Mark Carney | Prime Minister of Canada

Born the third of four children, Mr. Carney lived his early life in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, where his father was a school principal and his mother, a teacher. Mr. Carney was raised Catholic, and has Irish ancestry. In 1971, when he was six, his family moved to Edmonton.

Mr. Carney attended both Harvard and Oxford for his education. During his time at the latter, he met his wife Diana Fox, a British economist. They have four children: Cleo, Tess, Amelia and Sasha.

Mr. Carney is a triple citizen – Canadian, Irish and British – though he has begun the process to renounce the non-Canadian citizenships.

Mr. Carney is the first Canadian prime minister to never have held prior elected office. He served as governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, during Stephen Harper’s Conservative rule, and held the same post at the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

Mr. Carney is widely credited for shepherding Canada through the financial crisis and the Great Recession of 2008. He was instrumental in forging a consensus with the U.S., France and the U.K. for the emergency coordinated interest rate cut – a delicate task, given the announcement came just before an election. He also played a key role in tempering hostilities at the G7 meeting shortly after – a summit then-federal finance minister James Flaherty called the "most dramatic" weekend in his career.

He also took unprecedented steps to improve liquidity for Canada's big banks, and led the international charge for an overhaul of the way countries manage and identify financial risk.

As Governor of the Bank of England, he helped steer that country’s financial system through the 2016 Brexit referendum and its immediate fallout.

After leaving central banking, Mr. Carney took on several executive, board and advisory positions. Most notably, he joined Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian-American investment company, as the chair of the corporation's environmental, social and corporate governance investment strategy.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres also appointed Mr. Carney as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. In this role, he was able to create a global financial alliance, by bringing together banks, insurance companies and asset managers, to direct capital to meet climate targets. In 2025, that alliance unravelled, with members bailing, fearing political backlash, legal action and loss of business in the United States after President Trump’s return to the White House.

In 2024, he made the jump into partisan politics more than a decade after the Liberals first tried to recruit him and in the wake of several failed attempts by then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to have Mr. Carney join his government.

During the Liberal leadership debates, Mr. Carney was questioned about his stint at Brookfield, during which time the company relocated its headquarters from Toronto to New York City. He said the move was formally rubber-stamped after he had left the company. But the Brookfield board had voted unanimously in favour of the move while Mr. Carney was chair; he had issued a letter to shareholders backing that proposal.

During a press conference, Mr. Carney also declined to disclose his compensation at Brookfield, which has never been released despite him being a senior executive. His campaign maintained he’ll disclose his finances when conflict-of-interest laws require him to do so, and as prime minister, he’ll put his assets in a blind trust.