Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada will consider running for a second term if the generational shift he is pursuing to break Canada’s dependence on an increasingly volatile United States isn’t finished, he said in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times on Wednesday.
“I just got here!” said Mr. Carney, a former central bank governor of Canada and Britain, career Goldman Sachs financier and global corporate executive, who only jumped into the political fray in his native Canada last year at age 60.
“It’s too early to start asking” about running again, he said.
But, he added: “My value as a member of my party is to hit on the big things and move forward. And then, at the end of that, you see how much has got done, and if something else needs to be done.”
Mr. Carney won the Liberal Party’s leadership and became prime minister in March 2025, succeeding Justin Trudeau. He then went on to erase his Conservative opponents’ 20-plus-point lead to win the general election in April, securing a minority government in the Canadian Parliament.
In recent months, as he has pursued a dizzyingly ambitious reform agenda, Mr. Carney has consolidated his power, securing enough extra seats to form a majority through by-elections and floor crossings, where lawmakers from opposition parties joined the Liberals.
A general election should be held by October 2029, and no later than April 2030, in line with Canadian rules. An early election can be held for a number of reasons, but Mr. Carney dismissed the idea of holding one soon.
“We just got here. We’ve got a majority. We’ve got a big job to do. This is big, tough stuff. We just focus on that,” said Mr. Carney, who sat for the interview at the Times headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.
A key challenge Mr. Carney faces as he pushes sweeping reforms at home and pursues new trade and defense relationships abroad, especially with the European Union and Asian countries, is managing the pain Canadians are feeling because of the trade war the country is locked in with the United States.
He made it clear that he knows he is against the clock.
“We’ve got to be upfront with people,” he said, when asked about potential adverse consequences of his strategy. “You don’t transform the economy overnight.”
He said he expected that some of his major projects, including upgrades to a power generating station in Churchill Falls, would take at least 18 months to start yielding results that Canadians would feel, and would extend “beyond the political cycle.”
“You’re looking kind of a year and a half, two years before the big infra starts to really materially impact the growth,” Mr. Carney said, referring to major infrastructure projects. During that period of time, the government would need to deal with “headwind from tariffs, headwind from uncertainty that’s going on,” he said.
Mr. Carney said his government is taking short-term stimulus measures to support Canadians. Those include billions of dollars in employment insurance support and relief for small and medium enterprises hit by U.S. tariffs.
Asked whether his stimulus measures would work against efforts to keep inflation in check — a particularly thorny issue in the United States — Mr. Carney pointed to recent data showing inflation in his country was relatively low.
“Inflation pressures are much less in Canada than some other jurisdictions that you might be familiar,” he said. “And the fiscal position is much stronger.”
Mr. Carney said that he felt Canadians were behind him in this fight. “They’re kind of over the shock, and they’re in the roll up the sleeves, let’s build, let’s move forward attitude as opposed to lashing out,” he said. “And that helps.”
As of last week, Mr. Carney is the most popular prime minister in the history of Canada, recording up to 70 percent popularity rating in one poll.
Some 75 percent of Canadians were in favor of his decision to walk away from U.S. trade talks last month, polling shows, even as opinion surveys record angst and concern among Canadians over the economic impact of the trade war with the United States, suggesting that the positive attitude toward Mr. Carney’s endeavors could deteriorate.
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