On March 9, Mark Carney was elected to replace outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the new leader of Canada’s governing Liberal Party. He won by an overwhelming margin, securing more than 85% of the total votes cast by party members. 

As a result of the victory, Carney will become Canada’s prime minister as soon as he is sworn into office on Friday by Canadian Governor General Mary Simon. 

Throughout his professional life Carney has been regarded as a proponent of globalism, which advocates for international economic and political institutions and strategies rather than an exclusive or primary reliance on national actions. Now installed as Canada’s national leader, political pundits predict he will call a snap election before the end of the month, in hopes of capitalizing on the recent surge of popularity the governing Liberals have experienced since President Donald Trump last month announced the imposition of steep tariffs against Canadian imports.

Here are nine things to know about the man who is about to become Canada’s 24th prime minister:

1. He is a Catholic.

Mark Carney was born March 16, 1965, into a Catholic family in the remote Canadian community of Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, where his father was the principal of a local high school at which his mother was also a teacher. 

The family subsequently moved to the city of Edmonton while Carney was still a young child, and his father, who was now a professor of education at the University of Alberta, became a prominent member of the province’s Catholic community. 

Carney graduated from Edmonton’s St. Francis Xavier High School, where he reportedly “loved hockey, the Edmonton Oilers, and school” and was awarded a scholarship to Harvard. He has remained publicly committed to his Catholic faith throughout his adult life. In 2015, during the period he served as governor of the Bank of England, he was named Britain’s “most influential Catholic” by The Tablet, a progressive U.K. Catholic newspaper.

2. He has lifelong ties to the Liberal Party he now leads.

While Carney advertised himself as a “political outsider” during his successful campaign to succeed Trudeau, he actually has long-standing personal and family ties to Canada’s center-left Liberal Party. 

Carney’s father was an unsuccessful Liberal parliamentary candidate in the 1980s; the Liberal Party recruited Carney to public service from the private sector in the early 2000s; it was widely reported that he was considering a run for the Liberal Party leadership in 2012 before Trudeau decided to enter that race himself; Trudeau appointed him as a special economic adviser following his return from the U.K. to Canada in 2020; and Trudeau planned to appoint him as finance minister late last year — a politically disastrous move that provoked then-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to resign in protest and led directly to Trudeau’s subsequent decision to resign as prime minister. 

3. He is a graduate of both Harvard and Oxford, and his first career was as an investment banker with U.S.-based Goldman Sachs.

Embarking on a globalist and elite trajectory right from the start of his adult life, Carney graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and continued his studies at England’s Oxford University, obtaining two post-graduate degrees in economics. 

While at Oxford, he met his future wife, Diana Fox, a native of England who is also an economist specializing in climate-change policy. The couple married in 1994 and have four adult daughters. Diana currently works for the Eurasia Group, a political advisory organization, alongside Trudeau’s former chief political adviser Gerald Butts.

Recruited by Goldman Sachs following his graduation from Harvard, Carney worked in the London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto offices of the prestigious Wall Street investment bank for a total of 13 years before abandoning that lucrative career to join Canada’s public service in 2003. 

4. He served as governor of the central banks of both Canada and the U.K.

In 2003, Carney was named as deputy governor of the Bank of Canada by the Liberal federal government that was then in power. Subsequently appointed as the central bank’s governor by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Carney earned widespread praise for swiftly cutting interest rates in the wake of the September 2008 global financial crash.

During Carney’s leadership campaign, however, Harper publicly took issue with Carney’s claims that he deserved primary credit for Canada’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. “I have listened, with increasing disbelief, to Mark Carney’s attempts to take credit for things he had little or nothing to do with back then,” Harper said.

Carney resigned as the Bank of Canada’s governor in 2013 and was appointed almost immediately to the same role with the Bank of England, becoming the first foreigner to ever hold that post. As in Canada, few questioned Carney’s economic competence during his Bank of England tenure, but his public comments about the potential negative impacts of the U.K.’s “Brexit” from the European Union drew widespread criticism that he was improperly meddling in a sensitive political matter.

