Liberal Leader Mark Carney greets patrons at a restaurant during a federal election campaign stop in Port Colborne, Ont., on April 18.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
In the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark Carney was the chief capital wrangler for a novel product marketed by Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. BAM-T In theory, his job was simple: persuade top financial executives to pour billions of dollars into a promised boom in renewable-energy and green-technology investments. In practice, it involved cajoling, hand-holding and decoding climate finance for some of the most sophisticated money managers in the world.
As Brookfield’s head of transition investing, the former central banker wanted investors that own a broad array of companies and critical infrastructure – including big carbon emitters – to pool a chunk of their money in a fund devoted to driving a transition to a cleaner global economy. Brookfield would invest the money in technologies such as carbon capture and storage, solar power and batteries, even nuclear services.
Flanked by the CEO of Brookfield’s renewables arm, Connor Teskey, Mr. Carney chaired the high-level meetings to pore over issues of risk management and asset selection with senior investors from Toronto to Singapore.
His message to managers of trillions of dollars of capital was that a generational, lucrative opportunity was staring them in the face: They could make real money by financing necessary changes for the planet, but they needed to get on board and they had to go big.
Best known as a central banker and crisis manager, Mr. Carney’s credibility also came from a business career that spanned investment banking, regulation, risk management and investing. Those roles helped harden his reputation with business and government leaders for being smart and practical, and for marrying a nuts-and-bolts understanding of markets with economic principles.
On Wall Street, or at the offices of a sovereign wealth fund in Dubai, that played well, and helped make him an effective fundraiser. At a moment of enormous uncertainty when big investors were gripping their purse strings tightly, Mr. Carney won them over.
By 2022, the Brookfield Global Transition Fund raised and invested a total of US$15-billion, with major financial commitments from anchor investors that included Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Singaporean state-owned fund Temasek Holdings Ltd. That made it the largest transition-focused fund in the world to that point.
“That $15-billion, when you think about impact, just to underscore it, we expect as that’s fully deployed that should deliver something north of 130 megatons of emissions avoided,” Mr. Carney said in a 2023 interview with The Globe and Mail – equivalent to the environmental output of New York, London and Singapore combined.
Over his career as a businessman and civil servant, Mr. Carney has assembled a high-flying résumé that underpins his reputation for hard-nosed competence, especially under pressure. After barely five weeks as Prime Minister and with election day approaching on April 28, he is running on the promise that his experience is what Canada needs now in its current moment of crisis as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens the country and attempts to remake the global economy.
The Liberal Leader’s credentials in the top echelons of business and finance help put daylight between him and his unpopular predecessor, the social-minded Justin Trudeau, and his main rival, Pierre Poilievre, the rare Conservative leader who has largely shunned the country’s business elite.
Politics is a messier arena than orderly corporate corner offices or the hallowed halls of central banks. His opponents have used his sterling credentials to cast him as a cardinal member of a cohort of global elites, and a booster of politically toxic policies such as carbon pricing.
The question confronting business leaders and voters is whether he can work the levers of government to push his plans through Parliament, and reshape his own caucus with a sharper economic focus.
He has pushed hard for ideals such as the urgency of confronting climate change, but switched gears when policies and alliances to pursue those goals weren’t working. He has shown a talent for convening power brokers and finding common ground, but also led institutions that prize consensus with tighter control and a strong hand.
Business leaders describe him as “pragmatic” and “practical” ad nauseam. He has also been hands-on, where some central bankers prefer to float above the fray. That has opened the door to criticism that he has at times been too political, or pushed an agenda to decarbonize economies too hard.
One key question when he joined Brookfield, which manages US$1-trillion, was how much his role would be opening doors and glad-handing, and how much he would roll up his sleeves and get involved day to day. But he played a role in operations from the start, three sources with direct knowledge of his work said.
The Globe and Mail spoke to more than a dozen people who have known and worked closely with Mr. Carney, and is not identifying some of them as they are not authorized to speak candidly about him during the election campaign.
Mr. Carney’s campaign declined to comment for this story.
The groundwork for Brookfield’s first transition fund was grunt work. Mr. Carney said he joined video call after call, staring at a mosaic of pixelated faces as he huddled virtually with Mr. Teskey and a few dozen staff at Brookfield. They hammered out the transition strategy, how to measure it, and how to pitch it to investors bound by a fiduciary duty to earn returns for clients.
“It’s orders of magnitude bigger than any other impact fund that had been put together. We’re putting together a new team across multiple continents. And it’s effectively done through Webex,” Mr. Carney said.
