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FIRST READING: No Canadian P.M. has ever been more personally enmeshed with the U.S.

Half of Carney's daughters live there, almost his entire stock portfolio is American, and he's the first PM to never attend a Canadian university

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FIRST READING: No Canadian P.M. has ever been more personally enmeshed with the U.S. Back to video

In his address to last weekend’s Liberal convention, Prime Minister Mark Carney once again emphasized the need for Canada to rethink its dependence on the U.S.

“A good number of our historic strengths, which came from our close ties with the U.S., have become our weaknesses,” Carney said in French to the Montreal crowd.

He said that even if Canada gets over the “initial shock” of the trade war launched by U.S. President Donald Trump, it should “never forget” the lessons. “We need to take care of ourselves,” he said in French.

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It’s not a new argument from the prime minister, who has often outlined his plan to steer Canada away from U.S. trade and political influence. This time last year, Carney said in a campaign speech that Canada’s integrated relationship with the U.S. was “over,” and that Canadians must “fundamentally reimagine our economy.”

But the paradox of the claim is that it’s coming from a figure who is more personally enmeshed with the United States than any other prime minister in Canada’s history.

Half of Carney’s children live in the U.S. His wife was recently working for a U.S. company. Almost all of his multi-million dollar portfolio is in U.S. assets. He is Canada’s only prime minister to receive his undergraduate degree from a U.S. university.

And one of his last acts before entering politics was to help move one of Canada’s largest corporations to a new home on U.S. soil.

In late 2024, just a couple months before Carney entered politics as a candidate for the Liberal leadership, Carney oversaw the relocation of Brookfield Asset Management from its Toronto headquarters to one in New York City.

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The move was justified at the time as a means to secure more U.S. capital, and to potentially score Brookfield a spot on the S&P 500 stock index.

Carney was serving as Brookfield’s chair. In a letter dated Dec. 1, 2024 and later circulated by the Conservative Party, he urged shareholders to support the move out of Toronto.

“The most common feedback we hear from investors encourages us to position (Brookfield Asset Management) for inclusion in some of the most widely followed global large cap stock indices, including in the U.S.,” he wrote.

In July, four months after his swearing-in as prime minister, Carney first disclosed the details of a personal investment portfolio that he had placed into a “blind trust” to be managed at arms length throughout his time in office.

The trust contains 567 entities. And according to an analysis by Monique Kasonga at the Investigative Journalism Foundation, 91 per cent of them are American.

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Just three Canadian companies were among the holdings: The oil and gas firm Canadian Natural Resources, the railroad company Canadian Pacific Kansas City and the clothing brand Lululemon.

A heavy American presence can also be seen within a list of 25 companies that Carney submitted to the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, citing them as entities over which he had once held an “oversight role.”

It’s mostly a list of green energy companies. Eight of the 25 are U.S. firms; more than the number of Canadian entities listed by Carney.

The most recent known job worked by Carney’s wife Diana Fox Carney was with a U.S. firm. In May 2021, the New York City-based Eurasia Group announced Fox Carney’s appointment as a senior advisor.

The statement noted that she would work closely with the company’s Vice Chairman Gerald Butts, who had been a senior advisor to prime minister Justin Trudeau until just two years prior. National Post was unable to confirm if Fox Carney still works for Eurasia Group before publication deadline.

The Carneys have four children, and two of them are known to be U.S. residents who studied at Yale and Harvard.

And if the Carney children are favouring U.S. universities, they’re following in the footsteps of their dad, whose own undergraduate degree came from Harvard University in 1987.

This makes him Canada’s only prime minister to have received his undergraduate degree at a non-Canadian school.

He’s also the first since Pierre Trudeau to have an American university of any kind on his resume (the elder Trudeau got a master’s degree at Harvard in the mid-1940s).

For all the other prime ministers of the last 50 years, any non-Canadian education was reserved to post-graduate work at a school in the U.K.

Kim Campbell studied at the London School of Economics in the 1970s. John Turner attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship.

Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper all studied at exclusively Canadian universities and law schools.

Quebec has a new premier. With Quebec’s ruling CAQ government continuing to go down in flames in provincial polling (they were at just nine per cent as of last week), the party has swapped out their leader in a last-minute bid to reverse the decline. Stranger things have happened, but at this point the most immediate consequence of Christine Fréchette is that she might draw votes from the Quebec Liberals, thus ensuring a victory for the Parti Québécois in a general election to be held no later than October.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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