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Home » Transcript of Canada’s Role in a Shifting Global Order — with Mark Carney

Transcript of Canada’s Role in a Shifting Global Order — with Mark Carney

Here is the full transcript of Canada’s 24th Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party Mark Carney’s interview on The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway episode titled “Canada’s Role in a Shifting Global Order”, April 17, 2025.  

The interview starts here:

Introduction and Background

SCOTT GALLOWAY: Prime Minister, where does this podcast find you?

MARK CARNEY: I’m in Montreal right now, Professor.

SCOTT GALLOWAY: The majority of the world spends their news as 10 minutes domestic and 20 minutes international. In the US we’re kind of self-absorbed, narcissistic, we don’t talk a lot about other countries. I think most people have heard of you, have seen you on TV, but don’t know much about you. Can you give us sort of your backstory, your origin story?

MARK CARNEY: Sure. So I was born in the Arctic, the north of Canada, a place called Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. I grew up in Edmonton and those who might follow hockey, it was the days of Wayne Gretzky when he was playing for the Oilers – that was when I was a kid.

I went away to university in the US and then I worked on Wall Street or versions of Wall Street. I worked for Goldman Sachs in London and Tokyo and New York and ultimately Canada. And then about 20 years ago, I became the deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, which is the equivalent of the Federal Reserve in the US, and ended up being the governor during the financial crisis of 2008.

So I worked through that process of the financial crisis. We had a “good financial crisis” if you can have a good financial crisis in Canada. We got through it better than anyone else, emerged stronger, our banks stayed together. Then ultimately, kind of slightly bizarrely, I was asked to become governor of the Bank of England. So I became the first foreign governor of the Bank of England. I did that through the period of the Brexit referendum as it turned out and in the aftermath of that.

Then I came back to Canada in 2020, right in the middle of COVID. I think you probably had a better experience during COVID, if I’m reading your podcasts correctly, than I did. I did a lot of work on climate change for the United Nations, sort of pro bono, organizing the financial sector to help address climate change. But also at the same time I worked for Brookfield, which is a big asset manager, and I was chair of Bloomberg.

Then as of the start of January, I first ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party, which is one of the main parties here, and winning that became prime minister about a month ago. Now I’m running for election. Our campaign is 37 days and we’ve got two weeks roughly left to go – much shorter elections than the United States.

Canada’s Global Role

SCOTT GALLOWAY: A big friend of the Pod is Ian Bremmer, the geopolitical strategist, and he was on the Pod last week and he described you as an “open quote, generational mind for Canada on the global stage.” In your view, what role does Canada play on the global stage?

MARK CARNEY: We play several roles. We’re a member of the G7. In fact, we are chair of the G7 this year. So I’m chair of the G7. We’re a member of the Commonwealth, which is the old UK grouping. We’re a member of the Francophone, which is obviously the French-speaking grouping of about 60 countries. So we have our role in several different organizations or groupings.

I think one of the roles we play potentially in the new or the emerging global order is partly based on our assets. We are an energy, an emerging energy superpower in all forms of energy. We’re one of the largest critical mineral suppliers in the world. We’re pretty good in AI. A lot of people claim that, but I think we’re legitimately claiming that.

And so we can play a role as a country that believes in open markets, open systems, believes in trade, open ideas, diversity. We can play a role with like-minded countries to kind of reconstruct that bit of the international order which has been upended in the course of more intensively in the last few months. But a process that really began with the financial crisis 15 years ago.

Priorities for Canada

SCOTT GALLOWAY: Typically in the US, and I imagine the same way in Canada, when a new leader is elected, assuming you get elected, they have sort of a honeymoon period and an opportunity to get more done in their first year, more grace, if you will, than in the next two or three years. What would you identify as the two or three biggest issues facing Canada, and what’s your agenda? If you could pick two or three things you’re really going to go hard at your first year as Prime Minister, what are those things?

MARK CARNEY: I’ll set tariffs aside and focus in on three things. First is having free trade, actually within Canada. We have basically 13 economies here, 10 different provinces and territories, all with their own rules. It’s hard to move credentials and sometimes goods and services across the country, far harder than it should be. So a process, a very quick process of free trade. And by the way, just to put orders of magnitude on this, a reasonable estimate of the economic benefit of that is bigger than the economic hit from the worst version of the Trump tariffs. So we can give ourselves more than others can.

Second thing is we have a huge housing problem here, particularly obviously for younger Canadians. First and foremost, we need to double the rate of housing and we need to make major reforms in order to do that. We can do it in a way that actually leverages the Canadian supply chain, technology and all the lumber we potentially won’t be able to send southbound to the US.

Then the third thing – the world’s fluid.