No. 1: Prime Minister Mark Carney

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The job of prime minister is hard, and it ought to be. But Mark Carney entered office in an unprecedentedly difficult time. Our decades-long partnership with the US has been unilaterally ruptured by a president who keeps treating our national sovereignty like a cat toy. Alberta is threatening to secede if they don’t get what they want. Critical minerals, especially those in the Ring of Fire, position Canada to be a global leader, except Indigenous leaders are in no hurry to mine them, and for good reason. When it comes to AI, Canada must not be left behind—or so far out in front that we’re vulnerable to its perils. And while Carney is popular, his party is decidedly not, and each jobs report, inflationary indicator and Trump mood swing threatens to undo everything. It’s enough to make a guy run for the hills (or a yacht off San Diego). But Carney isn’t running: he’s down for the fight. Here, a conversation with the prime minister on domestic turmoil, the perils of AI and going toe-to-toe with Trump.

Interview by Malcolm Johnston on October 16

Mr. Prime Minister, as we look at the world today, much of what we have taken for granted for so long—democracy, rule of law, sovereignty, security—seems no longer reliable. In 2025, many influential Canadians have done many influential things in business, sports, culture, academia and beyond, but none of them can really function without those bedrock ideals. It’s because of your commitment to defending Canadian ideals and institutions that Toronto Life chose you as the most influential person of 2025. Well, thank you very much for the honour. It’s important that we have those institutions, and I’m happy to play a role in preserving them. But it’s interesting the way you frame it—what you’re saying is that you’re choosing Canada, because of what we represent as a country, what we believe in, what we’re fighting for.

You are a creature of Canada, born in Fort Smith, raised in Edmonton, now living in Ottawa, but let’s not skip over your time in Toronto. Back in the early 2000s, as you and your wife were starting a family, you lived in Forest Hill and worked on Bay Street. What do you recall most from those years? It was an interesting time. We’d moved back from New York, and our eldest was six weeks old. So it was a time of meeting people in the neighbourhood and sampling what Toronto had to offer. The sheer variety of neighbourhoods is on a scale you don’t experience in New York or London, both cities that I’ve spent some time in. So it was great to be back, a great time. I should have hung on to the house.

Did you not? No. I mean, you only need one house.

On a related note: I understand you quickly grew tired of the materialism of Bay Street and, before long, leaped at the chance to enter the public service. It’s reductive to trace your current job to having encountered too many flashy Bay Streeters with oversized Rolexes, but is there some degree of causation there? How to put it? I always expected at some point to do some form of public service. That was bred in the bone from my family. My parents were teachers, and my father worked in public service in Alberta for a number of years. So this was not a diss of Bay Street; it was the call of public service.

Maybe we nudged you? I learned a lot in my previous roles, including on Bay Street, and I put that to use in the roles I’ve had since.

At the risk of alienating your friends and family in Alberta, can you tell us what place Toronto occupies in the national fabric? I view this kind of thing as a win-win situation. Canada is more than the sum of its parts. Toronto makes the whole country better. It is in many respects the best of Canada, because it’s all of Canada in one place. Toronto is a centre of finance, of culture, of business, of huge entrepreneurship. What makes Toronto unique is that it’s the product of them all being together in one place. The genius of Toronto is the genius of Canada.

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“Trump texts with a lot of caps. And exclamation marks”

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Toronto, for all its charms and excesses, faces major challenges. What is the most pressing one as we head into 2026? Its capacity. The city is a victim of its success, of so many people wanting to live here. That puts tremendous strain on the system. Transit, safety—these pressures are huge. And we need to catch up to the scale of Toronto and the greatness of it.

You’ve announced plans to rapidly increase the pace of housing supply. From where I sit, however, the problem Toronto’s housing sector faces is not a lack of supply so much as a supply of the wrong thing. Torontonians really crave two- and three-­bedroom units. How do you incentivize developers to build those when they’re less profitable? It’s an astute observation. Sometimes people talk about the housing market as if it’s one market, when in truth it’s really segmented. There has been a huge ­build-out of small condos that function as places for people to live but also as investment properties. And simultaneously there has been very little built in Toronto and across the country of affordable housing—that is, not the deeply affordable housing for the more vulnerable in society, but just basic affordable housing for the masses. The federal government is stepping up to build a new Canadian industry—cheaper, factory-built housing, cheaper for people to live in and more energy efficient. We recently announced our first project in Toronto, at Downsview, which will be a step toward almost 65,000 units built by Canadians, with Canadian technology, for Canadians, and many of them skewed to affordability. So yes, the family that wants the two- or three-bedrooms will hopefully be able to access them.