The ability to pull that off, even in a global pandemic, was part of what created high demand for Mr. Carney in the corporate world after he left central banking.
Mark Carney speaks with an employee while touring the factory floor with Paul Le Houillier, President of Nova Bus, before making an announcement during his Liberal Party election campaign tour at Nova Bus, in Saint-Eustache, Que., on April 15.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
At around 8:45 on the morning of June 24, 2016, Mr. Carney stepped in front of a television camera set up outside his office at the Bank of England. Then-prime minister David Cameron had just resigned. The pound was tumbling in Asian markets.
Hours before, the British electorate had voted to leave the European Union.
“Some market and economic volatility can be expected as this process unfolds. But we are well prepared for this,” said Mr. Carney, then the central bank’s governor, looking directly into the camera.
He outlined the steps that the Bank of England had taken to shore up the financial system ahead of the Brexit referendum, ensuring banks had sufficient cash and liquid assets on hand to manage market swings or bank runs. The central bank, he said, stood ready to provide £250-billion of emergency funding to ensure banks kept lending, and would “not hesitate to take any additional measures required.”
The short, four-minute address, is widely regarded as the crucial moment of Mr. Carney’s tenure at the Bank of England.
“He went in front of the British people … and basically said there’s a pilot in the plane,” Sir Jon Cunliffe, former deputy governor at the Bank of England who oversaw financial stability during Mr. Carney’s term, said in an interview. “That morning, it was a really important statement in shaping people’s expectations, particularly in markets, about what is going to happen next.”
Mr. Carney’s calling card in this election is experience as a crisis manager at a time of extraordinary upheaval brought on by Mr. Trump’s aggressive protectionism. And there’s no question that his career as a civil servant was defined by one economic crisis after another, which he had to manage and clean up after.
The first came in the summer of 2007, when an obscure corner of Canadian finance started going haywire.
Today, the Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) crisis in Canada is little more than a footnote on the global financial crisis. But in 2007, the $32-billion market for short-term Canadian debt, backed by a bundle of assets such as credit-card receivables and subprime mortgages, nearly blew a hole in the global financial system.
As happened a year later in the United States and Europe, investors got spooked about the quality of the assets underlying the paper they held. So long as the flow of payments backing the assets looked solid, there was no reason to worry. But questions about the quality of underlying mortgages created a sudden crisis of confidence. Prices plunged, investors couldn’t unload what were meant to be highly liquid assets, and issuers were unable to raise money to meet margin calls.
To prevent outright market failure, the Bank of Canada, Department of Finance and major investors, including the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, agreed to hit a giant pause button, effectively putting the entire market into a deep freeze until the value of the assets could be re-established.
The move was “so extraordinary that I still cannot fully believe it happened,” Mr. Carney, who was senior associate deputy minister at the Department of Finance at the time, wrote in his 2021 book Value(s).
Mr. Carney had the task of untangling the mess, and spent the next 18 months helping restructure the toxic assets and persuading investors to accept a deal. In the end, investors walked away with around 90 cents on the dollar, and no banks failed in the process.
Former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, who first brought Mr. Carney to the Bank of Canada in 2003, contends that it was the finest chapter of Mr. Carney’s Canadian career.
“He did a good job managing the [2008] crisis, and I would say did an outstanding job in getting the resolution of the ABCP crisis,” Mr. Dodge told The Globe.
By the time Wall Street banks started toppling in the fall of 2008, Mr. Carney had become Governor of the Bank of Canada.
The most visible role of central banks is monetary policy: Setting interest rates to manage inflation. But they also play a crucial role as “lenders of last resort” during financial crises.
It was in this role that Mr. Carney, working with his counterparts at the U.S. Federal Reserve, Bank of England, European Central Bank and other major central banks, rolled out a dizzying array of support measures in the days and weeks after the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers.
The Bank of Canada lent money to Canadian financial institutions, purchased assets and set up swap lines with other central banks, to ensure that Canadian banks had access to foreign currencies if needed. It also slashed interest rates. When the bank’s policy rate couldn’t go any lower, Mr. Carney started using “forward guidance,” a novel tactic aimed at lowering longer-term interest rates by outlining the path for monetary policy.
Mr. Carney’s experience during the crisis has become a topic of debate in the election campaign, with former prime minister Stephen Harper saying that Mr. Carney has overstated the role he played, stealing valour from the late Jim Flaherty, who was finance minister at the time. Mr. Carney has shot back, saying that Mr. Harper asked him to succeed Mr. Flaherty in that role.
