Prime Minister Mark Carney shows off a beaded Edmonton Oilers medallion given to him by Chief Tammy Cook-Searson, behind, of Lac La Ronge Indian Band.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Imagine for a moment that someone offered your teenage self a mysterious bargain with the universe.
One day, many years in the future – and several decades after they last won it all – your team would have a shot at taking home the Stanley Cup. And you would be in a position where if you wanted to go to a game, someone would definitely find you a ticket. The catch? You would at that moment have a big, hefty job that might make it impossible for you to take it all in as your team reached for glory once more.
“It is a weird deal,” says Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is currently living this reality with his beloved Edmonton Oilers, who face the Florida Panthers in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final Wednesday night. “But you know, I’m just happy that they’re in the final. And I’ll be happier when they win.”
Carney was born in Fort Smith, NWT, in 1965, but moved to Edmonton when he was a toddler and spent the rest of his growing-up years there. He started playing hockey around age six and became a goaltender, and he followed the Oilers from the time they were born into the World Hockey Association in the 1972-73 season.
Carney remembers reading in the Edmonton Journal about the deal that sent Wayne Gretzky to the Oilers from the Indianapolis Racers, when he was about 13. The following year, Edmonton became an NHL team when the leagues merged.
By the time the Oilers began their dynastic run in 1984, Carney was attending Harvard, but he always came home for the summers, so he would be back in Edmonton for the playoffs. He only went to a handful of games in person when he was young; his Oilers-watching experience then was more of the black-and-white aerial TVs in a friend’s basement variety.
At Harvard, he became good friends with Peter Chiarelli, future general manager of the Oilers and a string of other NHL teams. They both played for the Crimson, Chiarelli as captain and Carney as the third-string goaltender.
“I opened the gate for a lot of very good players,” is how he sardonically described his collegiate hockey career in an interview a few years ago. The interviewer pushed on whether he’d considered playing in the NHL.
“I considered it,” Carney deadpanned. “The NHL did not consider it.”
He kept playing when he went to Oxford and afterward, though he hasn’t played since he moved to the U.K. as Governor of the Bank of England in 2013.
But the dream wasn’t quite dead.
“You know, I got called up to the Oil earlier this year,” Carney says in our interview, with an audible smirk.
A few days before he kicked off the election campaign in March, he invoked prime ministerial privilege to skate with the team at morning practice. He wore no. 24 (he’s the 24th Prime Minister of Canada) and goalie skates that looked like water skis, and they gave him a stall with his own nameplate, too.
The political value of the scene was obvious, in a moment of pugnacious Canadian patriotism as Donald Trump leered over the border. But there was nothing staged about the punch-drunk smile on Carney’s face as he wheeled around the ice.
“I finally made it to the show. It happened, I knew it would happen,” he says of the experience. “It was fantastic, every bit of it was fantastic.”
The thing about Carney in his day job is that he has never looked for one moment even slightly fazed to suddenly find himself Prime Minister, attending high-level global meetings with other bold-faced names and becoming a guy on the news every night. He doesn’t do impressed or intimidated.
Except in one case.
“It was deeply cool to meet the players,” Carney says of his one-man fantasy camp. “I walked into the dressing room and there was Draisaitl, McDavid, Darnell Nurse and Zach Hyman standing there – which is, you know, any one of them is amazing. Hyman introduced himself to me – like, I know who you are! I’m the one that has to introduce myself.”
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Carney frequently posts on social media hollering about the Oilers, and those are among the very few moments when his strategic and cerebral polish gives way to something almost goofy.
In 2021, he posted a photo of himself barefoot and flashing dual peace signs while wearing a t-shirt with Connor McDavid’s face superimposed onto an image of the Lord himself. The shirt had “McJesus 97” emblazoned across the back and Carney captioned it, “I believe.” That night, Winnipeg went on to sweep the Oilers from the NHL’s COVID-condensed playoffs.
This season, there was was brief muttering about a “Carney curse” after the injuries piled up following his appearance at practice.
Carney hasn’t been able to follow as many games this year, but he often listens to 630 CHED with Bob Stauffer, because no matter where he is in the world, he can get a pretty good picture of what’s going on. He watches games on TV when he can, but more often it’s on his iPad, and the few seconds of delay with the online feed can cause problems.
“I’ve got a handful of friends that I used to play hockey with, who sort of text group commentary. And they’re obviously all watching it on TV or in some cases at one time or another actually at the game,” Carney says. “And so I will end up getting a text that is either celebratory or desultory, before I actually see what happened.”
Carney shows his Oilers t-shirt at a campaign event in Edmonton in April.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
He runs through the dates of this series out loud, trying to figure out which ones he might be able to watch. There aren’t many. Game 5 falls the night before he hosts world leaders for the G7 meetings in Kananaskis, Alta., and Game 6 is the day the summit concludes. All Carney knows for now is that he can watch Game 1, and he’d love to be there in person at some point, but that decision feels like it belongs to his schedule.
“I would love to go,” he says. “If I could I would – if I can I will, is maybe a better way to put it. Duty calls.”
Even with this Stanley Cup final a rematch of last year’s heartbreaker, Carney says his emotional state is more excitement than angst. It’s an amazing lineup, they’ve had to leave everything on the ice to reach this point, he says, and last year, if not for that blind save by Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, who knows?
“They were so close,” Carney says, in what may or may not be an attempted exorcism of anxiety demons.
I ask whether it’s occurred to him that winning a seemingly impossible election and then watching his team go all the way in the same year is simply too much for the universe to grant one man.
“Nope,” Carney says flatly, and then laughs. “More is more.”