In his 1st year, Carney doubles Trudeau’s time out of the country

Prime Minister Mark Carney is on track to have spent 20 per cent of his first year abroad, more than both Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper.

Before he’d even been prime minister for a week, Mark Carney was in the air, en route first to Paris, for a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and then over to London to sit down with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Since then, Carney has hardly stopped, and by the time he marks his first anniversary as prime minister, he will have spent one of every five days in office out of the country.

Global News analyzed the itineraries of Carney and former prime ministers Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau and found that Carney has been on the road more than his two predecessors, a reflection of Carney’s promise, made during last spring’s election campaign, to diversify and strengthen Canada’s trade and security relationships beyond the United States.

“This prime minister has made trade diversification a real centrepiece of his time in office. And so it makes sense that he’s going out there trying to make deals,” said Roland Paris, a University of Ottawa professor who briefly served as a foreign policy advisor to Trudeau.

On Monday, the Prime Minister’s Office announced Carney will be wheels up again this week.

The Royal Canadian Air Force CC-330 Husky aircraft that carries the prime minister, aides, the media and others on these delegations will, beginning on Thursday, circumnavigate the globe, flying east from Ottawa to touchdown in Mumbai, New Delhi, Canberra, Sydney and Tokyo before returning to Ottawa.

And it will be Carney’s second circumnavigation in as many months.

In January, Carney flew west to Vancouver and then kept going to Beijing, Doha, Davos and back to Ottawa.