Mark Carney, who has never held elected office but has a long résumé in economic policymaking and investing, was sworn in Friday morning as Canada’s 24th prime minister. He will have no time to ease into his role.
Canada is experiencing a period of severe instability as its relationship with its closest ally, the United States, has been plunged into an extraordinary crisis since President Trump was elected and began unleashing attacks on its economy and sovereignty.
Mr. Carney will attempt to negotiate with Mr. Trump, who has unfurled a slew of tariffs and threats on Canada including a desire to take over the country entirely, while simultaneously heading straight into a campaign for a federal election.
He does not hold a seat in Parliament, and his party controls only a minority of the seats in the House of Commons, which means he has little choice but to immediately call for a federal election, likely to take place by May.
Mr. Carney, who turns 60 on Sunday, replaces Justin Trudeau who led Canada for nearly a decade. He was elected as Liberal Party leader on Sunday by some 152,000 members of the party, securing 86 percent of the vote.
In a traditional ceremony that involved pledging allegiance to King Charles III, Mr. Carney was sworn in by Mary Simon, Canada’s governor-general, who represents the king as the official head of state. Ms. Simon is the first Indigenous person to serve in that role.
Mr. Carney, speaking to reporters after he was sworn in, called Mr. Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state “crazy.”
He has no plans for now, he said, to meet with Mr. Trump. Instead, his focus will be on strengthening Canada’s economy against trade threats.
“We know that by building together, we can give ourselves far more than anyone else can take away,” he said.
Mr. Carney had served as governor of the Bank of Canada during the global financial crisis of 2008 and later as governor of the Bank of England — the first and, so far, only foreigner to be hired to the job — from 2013 and through the Brexit transition.
Before becoming a central banker, he worked at Goldman Sachs for more than 10 years. Since leaving the Bank of England he has served in top positions on corporate boards and has emerged as a key global advocate for green investment.
Mr. Carney has made it clear that he plans to continue taking a hard line against Mr. Trump, while also trying to reach a trade deal with the president. Canada has applied two rounds of retaliatory tariffs against U.S. exports and said it was prepared to do more.
“My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect — and make credible, reliable commitments to free and fair trade,” he told the party faithful in Ottawa on Sunday as he accepted the role of party leadership.
And in a sign that he is looking for new best friends for Canada now that its relationship with the United States is badly frayed, his first overseas visits will be to London and Paris.
Dealing with the complex problems that Mr. Trump’s statehood threats and tariffs create for Canada will leave little time for anything else, but Mr. Carney has made policy promises that suggest he is a centrist.
He has vowed to introduce an era of fiscal prudence and to cut taxes, while leveraging his business experience to help Canada attract investments that can help boost the country’s economy.
Mr. Carney will also need to turn his attention to pressing domestic issues, like a persistent high cost of living and the effects of record immigration that spurred Mr. Trudeau’s resignation.
But the economic fallout from the suite of tariff measures imposed by Mr. Trump, will dominate Mr. Carney’s first days in office.
He will need to try to stop Mr. Trump from bringing in fresh surcharges on more Canadian goods as he has threatened. Economists say they expect that the current measures taken against Canada by the U.S. administration, as well as the slowdown in investment that comes from the uncertainty around what will happen next, will hurt the Canadian economy and could push it into a recession.
Then there is the looming election. Mr. Carney will need to prove that despite never having run for political office, he is still the best person for the job, not just to a group of party members who broadly agree with him but to the entire electorate.
In the federal election he will face off against Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader who has helped his party gain a robust lead in public opinion polls and collect almost double the amount of fund-raising dollars as the Liberals in 2024.
Mr. Trump’s arrival in the White House, however, has upended the political landscape.
A lifelong politician who knows how to deliver a punchy slogan, Mr. Poilievre, 45, is trying to pivot his messaging, political analysts say, to position himself as the strongest candidate to take on Washington, while not alienating pro-Trump conservatives in Canada.
Mr. Poilievre’s main angle of attack had long been to present Canadians with all the ways that the Liberal Party had “broken” Canada, with a focus on crime, housing prices, an unpopular consumer carbon tax and a surge in immigration.
But Mr. Trump’s ascent and his attitude toward Canada, coupled with the resignation of Mr. Trudeau, who had become deeply unpopular, have nearly evaporated the Conservatives’ lead in a remarkable reversal.
Several recent opinion polls have shown that, under Mr. Carney’s leadership, the Liberals would have a chance of eking out a victory.
From his expansive qualifications in the finance world, there’s little doubt of Mr. Carney’s ability to get his message across in a boardroom or a monetary policy meeting. In his central banking roles he was often seen as being sermonic, and at times dismissive of the news media.
But he’ll need to find a common touch and a different level of engagement to be able to campaign effectively.
Mr. Carney’s challenge will be to quickly master “retail politics” — the art of energizing a room with a speech, making individual supporters feel important and heard and finding a way to engage with the news media that gets his point across clearly, said Fen Hampson, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“Those glad-handing skills do not come automatically to someone who’s spent his life being a banker,” Mr. Hampson said. “His Achilles’ heel is that his communication skills and his retail politics skills are not finely honed yet.”
In forming a cabinet, Mr. Carney has maintained the roughly 50-50 split of men and women, a standard Mr. Trudeau set when announcing Canada’s first gender-balanced cabinet after he was elected in 2015.
The foreign minister, Melanie Joly, will remain in her position and Dominic LeBlanc, a close friend of Mr. Trudeau, will be the new minister of international trade, taking a central role in tariff discussions along with the new finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne.
The former finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, who was the runner-up in the Liberal leadership race, will remain in the cabinet as minister of transport and internal trade.