5. He currently serves as the U.N.’s special envoy for climate action and finance. 

Shortly before leaving the Bank of England in March 2020, Carney burnished his globalist credentials with a continuing United Nations appointment that commissions him to map out “net-zero climate solutions,” intended to accomplish future economic growth without increasing the carbon emissions that many scientists believe are the cause of destructive global warming. 

According to an article titled “The Catholic or the Davos Man?” published by The Catholic Register, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Toronto, Carney’s “Wikipedia page reads as a curriculum vitae of a globalizing elite.”

“Carney is the United Nations special envoy on climate finance, co-chair for the Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), on the advisory board chair for the progressive think tank Canada 2020 and on the foundation board of the World Economic Forum,” the article points out. “The list goes on: chair of the Group of Thirty, a member of the boards of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Harvard University Overseers and The Rideau Hall Foundation.” 

Carney and his wife relocated in 2020 back to full-time residence in Canada, in the home the Carneys had continued to own in Ottawa’s upscale Rockcliffe Park neighborhood close to the Canadian Parliament. But in another indication of his continuing multinational identity, Carney currently holds Irish and British citizenship, as well as Canadian citizenship. He has pledged to renounce both foreign citizenships, but some observers have questioned the depth of his Canadian patriotism in light of his readiness to acquire them earlier.

6. He is a member of the Vatican’s Council on Inclusive Capitalism. 

Following his departure from the Bank of England, in late 2020 Carney was appointed to the Vatican’s newly formed “inclusive capitalism” council. 

Carney’s 2021 book Values: Building a Better World for All begins with an anecdote about a lunch he attended a few years earlier at the Vatican, which Pope Francis unexpectedly joined in order to colorfully urge the participants to find ways to strengthen the moral foundation of economic activity. He credits the Pope’s luncheon challenge “to turn the market back to humanity” as the inspiration for writing his book.

7. His top political priority is “50 shades of green” climate activism.

In his public writings and speeches, Carney identifies climate change as an existential threat that must be met by a fundamental reorientation of all economic policies. In a BBC-sponsored lecture that he delivered in 2020, he credited 16-year-old Greta Thunberg’s 2018 U.N. address with cementing his convictions that immediate and sweeping changes are required. “With the clarity and certainty of youth, Greta Thunberg was telling us that we were failing,” he said.

To address this existential crisis, Carney believes policymakers must establish a comprehensive framework of market-based instruments that will guide individuals and companies to embrace net-zero solutions in every economic context. 

“It’s important to recognize that a whole economy transition isn’t only about funding deep green activities, or blacklisting dark brown ones,” Carney asserted in his lecture. “We need 50 shades of green to catalyze and support all companies moving towards net zero.”

Employing rhetoric patterned on John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 inaugural address, Carney also stressed the need to subordinate national interests to the global imperative of saving the planet from impending ecological calamity. “Ask not what the climate is doing to your country, but what your country can do for the climate,” he declared.

Alongside the climate issue, in his book Values, Carney identifies the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID pandemic as the two other major recent international events that have collectively demonstrated the shortcomings of the “market fundamentalism” that occurs “when the belief in the power of the market enters the realm of faith.”

8. He spoke out forcefully in favor of legal abortion on the day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

Despite his reported commitment to his Catholic faith and his publicly stated admiration for Pope Francis, who has repeatedly condemned abortion throughout his pontificate, Carney is a vociferous supporter of legal abortion.

“I’m proud to live in a country where a woman’s right to choose is so strongly supported,” he wrote on X on June 24, 2022. “But the devastating decision today in the US is a clear reminder that progress should never be taken for granted. Our commitment to protecting fundamental rights must be unwavering.” 

9. He has committed to fighting aggressively against the steep tariffs Trump has imposed against Canadian imports.

As the U.S. and Canada continue to exchange trade salvos in the wake of President Trump’s commitment to impose high tariffs, Carney has stated that he won’t back down.

“President Trump’s latest tariffs are an attack on Canadian workers, families, and businesses,” he said March 11 on X. “My government will ensure our response has maximum impact in the US and minimal impact here in Canada, while supporting the workers impacted. My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect and make credible, reliable commitments to free and fair trade.”