Mr. Dodge said that Mr. Flaherty and the federal government took the lead digging the Canadian economy out of a hole, starting with their expansionary budget in early 2009. But Mr. Carney was in the pilot’s seat in the fall of 2008, shoring up a teetering financial system at a time when Canada’s politicians were fighting a federal election and bickering over the issue of prorogation. And monetary policy supported fiscal policy during the recovery.
“He had a difficult job to do and he did the job well,” Mr. Dodge said.
Over the following years, Mr. Carney took a lead role recalibrating the global financial system that had failed so dramatically. In 2011, he became chair of the Financial Stability Board, the group of finance ministers and central bankers from around the world who had the job of coming up with stricter rules for commercial banks, including higher capital requirements and larger liquidity buffers.
These changes sometimes put him at odds with Wall Street. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jaimie Dimon famously accused Mr. Carney of being “anti-American” in a closed-door meeting of bankers that leaked to the press.
“Generally, he wasn’t somebody who was in awe of people who are moving money around, because that was his world,” said Tim Lane, a former deputy governor at the Bank of Canada, who worked alongside Mr. Carney on the post-crisis financial reforms. And while Mr. Carney’s efforts “didn’t always make him the most popular with those people, I think he did get a lot of respect.”
By 2012, Mr. Carney had caught the eye of George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. After an extended courtship – sweetened by a £480,000-a-year pay package, plus a hefty housing allowance – Mr. Carney became the first non-British governor in the Bank of England’s 400-year history.
Mr. Carney’s tenure was defined by change and turbulence, and his performance has invited mixed – often highly partisan – reviews.
He generally earned high marks from economists and the financial press for making the Bank of England more transparent and strengthening the country’s banking system. But he was criticized at times for sending mixed signals to financial markets, earning the label “unreliable boyfriend” from Labour MP Pat McFadden for promising to increase interest rates if unemployment fell below a certain level then failing to do so.
It was Brexit that made him a political lightning rod. Both before and after the referendum, the Bank of England published forecasts showing that leaving the European Union posed a major downside risk to the British economy. Mr. Carney spoke openly about the risks of a messy departure.
This made him Public Enemy Number One for the Brexiteers. It also proved controversial within the central-banking community, with some worrying that Mr. Carney was putting the central bank’s independence at risk. “It saddens me to see the Bank of England unnecessarily drawn into this project,” Mervyn King, Mr. Carney’s predecessor at the Bank of England, wrote in a 2018 opinion article.
“I think he did aggravate the tensions a bit,” said Tony Yates, an economist who previously worked at the Bank of England and as a professor at the University of Birmingham. “You can’t help make implicit remarks about Brexit, but he stepped a bit beyond that in some of the material that he got the bank to write … it was almost calculated to incite hostility from the Brexit side.”
The Bank of England, at Mr. Carney’s direction, started preparing for the possibility of a Leave vote months ahead of the referendum, said Sir Jon, the former BoE deputy governor. That meant ensuring financial institutions had sufficient liquidity, emergency lending programs were in place and necessary legislation had been passed in Parliament to prevent the banking system from tripping over legal snags.
Then came the moment of truth, when Mr. Carney stepped in front of the camera the morning after the Brexit vote. “You have to speak with authority. You have to know what you’re talking about,” Sir Jon said. “But you also have to have war-gamed and prepared, and be ready.”
The Liberal Party leader greets supporters as he arrives for a televised English language debate in Montreal, on April 17.Evan Buhler/Reuters
By the time Mr. Carney had left central banking, Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt was plotting the investment giant’s next big business.
Brookfield has never been shy about investing in carbon-heavy sectors – earlier this month it struck a US$9-billion deal to buy the owner of the Colonial Pipeline in the U.S. But Mr. Flatt was certain that decarbonization would become a major lever for economic growth and a pillar of a changing global economy, requiring trillions of dollars in new investment.
He set his sights on Mr. Carney, who saw the same opportunity, as the person with the bona fides and know-how to make Brookfield a front-runner in transition investing.
The competition to land Mr. Carney – and his hard-to-match Rolodex – was intense. One of Brookfield’s largest U.S. rivals, Blackstone Inc. BX-N, also pursued him, betting that he could open virtually any door, with corporate CEOs, government leaders or top regulators around the world.
Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman later conceded Brookfield scored a coup by landing Mr. Carney, two sources said.
Mr. Carney’s early career, when he spent more than a decade at Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs, reassured fellow business leaders that he approached his work with a commercial mindset. His roles at the bank often bumped up against geopolitics as he worked on projects in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, and on Canadian files such as Ontario’s attempted privatization of power utility Hydro One.
