Mark Carney’s national liberalism

The center-left exception to the rule

In Warsaw on August 25, 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland. (Photo by NurPhoto/Contributor via Getty Images)

About a month ago, I found myself asked to speak on a panel about the crisis of the global center-left and struggling a little to think of something new to say. What occurred to me is that in the spirit of “the exception that proves the rule,” it might be useful to approach the question from the opposite direction and think about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is running what seems to be clearly the most successful center-left political party in the world right now.

The idea of the exception that proves the rule is not that the existence of an exception demonstrates that a rule is true. It’s that if you lay down a rule (“the center-left is in crisis globally”) and then find an apparent exception (“the Liberal Party of Canada is doing great”), this tests what the rule actually is and lets you rephrase it more precisely.

In other words, if we understand what’s distinctive about Carney — or about the Liberal Party or about Canada — we can better understand what’s happening everywhere else.

Note that what is impressive about Carney’s political achievements isn’t just that he won an election. Joe Biden and Keir Starmer also won elections. I know a lot of people on Bluesky think Starmer’s collapse debunks popularism and all the rest. But I think it mostly just goes to show that the popularism debate is over and boring because popularism is obviously correct and that the most interesting and difficult question is how to actually govern a country. That’s where Biden and Starmer both struggled.

Unlike them, Carney didn’t just win. He has maintained a net positive approval rating and put the Liberals on track to win a new election. He also persuaded several members of Parliament to switch parties and join the Liberals, helping take his government from a minority to a majority. And what makes this even more impressive is that the Liberals have been in power, mostly under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, since November of 2015.

My read of this situation is that some of the successes are tactical points that more or less everyone could learn from relatively easily and apply elsewhere. But a structural factor that’s harder to copy is that the Liberal Party has a different kind of relationship to Canada than you see from most center-left parties around the world.