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In the the Summer 2025 issue of Perspectives Journal, University of Calgary post doc and Parkland Institute board member Mack Penner wrote ‘Carney and the Calgary School: or, Passive Revolution and Canada’s Social State in the Neoliberal Era,’ tracing the origins of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s economic thinking to the Calgary School. The Calgary School is described as an informal grouping of conservative academics that played an active and significant role in Canadian politics during the 1990s and 2000s, whose members centred around the University of Calgary. What united otherwise disparate neoliberal and neoconservative thinkers at the Calgary School was a skeptical orientation towards the intentional state.
Carney, a lifelong banker (in the financial investment sector, then the monetary central banking sector), thus stands quite appropriately as an heir to North American neoliberalism. But to secure his troubled inheritance with impressive stealth, he has become the new political face of an ideological orientation that shares his western-Canadian background, but none of his partisan identifications.
Strange and contradictory as it seems, Carney arguably represents the “common-sensification” of a conservative tradition identified with the Calgary School, a now multi-generational group of conservative intellectuals of which none would appreciate the association with a Liberal government. We chat with Mack Penner to better understand this connection between Carney and the Calgary School.
Notes and further reading:
- Mack Penner, ‘Carney and the Calgary School: or, Passive Revolution and Canada’s Social State in the Neoliberal Era,’ in Perspectives Journal, no. 4, Summer 2025.
- ActiveHistory.ca
- mackpenner.com
- Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Macmillan, 2023.
- Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Princeton University Press, 2025.
