From Harvard to Ottawa: Carney and Freeland Vie To Become Canada’s Next Prime Minister

In 1985, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau was headed to lunch at Winthrop House when he crossed paths with a group of juniors on the men’s hockey team.

Though there was more than one Canadian among them, only Mark J. Carney ’87 recognized the Prime Minister as he descended the stairs to the Winthrop dining hall.

“Good afternoon, Prime Minister Trudeau,” he said.

Now, nearly a half century later, Carney is the front-runner to succeed Trudeau’s son as the 24th Prime Minister of Canada and the next leader of the Liberal Party.

Last month, after a decade at the helm, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his decision to step down as both the nation’s leader and head of the Liberal Party, triggering an expedited race to select his successor.

The race to lead both the country and a reeling party has narrowed to two frontrunners: Carney, the former Canadian and British central bank governor, and Chrystia A. Freeland ’90, the former deputy prime minister and a fellow Harvard alumna.

After just his freshman year, Carney — who graduated magna cum laude in economics — stood out to his friends, who recognized that he was “special.”

“Leave it to Mark to recognize with a fleeting glimpse at lunchtime,” said Peter E. Chiarelli ‘87, one of Carney’s roommates. “The last thing on our minds is to recognize a world leader walking from the dining room in our sweats back to our room.”

“I might have told him after freshman year that I think you’re going to be Prime Minister, jokingly, but kind of half seriously,” Chiarelli said. “He just impressed me — his drive, his work ethic.”

Carney is now a member of the Board of Overseers, Harvard’s second-highest governing body. Both Carney and Freeland have children who attend Harvard.

‘Fly SWATter’

During Carney’s final years at the College, another young Canadian, Freeland, was making her mark. Though they never crossed paths despite their time overlapping, the two are now close friends. Carney is the godfather to Freeland’s son.

Freeland graduated magna cum laude in history and literature and won the Rhodes Scholarship.

While attending college in the U.S., Freeland remained proud of her Canadian heritage. She regularly quizzed her roommates on the 10 Canadian provinces, making them recite the provinces in order from coast to coast.

“She felt very strongly about Canada and would make sure everyone remembered Canada, all the time,” said Robyn H. Fass Wang ’90, Freeland’s college friend.

Throughout her time on campus, Freeland was a dedicated student activist. She devoted herself to Perspective: Harvard’s Liberal Monthly and was a prominent student organizer. Freeland rallied against women’s exclusion from male-only final clubs and Harvard’s financial ties to apartheid-era South Africa.

Two years before Freeland was a student, the University cut ties with final clubs, known for their exclusive membership that served as a mode of social separation on campus, over their refusal to admit women.

“Chrystia was against the sex segregation of the final clubs,” Fass Wang said.

“An elite social club isn’t something she would have really wanted to be in anyway, but reinforcing institutional sexism — she was against that,” she added.

Carney, along with some of his close friends were members of the A.D. Club, a male-only final club.

During Freeland’s time at the College, the Fly Club, also a male-only final club, only allowed women into parties through a side door. In protest, Freeland led a group of friends to enter the party through the front door.

“We were just going to go through the front door in order to protest the second-class citizen appearance that it has when you can’t enter a building through the front,” Fass Wang said.

Her group of friends were ultimately unsuccessful and rejected at the door.

Freeland, a former Crimson editor, wrote extensively in opposition to final clubs. She later joined a student organization, Stop Withholding Access Today, that supported a legal complaint filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, alleging that the clubs’ admissions policies were discriminatory. Crimson articles at the time referred to members as “Fly Swatters.”

‘The Shutout’

Carney, who played hockey throughout his childhood, was a member of the Harvard men’s hockey program during his time at the College. While on the varsity team, Carney was Harvard’s third-string goaltender, playing behind two All-American goalies.

“He was a very, very good player,” said Michael W. DeVoe ’87, one of Carney’s teammates.

“Had he not been stuck behind those two guys, I am sure he would have been starting at a lot of the top programs in the country,” he added.

Although Carney did not start a game for the Crimson, he was thrown into action against Colgate, a close rival, for his only varsity play during his sophomore season.

Carney stopped 100 percent of the shots he faced, leading the team to a lopsided 10-2 victory, creating a perfect save percentage during his college career.

“We like to call it the shutout,” Chiarelli said.

Seth A. Goldman ’87, one of Carney’s blockmates in attendance, recalled the energy in the Bright-Landry Hockey Center following the win.

“The fans chanted: ‘Goalie! Goalie!’,” he said. “That was enough for him.”