That sounds great, but it leads to another problem. Doubling the pace of housing worsens our transportation woes by the same factor: more people getting stuck in gridlock and on the TTC. Shouldn’t any federal investment in housing come with an accompanying federal investment in major transit projects? We have multiple levels of government, and they need to make choices around what’s important. But, yes, investment in transit in Toronto, all forms of transit, is important. The federal government is building out on lands that have that close proximity to transit, which is to residents’ advantage.

Let’s switch to US relations. Oh, okay, so the light-hearted part of the discussion!

President Trump is the self-described master of the art of the deal. You, having spent decades in the private sector, are no stranger to the art yourself. Having been up close to Trump many times now, how would you characterize his negotiating skills? He is a good negotiator. When you’re president of the United States, you oversee the world’s military hyper-power, the largest, most dynamic economy, and you inherit a series of very tight relationships with your major trading partners. So you’re starting from a position of strength. Then you throw on top of that someone who has lots of negotiating experience, an ability to identify the points of maximum leverage and a willingness to exploit them.

From the Canadian perspective, it takes patience and an ability to open up different avenues of that negotiation. We’re not going to sign a bad deal. We’re not even going to sign a good deal. We’re going to sign a great deal for Canada. Our relationship won’t get back to what it was. We’ve learned a lesson as Canadians on the dangers of close integration. But our situation can be better than it is today, and that’s what we’re negotiating hard for.

Before Trump called off negotiations, you two had shifted your relationship to text. I’m wondering who took the bold step of asking for the other’s number. He offered me his number when we first met in the Oval Office.

How would you describe his texting manner? Is it as much all-caps as I’m picturing? A lot of caps. And exclamation marks. And there is no time limit—there is a 24/7 element to it. In other words, it is not apparent how much the president of the United States sleeps.

Middle of the night? Middle of the night, early in the morning.

Fresh off the campaign trail, you used charged language like “betrayal.” In your October meeting, there was a spirit of deference in the Oval Office. Is it fair to interpret an intentional shift there, a sort of Make nice with the big guy and let the negotiators do the rough-and-tumble approach? I don’t think there’s an inconsistency. Canada and the United States had a long-standing relationship that the US decided unilaterally to change. It’s had a real effect, which we see here in the GTA in the auto sector, as an example. The language on the campaign trail was more marked, maybe, but it was correct.

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“Poilievre’s hair is impeccable. And he loves his family”

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It’s a delicate dance. On the one hand, you have to avoid offending Trump—we all saw what happened with President Zelenskyy in Washington in February. But Trump twists empirical data; he mocks our nation; and while he hates being called Donald, he repeatedly refers to you as Mark. How challenging is it for you to sit there and hold your tongue for the greater good? A couple of things. One, I’m in his environment, the Oval Office, and he has literally 75 press people there, maybe 10 per cent of whom are from Canada, and he’s speaking to them about US domestic issues that have nothing to do with Canada. So I’m not going to interfere. With respect to Canada, I think you do see in those settings a level of respect that we expect for Canada. We are not “the 51st state” there. He wishes that we would be part of the United States. In the Oval Office, when he said, “Never say never,” I said, “Never, never, ever.”

Let’s talk AI. Growing Canada’s leadership in artificial intelligence is one of your priorities. In what specific applications do you see Canada becoming a global leader? AI can contribute to our economy in many ways. For example, when it comes to the infrastructure necessary to train models and build those models out—which we can do with Canada’s cheap and clean power, engineering expertise and determination. We can also support the development of specific applications that can be enterprise-level AI. Cohere is an example, as are applications within Shopify, Creative Destruction Lab and the Vector Institute. The other opportunity is the broad application of AI across the country. One of the things you’ll see from the federal government over the course of the next year is developing the strategy of “AI for All.” That means AI that works for you as opposed to you working for AI. How do we use it to make the job of, say, a nurse practitioner better? How do we get rid of some of the administrative work? How do we use it for education? Marketing?

AI is essentially in a global arms race, and we know from experience that arms races usually don’t end well. So how do we embrace AI but also ensure that Canada isn’t part of some sprint straight toward our collective demise? That’s very poetic.

