By Lisa Van Dusen

December 19, 2025

Given the economic and geopolitical events of the past year, it’s tempting to say that Mark Carney’s introduction to elected politics has been a baptism by fire. On closer inspection, it has really been defined by the kind of cosmic luck that most politicians can only dream of.

There’s no disputing that 2025 was an unprecedentedly disruptive year in the parade of unprecedentedly disruptive years that has defined this century. Much of this disruption has served to shift global power away from democracy and toward autocracy, including and most alarmingly in the world’s flagship democracy, the United States.

Politics has become a cartoon fight-cloud of narrative warfare, cancel culture, hypertactical shenanigans, preposterous covert operations, weaponized fictionalization, shameless propaganda, rampant means-to-an-endism, and zero-sum ruthlessness run amok.

Which was no field of clover for anyone to parachute into as a freshman political actor in 2025, no matter from whence he dropped. It was more like parachuting into occupied France in early 1944 with every expectation of getting shot down or blown into a massive tas de merde.

And yet, Carney, former darling of both The City and Fleet Street — from The Guardian in 2021: “Mark Carney is no ordinary banker. He is the banker’s banker, the superstar banker, the George Clooney of banking, possibly even the James Bond of banking” — had a relatively soft landing in prime ministerial politics, slipping in as he did under that punch pocket where Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau were sealing their own fates by trading blows over…him.

As is so often the way with such triangles, the two principal belligerents knocked each other out, and Carney prevailed in the subsequent Liberal leadership race, as he did in the general election campaign, as a voice of reason and paragon of technocratic chill.

Most significantly, Carney became, through a serendipitous confluence of timing and circumstance, the sole Canadian beneficiary of Donald Trump’s trade-war lunacy and threats to turn everything north of the 49th parallel into one, big gold-plated resource casino.

In no other contrast dynamic would Mark Carney’s attributes as a sane, lucid, compos mentis, economically fluent, unflappable wonk have been seized upon in the way that Trump-addled voters embraced him as prime minister in April.

As the contours of Carney’s relationship to political power have emerged over eight months of choices and outcomes, there is no doubt that Canada’s prime minister is a very smart man. The question Canadians may now have is whether he could be too smart for their own good.

Is he doing too much too soon? Does he understand the difference between the public sector, the private sector and the public private club of central banking? Does he know that moving fast and breaking things may not be as prudent a political philosophy as the more Obama-esque “Don’t do stupid s**t”?

Most significantly, Carney became, through a serendipitous confluence of timing and circumstance, the sole Canadian beneficiary of Donald Trump’s trade-war lunacy.

These concerns have registered in oddball ways, including lately in the line of questioning about the Tory defections that have inched Carney to one seat short of a majority.

The crucial matter of whether the defections will backfire among voters as evidence of Machiavellian gamesmanship has apparently put Carney in the unusual position of having to defend himself in the face of an influx of unprecedented political good fortune.

It could be the lucky break of opposition MPs disgruntled and repelling to refuge, evidence of his own leadership and what he describes as the attraction of Liberal policies, or a combination of both.

Whatever Newtonian laws of political physics are at play and pending credible reporting that Conservative MPs are being seduced across the floor with offers they can’t refuse, it would be absurd to expect Carney to spurn the defectors at the door.

Because that would be stupid. And nobody who makes their way from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories (far better known as the “Gateway to the Tundra!” than the gateway to Bilderberg) to Oxford to Threadneedle Street to the leadership of a G7 country is an idiot, no matter how large a horseshoe they may concealing or carrying.

The danger for Carney is that, at a time when the major democracies have each been besieged by their own norm-breaking narratives — from Trump to Brexit to multiple variations on the theme of performative populism — he risks being perceived as the Canadian version; democratic degradation by genius.

There are worse optics problems to have, especially when, in a dystopian thought experiment, most Canadians would prefer democracy degradation by genius than democracy degradation by Trumpian belligerence. That doesn’t diminish the hazard.

As an editor and columnist, I can safely say there is no single political quotation that I’ve either deployed or encountered more often than the one uttered by that otherwise unspectacular quote machine Harold Macmillan when asked to name the greatest challenge of statesmanship: “Events, dear boy, events.”

Macmillan, too, was smart enough to become prime minister, though not terribly lucky — in war, love, or politics.

In Carney’s case — from the harmonic convergence of variables that propelled him into office to the fortuitous foil of the vendetta henchman next door to the recent, possibly majority-making migration of Conservative MPs that will likely protect him from a snap election to the precarious incumbency of his principal domestic opponent — that exhausted Macmillan quote has been defibrillated for a new century.

Indeed, Mark Carney could accurately describe the key to his political success so far as “Events, dear boy, events.” Those and, of course, luck.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.