Picking 2025’s Canadian newsmaker of the year

To say Prime Minister Mark Carney had a seismic impact on Canadian events in 2025 would be an understatement of Himalayan proportions.

Twelve months ago, the former governor of the banks of Canada and England had exactly zero experience in electoral politics; the ruling Liberal Party under the leadership of increasingly unpopular leader Justin Trudeau seemed headed for a massive defeat in the upcoming fixed-date election; and Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre was confidently readying Canadians for a new era of Trump-imitative federal leadership.

And then…

On Jan. 6, facing increasing pressure from within his own party, Trudeau announced he would resign as prime minister and party leader as soon as replacement could be selected. Ten days later, Carney declared — to the surprise of almost no one who had been paying attention to the Liberals’ internal strife — his intention to join the leadership race.

And less than a week after that, Trump was inaugurated as U.S. president for a second time, and almost immediately began slapping punitive tariffs on virtually all his nation’s formerly friendly trading partners, including Canada. At the same time he was ratcheting up trade tensions around the world, the president began musing aloud, with irksome regularity, about the U.S. annexing Canada as its “cherished 51st state.”

By the time Carney’s landslide victory in the Liberal leadership contest was declared on March 9, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric had galvanized anti-American sentiment across the country. So when the newly installed PM asked the governor general to dissolve Parliament and set April 28 as the date for a federal election, Poilievre found himself facing the unenviable reality that the combative populist posture upon which he had built his entire electoral aspiration — namely, acting and sounding as much like Trump as possible — was suddenly not the winning game plan he had long envisioned it to be.

Unable to outrun the Trump-lite image he had worked so deliberately to cultivate, Poilievre was doomed. Rather than the massive Conservative majority pollsters had for more than a year been predicting, voters delivered yet another Liberal-minority result — this time just a few seats shy of a majority — and, in a final emphatic rebuke, handed Poilievre a humiliating defeat in the Carleton riding he had represented for more than two decades.

The speed with which a political outsider had been ascended to party leadership and the office prime minister was nothing short of stunning. Small wonder, then, that The Canadian Press named Carney as its newsmaker of the year for 2025.

“A year ago, most Canadians probably didn’t even know his name. Now, Mark Carney is the prime minister, leading the country through a particularly tumultuous time,” said Globe and Mail digital editor Mackenzie Lad.

While his first six months in office have been noteworthy for their relative lack of controversy or upheaval, he has accomplished a few significant things. Relations with Trump and the U.S., while far from mended, have been reduced from a full boil to a simmer, and Carney has made purposeful strides toward dismantling interprovincial trade barriers and diversifying Canada’s international trade.

By employing a leadership style that might best be described as measuredly restrained, Carney has massively altered the trajectory of Canadian politics. Of course, he did not accomplish this on his own; he had help.

To put it in a way that folks in this hockey-crazed country can easily understand, the summary line goes like this: Canada’s goal scored by No. 24, Mark Carney, with assists from No. 47, Donald Trump, and No. 2, Pierre Poilievre.