Why thank you. We need to be clear about what we value, and then use AI to help achieve what we value. Canada values equality and universal access to health care, to name two. How are we going to use AI so that our health care system is more effective and efficient? We all know it needs to substantially improve. Really, it’s a question for everybody, all the readers of Toronto Life and their neighbours and others: What do you value? What do you want to solve for? And then you work back using AI as a tool that makes it much more likely you’re going to be successful.

Misinformation, AI-generated deep fakes and the like are the scourge of our time. By way of example, an impersonation scam has been circulating in Saskatchewan claiming that you’re endorsing two online investment platforms. My question is— I do not have a side hustle as prime minister. I just want to make that clear.

Okay, my second question is whether there is any hope for truth when the big tech platforms seem to have given up on it. Well, there’s a responsibility that comes with being a platform. That’s true for a publication like yours, as I’m sure you’re acutely aware, but also for tech platforms. They try to pretend they’re not publications, but they are in this respect. We can use AI to police AI, to track bots and block bots, to identify deep fakes. And yes, we need to hold on to truth. We’re putting a lot of resources, including 150 RCMP officers, onto exactly these types of issues, which is the rise of financial fraud.

We know that America is divided, perhaps beyond repair, but how deep do you think Canada’s divisions are? And what responsibility do you think politicians bear for deepening them? It’s no secret that the easiest way to whip one’s base into a lather is to vilify the other. Canadians, over the course of this year, including in Toronto, became more unified under the external threat of what was happening south of our border. We really looked into ourselves and saw what it means to be Canadian, what we want to preserve, what we want to build. It’s my responsibility to bring Canadians together, to govern for all Canadians, not to look for wedge issues. I find that people prefer their politicians to be straight with them. They don’t always agree with you, but at least they appreciate it if you’re open and honest. And in that regard, we can swim against this tide of political division.

Can you compliment Pierre Poilievre? I can, of course. What would you like me to compliment?

I don’t know. Maybe name three things you admire about him. His hair is impeccable. He’s a hard worker. He loves his family.

Okay. Moving on: social media deepens this division we’re talking about, disseminates misinformation and worsens the mental health crisis, particularly among young people. Do you see any merit to following Australia’s upcoming banning of social media for kids under 16? Could that happen here? I see the merit on both sides of the argument. How do you weigh being overly protective against the well-documented evidence of the causal link between exposure to social media and mental health challenges? We have an epidemic, not just in Canada but around the world, of mental health challenges in youth, and we need to take responsibility for that. So the question is, What’s the route? It starts with the very basic banning of cellphones and access to social media in school, just literally giving children an opportunity to be present. Does it extend all the way to the Australian example? My view is not settled yet on that—I’ve been focused on other things. I know that most senior people in tech, certainly in Silicon Valley, do not let their children on social media. If they do, they very much limit their time.

That says something. It says a lot. They’re well-informed, and they care about their kids.

We’ve been getting heavy here. It’s been dark!

Let’s lighten it up a little bit. When this issue hits newsstands, you’ll have been prime minister for 250 days, roughly. What’s the best perk of the job? And I won’t accept “Meeting Canadians, coast to coast to coast.” That’s too easy. That’s exactly what came into my head! You’re not going to allow me that, okay, but that is the best element of the job, without question. As a distant second, I would say—as a perk and a responsibility—having the resources of the country to make a sound decision. Consider your example of banning social media: I could form a table, I could talk to people, I could get others to study it. That is a real perk. There aren’t many roles like that. Maybe you have that convening power in your role—

I do not. —but there are not that many roles where that’s truly the case.

What do you miss most from your pre–prime ministerial life? It’s not a regret, exactly, but in this job you’re never alone. You have no privacy.

No offence to your team members in the room, of course. No offence to present company. But there’s always company.

The job of prime minister is naturally a pressure cooker, possibly more now than ever. Trump, tariffs, immigration, the economy, unemployment, Ukraine, AI, the Middle East, the auto sector, Alberta secession, approval ratings, re-election and whatever else lurks ahead. Is it possible to actually turn off? No is the short answer. I mean, I went for a run this morning, so maybe for part of the run I wasn’t thinking about policy issues. I was crossing the road, so I was—

Trying not to get hit by a car? Yes. So it’s pretty hard to turn off.

In your 2021 book, Value(s), you talk about meditation. Is that still part of your routine? I still do it, yes. And by definition, if you’re doing it successfully, you’ve turned off, emptied things out, tuned your mind, which is very helpful.

And then Trump texts, right? That’s why you have to put your phone on silent mode.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.