supporters say it was a limited role.

“I think it had more cosmetic value to Trudeau than it was substantial,” said Evan Sidal, a Canadian business leader who worked with Carney to raise money for the campaign.

Carney's platform will bring about a major divergence from Trudeau, and will replace it with a massive polluter industrial pricing system that involves paying consumers to reduce their carbon taxes and reducing their carbon footprint. His climate plan includes incentives for a green energy transition while trying to avoid a backlash in Alberta, the heart of Canada's oil and gas industry.

Carney said it would cancel the Trudeau government's capital gains tax cuts and limit the size of the government's workforce.

He proposed a softer, more familiar version of the campaign trajectory, but Mr. Carney is known to be a nonsense technocrat and sometimes to take on a much more nasty attitude.

“I say this,” Sidal said, “He will not suffer from fools.”