Carney's win in Canadian election leaves crypto industry's future uncertain

Mark Carney has won a snap election to keep his job as Canada's prime minister, but this leaves the future of the country's crypto industry unclear, given his past skepticism toward blockchain technology.

Carney defeated the explicitly pro-crypto candidate Pierre Poilievre in an election the sitting prime minister called. Throughout his political career, including terms leading the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, Carney seemingly laughed off Bitcoin and the wider crypto sector.

 “It is not a store of value because it is all over the map. Nobody uses it as a medium of exchange,” Carney said about Bitcoin in 2018. 

“The long, charitable answer is that cryptocurrencies act as money, at best, only for some people and to a limited extent, and even then only in parallel with the traditional currencies of the users,” he said that same year. “The short answer is they are failing.”

Still, Carney, Canada's Liberal Party standard-bearer last month, after Justin Trudeau stepped down, is broadly considered pro-technology and pro-business. The Stand With Crypto Super PAC, for instance, labels him as "somewhat pro-crypto." And, much has also changed since Carney’s earlier criticisms.

Crypto is no longer a fringe issue for governments. Growing the U.S. crypto industry is a stated part of President Donald Trump's agenda, including introducing stablecoin regulations by the end of the summer.

Carney shows his stripes

Carney’s victory could also be viewed as a referendum on Trump. Tensions between the U.S. and Canada have escalated amid Trump’s threats to levy tariffs against America’s northern neighbor and biggest trading partner. However, there may likely be little daylight between how both politicians view the need to regulate crypto. 

In a 2021 lecture, Carney said stablecoins should follow existing rules for "commercial bank money," including liquidity requirements — a stance not far from the GENIUS Act in Congress, which favors cash-backed stablecoins over algorithmic ones.

Notably, Carney, a Stripe board member, said at the time that Facebook's now-defunct Libra stablecoin project could change the payments landscape but stressed that regulatory frameworks would need to be established well before such systems could launch. Unlike many politicians, he said he had an "open mind" to the project, which was not far from Carney’s vision for a CBDC backed by multiple central banks to replace the U.S. dollar. 

Generally speaking, Carney is looking to bring the crypto industry in line with the wider financial sector without stifling innovation. He has warned that the industry is vulnerable to manipulation and fraud, but has also described its underlying technologies as "exciting."

Still, it remains unclear how Carney views the sector today. Many of his most critical comments came when Bitcoin’s market capitalization was a fraction of what it is now. At a 2018 "Future of Money" conference in Scotland, he referred to Bitcoin as an "equity-type risk," rather than a systemic financial threat — though perhaps this has changed given that BTC has shown signs of decoupling from traditional financial markets.