He was co-head of sovereign risk, managing the bank’s exposure to debt issued by countries going through major change. As executive director of emerging debt capital markets, he advised companies and governments in developing economies on buying and selling debt. And he was exposed to large corporations as a managing director in investment banking.
What he took from that experience, business leaders say, was a keen understanding of how markets function – in times of calm and crisis.
“He was both an economist and understood how markets operate, how they work, what levers you can pull,” Gord Nixon, the former Royal Bank of Canada CEO who was in frequent contact with Mr. Carney through the global financial crisis, said in an interview.
Mr. Carney’s job at Brookfield was the centrepiece of a constellation of prestigious roles he took on, some of which came through a close partnership with billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
Mr. Carney took over from Mr. Bloomberg as the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, and the two men co-chaired the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ).
Late in the summer of 2023, Mr. Bloomberg tapped Mr. Carney to chair an overhauled board of Bloomberg LP, the financial data and media empire that is facing important strategic changes. Mr. Carney briefly played a central role in planning for the company’s future.
Mr. Carney also had less-demanding roles as a board member at digital-payments processor Stripe and on the global advisory board of fixed-income investment giant PIMCO.
Mr. Carney’s compensation in his various jobs was not disclosed, but it is fair to say he earned millions of dollars working in the private sector. His Brookfield stock options were worth US$6.8-million at the end of last year. Mr. Carney and two other top Brookfield executives were paid a total of US$4-million in base salaries and US$3.5-million in cash bonuses in 2024, company filings show, but Mr. Carney’s share of those sums is unclear.
When he became Prime Minister, Mr. Carney put his assets, aside from some cash and real estate, in a blind trust to comply with ethics rules. But his political rivals have pressed him to be more transparent about what he owns, raising questions about potential conflicts of interest.
After Brookfield spun off its core asset-manager business as a separate company late in 2021, Brookfield made Mr. Carney chair of a new board of directors for Brookfield Asset Management. Brookfield’s existing board of directors remained intact at parent company Brookfield Corp.
Mr. Carney’s political opponents have cited that board leadership role to link him to any number of Brookfield’s business activities, from investments in rental housing to using entities in tax havens such as Bermuda.
One line of attack has focused on Brookfield Asset Management’s decision to move its headquarters from Toronto to New York last year – at least on paper. It was a technical change to help Brookfield qualify for inclusion in major U.S. stock indexes, exposing its shares to a larger pool of investors. Brookfield is still incorporated in Canada.
Mr. Carney’s opponents accused him of helping Brookfield flee Canada and move jobs to the U.S. Brookfield said that is false – New York was already the company’s largest office, and the company made no changes to operations or staffing, according to company statements. While Mr. Carney approved changes in his role as board chair, it was Mr. Flatt, the CEO, and his key lieutenants making strategic calls for Brookfield.
Mr. Carney focused mostly on transition investing, which he framed as a “climate imperative.” Senior business leaders think he is sincere in his convictions about climate – which, for some, raises questions about how committed he would be to fossil-fuel projects such as building new pipelines as Prime Minister.
But they also say he is practical about how to attack the climate challenge.
“He’s been a pretty pragmatic sustainable finance advocate,” said Ryan Riordan, director of research for the Institute for Sustainable Finance and a business professor at Queen’s University. “He hasn’t been someone who’s pushed too hard in ideological directions.”
He has also walked away from initiatives that don’t have a clear path to succeed.
As an example, business leaders cite his effort to unite the world’s largest financial companies on net-zero targets through GFANZ. Four years ago, he rallied Wall Street and Bay Street, persuading wary banks, insurers and investment companies to sign on. But as the tide has started to turn against green initiatives, many of those top financial institutions dropped out – including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Canada’s Big Six banks.
As GFANZ came unravelled, Mr. Carney showed little desire to resuscitate an initiative that had already flatlined. As with federal consumer carbon pricing in Canada, he appears willing to walk away when there isn’t enough support to press on. To his critics, his position on carbon pricing was a flip-flop. To some business leaders, it was simply hard-headed.
So far, the pitch he made to Brookfield’s clients appears to have momentum, in spite of an ESG backlash. Brookfield is raising a second, larger transition fund that is expected to reach US$20-billion or more. And the asset manager has raised more than US$2.4-billion toward a US$5-billion Catalytic Transition Fund targeting clean-energy assets in emerging markets, anchored by an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates.
“I think we feel vindicated, validated in the strategy that we felt that we could create a tremendous amount of value by playing a role in helping to solve arguably our biggest challenge as a society,” Mr. Carney said in the 2023 interview.
“We go to the problems and we fix them.”