In Carney’s senior year, the Harvard men’s hockey team advanced to the NCAA’s Frozen Four while Chiarelli, his roommate, was the captain.

He remembered Carney’s “tremendous work ethic” and dedication to balancing athletics with his studies, where he was a top economics student.

“It’s a big commitment on time and he played it for three years,” he added.

“He was someone who the younger members of the team looked up to,” William C. Kennish ’89, a teammate of Carney’s, wrote in a statement to The Crimson, when Carney was named head of Canada’s Central Bank in 2007. “He was an excellent player who enjoyed his hockey but also was highly intelligent and focused on his studies.”

Carney would go on to play on the Oxford men’s hockey team as a backup goalie during his graduate studies in economics. There he met his wife, Diana Fox Carney.

Goldman said Carney didn’t have so much luck during his Harvard days.

“I mean, it’s funny,” Goldman said. “We were both not super successful in terms of developing girlfriends.”

“We developed that skill later in life,” he added.

The Journalist

Freeland, who pursued a prolific career in journalism for publications including the Globe and Mail and the Financial Times, studied abroad at the University of Kiev during the 1988-89 academic year.

During her undergraduate studies, she worked with a New York Times reporter to document mass graves in the Soviet Union and was in Ukraine when the Berlin Wall fell. As Soviet control crumbled, she found herself at the heart of one of the most defining geopolitical shifts of the era.

“That was the biggest news in the world in the late 80s, early 90s, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War,” said professor Serhii Plokhii, who arrived at Harvard from Soviet-controlled Ukraine in the Soviet-American academic exchanges and was introduced to Freeland at a 1987 event.

“So young people from Harvard and from other places were just pouring into Eastern Europe,” he added. “She was uniquely positioned to do that, given her knowledge of Ukrainian language and culture.”

Freeland feared her reporting placed her in the crosshairs of Soviet authorities. Archival KGB materials reviewed by the Globe and Mail revealed Freeland’s phone was tapped by the intelligence agency where she was labeled with the nickname “Frida.”

“She had to burn her notes and stuff because she was afraid the KGB would be after her,” said Lucan A. Way ’90, one of her close college friends, who said he and Freeland were often referred by Freeland’s boyfriend as the “nerdy twins.”

On campus, Freeland pursued journalism with the left-leaning student publication “Perspective: Harvard’s Liberal Monthly.”

In one of her sophomore year investigations, Freeland infiltrated a pregnancy crisis center in Harvard Square. The center, a Christian anti-abortion organization, offered help to women who were considering getting abortions.

Freeland wanted to see how far the center would go in pushing anti-abortion messages. She posed as an uncertain pregnant woman, bringing Fass Wang along, as a part of the investigation, and recounted her experience in Perspective.

“I was there to be an additional witness. It seemed plausible that you would bring your friend, so I went as her friend,” Fass Wang said.

Freeland, an activist for abortion access, emerged from her undercover expedition sharply critical of the center’s work. She alleged in her Perspective article that a worker asked her how her loved ones would react if she terminated her supposed pregnancy and regaled her with “Brueghelesque descriptions of abortions.”

Later during her time at the College, Freeland supported her close friend through her own abortion.

“She actually accompanied me for me to have an abortion when we were — I guess we would have been — juniors, seniors” Fass Wang said.

“She was the friend I chose, because she was just so level-headed, and I just thought she would just be calm and the kind of presence you would want in something that could be difficult,” she added.

A spokesperson for Freeland did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

The 24th Prime Minister

Current polls show Carney as the clear front-runner, holding a 40-point advantage over Freeland as the Liberal leadership race enters its final weeks.

While Carney has resigned from all his previously held positions since entering the race, he has continued to hold his role on the Harvard’s Board of Overseers. He has not stated if he will resign from the Board if elected as Prime Minister. No other current members of the Board of Overseers are active politicians.

Whether Carney or Freeland emerges victorious in the March leadership vote, the next Prime Minister will face a turbulent landscape, marked by the threat of continued tariffs from the Trump administration and a fragile political situation at home.

With Canada’s parliament suspended, the Liberal Party will choose its next leader — and Canada’s next prime minister — on March 9.

But the Canadian parliament is scheduled to return on March 24. The Liberal government will likely face an imminent no-confidence vote, triggering a general election where Conservative Leader, Pierre Poilievre, leads in the polls by a wide but shrinking margin.

–Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at abigail.gerstein@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

–Staff writer Avi W. Burstein can be reached at avi.burstein@thecrimson.com.