By Lori Turnbull

September 22, 2025

After a career that was launched from the influence incubator of Oxford and has spanned global-Goldman Sachs, two G7 central banks and the United Nations climate brain trust, Prime Minister Mark Carney has friends in high places.

Carney’s work in the public sector might give the impression that he’s a “process guy,” but Carney governs through relationships, not process. As soon as he was sworn in as prime minister, he flew to Europe to meet with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron. The ease with which these meetings were arranged gave the sense that he had other G7 leaders on speed dial even before he became prime minister, which was quite likely the case.

King Charles accepted his invitation to open Canada’s Parliament and deliver the Speech from the Throne. Prime Minister Carney’s friendship with Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been instrumental in smoothing intergovernmental relations at a complex time. Even Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is singing Carney’s praises. Both premiers have been effusive about how much things have changed for the positive since Prime Minister Carney took office.

The prime minister is attracted to executive-style meetings where agreements are hammered out between decision-makers. Again, he’s all about results, not process. But now that Parliament is back, Prime Minister Carney must turn some attention to another relationship: the one between himself and the Liberal caucus, including his cabinet.

This relationship won’t be about making deals. Relationships between leaders and their partisan colleagues in the House of Commons are about shared responsibility, communication, support, accountability, expectations management, and, most of all, loyalty.

While the prime minister can count on some degree of devotion from his colleagues for having spared the party from all-but-assured electoral defeat, this won’t be enough to keep caucus happy in the long run — particularly as they will be expected to deliver messages of austerity on the doorsteps of anxious Canadians after the November 4 federal budget.

As prime ministers have learned for more than 150 years, a few of them the hard way, caucus relations are the exigency of leadership most likely to sneak up and bite you in the ass. Prime Minister Carney would do well to ensure that caucus management remains a top priority for him. Otherwise, discontent could fester  and by the time it becomes an outbreak, it could be too late to fix.

Like his predecessor, Carney became leader of the Liberal Party at a time when the party needed to be rescued. The Liberal Party was on the ropes until Justin Trudeau stepped aside to clear a path for Carney. Timing is everything in politics and, given the circumstances back in March with respect to the trade and tariff war with U.S. President Donald Trump and the fact that Carney needed both a mandate from Canadians and a seat in the House of Commons, he really had no choice but to call an election right away.

As a feature of this sequence, he inherited a caucus. Those candidates nominated after Carney took office did not have enough time to build a relationship with him. There are exceptions that prove the rule, most notably Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson who worked with Carney at Goldman Sachs and the Bank of Canada. The newly announced departures of Bill Blair and Jonathan Wilkinson will create some opportunities for the prime minister to bring in more people who are close to him. But building caucus loyalty through attrition takes too long.

As prime ministers have learned for more than 150 years, a few of them the hard way, caucus relations are the exigency of leadership most likely to sneak up and bite you in the ass.

When Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader in April of 2013, he had more time and space to make the party his own before the election in October of 2015. His first caucus had only 34 Liberal Members of Parliament — including himself — which was the worst seat count the Party had ever seen. But the silver lining for Trudeau and the team around him was that they were given the opportunity to revive the Liberal project by recreating it in his image. He infused it with his progressive values and persuaded friends and acquaintances who shared his vision to run as candidates.

The result was a high degree of values-based cohesion within the Liberal caucus, but the party was no longer the Liberal Party of Paul Martin, Jean Chretien, and the stream of Liberal Prime Ministers before them. Justin Trudeau replaced the old brokerage party with a progressive centre-left movement.

But Mark Carney is a different leader in a different context. He is laser focused on the economy. Politically, he’s often described as a Red Tory. There is reason to believe that a good number of caucus members have closer values alignment with Trudeau than they do with Carney. We can already see the signs of that, with some Liberal members forming an environmental caucus in an effort to ensure, as one MP put it, that Prime Minister Carney “remains true to his values” as an environmentalist, indeed, a former UN envoy on climate action and finance.

This suggests that the caucus members see a role for themselves in holding their boss to account. Constitutionally speaking, this is always the role of governing caucus members because they are part of the legislative branch, but it’s unusual for them to say it out loud – even if not for attribution. It suggests a distance between the leader and the caucus and a sense that at least some caucus members don’t know Carney well enough to trust what he will do next.

To give another example, his decision to invite Kevin Roberts, creator of the far-right US policy manifesto Project 2025, to speak at a cabinet retreat may have raised more concern about Carney’s ability to triage bad advice than about his politics, but either way, it did not go over well with some caucus members. The Roberts appearance was cancelled.

Carney’s cabinet is a combination of newbies and ministers who served in the Trudeau government. Frankly, it’s not clear how devoted he is to this group. The fact that he did not write mandate letters to each one individually but instead issued one letter for everyone consisting of seven bullet points suggested that he did not bother to write a job description for each minister or to think through what role they would play in furthering his agenda.

To build up relationships with his caucus members, it would be a good idea for Carney to include them in his vision and strategy. This could mean working groups that contribute to strategic planning. When Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Finance Minister Paul Martin were delivering their own cuts and austerity measures, he made sure that the Program Review Committee, which was responsible for deciding what to cut, had heavy representation from the left wing of the caucus. This helped to prevent alienation and rupture in the team and made the different factions in the party feel included.

For Brian Mulroney, who came to the Tory leadership in 1983 with a remote version of caucus relations already mastered from Montreal, there was no new information about any caucus member too obscure or minute to escape his interest.

Mulroney, who took the pre-emptive approach to caucus relations of dousing sparks before they could become infernos, knew whose wife was pregnant, who was having financial difficulties, and where the potential trouble spots were. And his famous telephone game was put to use daily in reaching out to backbenchers. It did not prevent every scandal and controversy, but not for lack of attention.

Carney would do well to study both Trudeau’s caucus relations trajectory and Mulroney’s. Trudeau built a caucus by rebuilding the party, so his coattails bred loyalty that lasted for nearly a decade, until the polls ate his coattails and they didn’t.

Mulroney was swept into power in 1984 with the largest majority and therefore largest caucus in history, at 211 members. Caucus relations were as much a matter of crowd control as handholding in the first year of his mandate. But he is still remembered as the PM with the best record on caucus relations.

Both prime ministers offer examples both useful and cautionary. And as a transplant from C-suite culture, Carney will appreciate the value of best-practices research.

Policy Contributing Writer Lori Turnbull is a Senior Advisor at the Institute on Governance.