Canadians have experienced a year of Mark Carney as prime minister, and his performance in the public eye isn’t what many insiders expected. The way that speech at Davos commanded world attention. How his restrained yet emotional response to the Tumbler Creek shooting channelled the nation’s disbelief. His routine knack for coming off as relaxed yet serious in front of the cameras.

Before we grow too blasé about his effective messaging, it’s worth recalling that only a year or so ago, as he was winning the Liberal leadership and then a federal election, summaries of the style of the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor emphasized that Carney was “a staid, low-key globalist,” who would bring to politics the “sober demeanour of a natural technocrat.”

In other words, the conventional wisdom on Carney was that his capacity for crafting a policy agenda was bound to outstrip his ability to sell one. And those characterizations of him as staid and sober weren’t wrong—as far as they went. How can it be, then, that those traits seem to be serving him so well? The easiest way to process his success would be to simply conclude that the guy has transitioned from technocrat to politician more deftly than expected.

But that shrugging response—hey, he’s better than we’d have guessed—misses key clues from Carney’s pre-politics background that help explain his knack as prime minister for getting his points across. Skepticism about how a central banker’s résumé prepared him in politics was understandable. What it missed, however, was how Carney came to grasp the need to connect with the public, back when he supposedly didn’t have to care.

The notion that monetary policy is a bloodless business is wrong. Carney spoke about this perceptively in a speech he delivered on June 28, 2021, between the end of his tenure at the Bank of England and his plunge into partisan politics. He called the speech “The Art of Central Banking in a Centrifugal World.” What he meant by “centrifugal,” as he explained right off the top, was an “increasingly multipolar global economy” characterized by fragmenting forces, notably the rise of crypto currencies.

Carney saw a world where the old centres of gravity—implicitly including a reliable U.S. economy around which all else swirled—were increasingly unable to hold. In the rise of crypto, he saw striking evidence that traditional sources of stability—including old-fashioned money—were facing unprecedented challenges.

A stereotypical central banker’s response to these disturbing developments would have been to pull some levers. Adjust interest rates. Tinker with quantitative easing or tightening. Play around with financial regulations. Or some other fiddling almost nobody understands. Instead, Carney stressed that “central banking is an art as well as a science.”

He described money itself as “a social convention” that is “grounded in values of trust, resilience, dynamism and sustainability.” Not only must the custodians of money somehow reassure worried ordinary people that the system is solid, they need those people to buy in. “This in turn requires public understanding, built through transparency and accountability,” he said. “And it requires public consent grounded in solidarity including in the fair sharing of the burdens of economic adjustment.”

Carney warned that “technological change is widening inequalities and, through social media, contributing to the polarization of public opinion.” He was talking, not about eye-glazing economic concepts, but about the daunting challenges that cause anyone who thinks hard about twenty-first century politics to lose sleep: inequality, social media, polarization.

“During times of great change, the relative weight that societies place on certain core values—resilience, dynamism, solidarity, and sustainability—is revealed,” he summed up. “History teaches that realizing the gains from major technological transitions eventually requires the overhaul of virtually every institution from education to finance.”

These are not the words of a cautious technocrat who has cultivated the art of understatement. Carney emerged from his long run as a central banker convinced that the world was in a dangerous moment of transition. He called for “overhauling virtually every institution.” And he argued this could only happen with “public consent grounded in solidarity.”

It is not a long leap from this worldview to Carney’s celebrated Davos speech on Jan. 20 this year. Listeners sat up straight when he spoke of a “rupture in the world order,” and clearly he was alluding to Donald Trump’s bizarre behaviour. But he was already talking about the need for a fundamental transition five years earlier. His prescription for middle-power cooperation leaned into words like “solidarity,” “sustainability,” and “resilience”—all terms that chime with that 2021 speech.

None of this is to argue that Carney as prime minister is a simple extension of Carney as central banker. Scrutinizing what he did in his previous line of work doesn’t capture his personal qualities. Carney possesses the rare gift of combining a light touch and high seriousness—a politically potent mix. His charm in a room often translates nicely onto a screen. He smiles more readily than he frowns, which voters always like.

But beyond those attributes, Carney’s approach is grounded in deep deliberation about a world dangerously in flux. He has thought a lot—certainly more than most novice politicians—about the critical task of bringing an anxious public along in an era of unavoidable change. He did that thinking as a central banker. It isn’t a background he must break free from to succeed as prime minister, it’s the foundation of his politics.