How the high priest of project fear charmed Canada and took on Trump [Video]

Mark Carney, Canada’s next prime minister, doesn’t look like a liberal firebrand.

With his sharp suits and steel-grey hair, the former Goldman Sachs banker has spent years cultivating the image of a centrist technocrat, with a fondness for fiscal discipline and a distaste for political showmanship.

Once, when asked about running for office, he retorted: “Why don’t I become a circus clown?”

But since US President Donald Trump started imposing tariffs on Canada and threatening to absorb its neighbour as the “51st state”, Carney has reinvented himself, regularly baiting and ridiculing the most powerful man in the world.

It took a trade war and the threat of annexation for the 59-year-old – …