Assahafa.com
After months of speculation about his future, former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney launched his campaign to replace Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader on Thursday.
Carney, 59, kicked off his campaign to take the reins of the governing party at the Edmonton-area hockey rink where he learned to skate as a boy while growing up on the Prairies.
“I’m doing this because Canada is the best country in the world, but it still could be even better,” Carney told the roomful of supporters.
The Harvard-educated Carney said he has the economic bona fides needed to steer Canada through a period of economic uncertainty as the country stares down president-elect Donald Trump and the threat of punishing tariffs on all our goods.
After his time at Harvard and later Oxford University in the U.K., Carney started his career as an investment banker at New York-based Goldman Sachs before coming back to Canada to work as a senior public servant in the federal Finance Department.
In what was considered by some to be a shock appointment at the time, Carney was then tapped to lead the Bank of Canada as governor in 2008.
While serving as the head of the central bank, Carney helped lead the country through the 2008-09 recession — an economic calamity that wasn’t as bad in Canada as it was elsewhere.
Unlike in the U.S., no Canadian banks collapsed on Carney’s watch. He aggressively cut interest rates to prop up an economy on the ropes, which some analysts credit with helping to save the country from ruin.
Carney was later picked to serve as the Bank of England governor during a tumultuous time for the U.K. as it navigated Brexit and the resulting economic fallout.
During an appearance on Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s podcast last year, Carney said he was thinking about jumping into politics because the high-flying Conservatives are “leading in the polls” but they’re a party led by someone who “doesn’t understand the economy.”
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre described Carney as a Trudeau-like Liberal who supports a carbon tax and will pursue job-killing policies, if elected.
Source: cbc
