Source
Article by Sasha Yusufali, a 2L at Columbia Law School.
Source
Article by Sasha Yusufali, a 2L at Columbia Law School.
Mark Joseph Carney, OC, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, economist, banker, civil servant (born 16 March 1965 in Fort Smith, NWT). He was the second-youngest person to assume the top job at the Bank of Canada when he took office in 2008. In 2014, he was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada.
Education
Like his two brothers, Mark Carney attended Harvard University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics in 1988. Following a stint at investment firm Goldman Sachs, he returned to school at England's Oxford University earning a master's degree and a doctorate in economics, in 1993 and 1995 respectively.
Rejoining Goldman Sachs upon graduation, Carney rose through the ranks to become the firm's Toronto-based Managing Director, Investment Banking in 2002.
Career Highlights
Mark Carney's career as a civil servant began in August 2003 when he successfully applied to become one of the Bank of Canada's four deputy governors. Thirteen months into the position, Carney was appointed (on a secondment basis) to be the senior associate deputy minister in the Department of Finance. In this function he represented Canada's finance interests at G7 meetings and oversaw the sell-off of the government's stake in Petro-Canada.
Turning down opportunities to become the deputy minister in two government departments, Carney returned to the Bank of Canada in November 2007 as Advisor to the Governor, having been tapped for the top job one month earlier.
Mark Carney was the eighth Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, and throughout the Great Recession. As such, he was the second-youngest person to assume the top job at the Bank, after Graham F. Towers, the bank's first governor. In 2011, Carney was named head of the Financial Stability Board, an organization based in Basel, Switzerland, that was set up to recommend strategies for stabilizing the world's banking systems following the global monetary crisis.
In his position as Governor of the Bank of Canada, Carney received widespread praise and a high public profile. In 2009, Britain's Financial Times named him one of the 50 international figures who would "frame the way forward" and was selected by Time in 2010 as on the 100 most influential people in the world. In 2012 he was selected for the prestigious position of head of the Bank of England. He took over the job in June 2013, making him the 120th governor and the first non-British governor of the Bank.
In 2020, Mark Carney became head of transition investing at the Canadian-American firm Brookfield Asset Management, as well as the United Nations’ Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. He is notably responsible for the formation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) during the COP26 climate conference. In 2024, Carney is named special advisor for the Liberal Party of Canada’s economic growth task force.
On 9 March 2025, Mark Carney is elected by the Liberal Party of Canada to replace Justin Trudeau as head of the party. March 14, 2025 was his appointment as prime minister of Canada.
Honours
Mark Carney was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 2014.