“BORING” BUT “REASSURING”
Daniel Beland, director of the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University, described Carney as a “technocrat”.
“He’s a boring guy who in general doesn’t have a lot of charisma,” Beland said.
But he noted that with Canada rattled by Trump’s trade chaos and attacks on its sovereignty, rigorous competence with no flash may be appealing.
Carney presents “the image of a reassuring guy who knows what he is talking about”, Beland said.
Lori Turnbull of Dalhousie University cautioned that Carney’s potential struggles to connect with the public could prove a liability.
“He’s not a particularly great communicator when it comes to the public,” she said.
“He is unusually well-equipped to deal with economic crises” but “it’s very hard to see how anybody would be successful in politics if you can’t bring people on board with you”, she told AFP.
The Conservatives are running attack ads branding Carney as “sneaky” – an early look at how they might plan to wage the campaign against him.
Carney is personally wealthy, spent significant parts of his career outside of Canada, worked for US-based Goldman Sachs and was chairman at one of Canada’s largest corporations, Brookfield.
“The Conservatives are trying to cast him as an elite who doesn’t understand what regular people go through. And I think if he can’t communicate well, then he runs the risk of being typecast in that way,” Turnbull said.
Climate change, and Carney’s plans to address it, are also certain to play a key role in the campaign.
“Carbon Tax Carney” has emerged as a favorite Tory attack line, seeking to tie Carney to a deeply unpopular Trudeau policy that saw some homes face a marginal tax to offset emissions.
Climate has been central to the latter part of Carney’s career, but he says his focus is on investment-led solutions, like green technology, that create profit and jobs.
“Very much we are emphasising the commercial aspect of it, the competitiveness aspect,” he said recently in an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast.
“This is where the world is going.”
