This transcript has been edited. Listen to the full episode to hear the full conversation!
Jennifer Stewart: Many Canadians might not know that you were born and raised in Britain. Can you take us back to what you were like as a kid, and who or what influenced you?
Diana Fox Carney: So I was born in Oxfordshire, and I was a strange kid. I mean, there’s no denying it. I was a slightly solitary kind of kid, had this wild white hair, and I grew up on a farm. I was a pretty lonesome kid, and my parents were divorced when I was pretty young. And, playing into stereotypes, I was sent to boarding school when I was very young, so I had an unusual childhood. But what doesn’t kill you makes you strong.
Catherine Clark: When you say young, give us the context. How old were you when you were sent to boarding school?
Diana Fox Carney: Eight.
Catherine Clark: Yeah, that is young. Do you remember it? Do you remember what you felt?
Diana Fox Carney: I went one term, one semester after everyone else, which didn’t help either. It was sort of a necessity at the time, and I think it’s contributed to a strong sense of the need to fly sometimes, like to not be in the place that I was. But then I loved it after a while. But it was tough.
Jennifer Stewart: Where did you find solace? In books, in a person, in yourself?
Diana Fox Carney: It’s a good question. I think being outside. This was actually a house in the countryside, and we used to play outside a lot. But I remember we had house groups, and I was in the Oak group, and I spent a lot of time lying on the ground, looking up through the oak leaves and thinking how beautiful they were. And still, I love to do that. I love lying under trees. So yeah, I think it’s nature, probably.
Catherine Clark: You’ve talked previously, in other conversations, about the fact that you had a more female-centric upbringing because you just mentioned your parents’ divorce. You had, I think, two sisters and your grandma. How did that influence how you grew up as well, being surrounded by so many women?
Diana Fox Carney: I think at the time you don’t think about these things. It’s just life. You take life as it comes. And, as you mentioned, my grandmother was a strong influence. She was a strong character and lived close by, either with us or close to us, and was very much the person who played games, taught us how to do craft projects, and this and the other, and had pretty strong values and commitments to doing good in the world. So that was great.
It was a collaborative household. We were all kind of making do. You very much had to be independent at a very young age. Not only because I was away at school doing all the things I needed to, but, you know, we all got on, and my job was mowing the lawns, and I was the kind of handy person around the house. One of my sisters took on the cooking, and the other one – we had a lot of animals. I grew up on a farm, but even after that, we had many animals. And one of my sisters, you know, she took on the animals.
But when I was very young, I used to change the plugs and do all the little mowing and all those important things. So, it was kind of normal, I guess.
Jennifer Stewart: Are there any lessons from your childhood that you draw on now?
Diana Fox Carney: Well, it’s this. I think doing things for yourself, resilience, just understanding this is how it is now. I need to put one foot in front of the next and move on.
Although I just read a piece in the New York Times last week by a woman, Angela Duckworth, who writes about grit, and she was writing that you can think about grit and resilience and all these things that we need to persevere, but actually a lot of life should be about support and how everyone who’s successful has people who support them.
So I think I learned a lot about resilience. Perhaps I didn’t learn enough about asking for help and working with other people. It was all very much like you’re out there on your own. But we all deal with different backstories, right? And we make the most of them.
Catherine Clark: So this is totally jumping ahead, but thinking in terms of maybe not having learned how to ask for support early in life, do you feel that that’s something that – you’re in such a whirlwind of a life right now – have you gotten better at asking for the support that you need at this stage of your life?
Diana Fox Carney: Having just read this article, I was trying to transpose this into my life. I think I probably do, whether I do it in the right way or to the right people.
I find it weird in life in general that you’re never really taught how to work with other people. I guess, in a sense, that’s the thing that people teach you least. You have to kind of try and experiment. How do you work with people? How do you work with teams? How do you get the best out of people? These are things we can read about and experiment with.
But it’s a funny thing that no one’s ever sort of sat down and said, “This is kind of the way it should be done.”
Jennifer Stewart: So you’re a hockey player, and you met your husband playing hockey in Oxford. Speaking about that kind of team dynamic, first of all, how did you pick up hockey in the UK when it’s not necessarily a popular sport? And then, did knowing the greatest sport in Canada teach you how to play and learn as a team?
Diana Fox Carney: Most people my age didn’t have as many opportunities as kids do now. Everything was pretty basic.
So when presented with opportunities to do things like that, I would take every opportunity that I could find. So I played field hockey, and when I went to Oxford, actually I missed it the first year. I didn’t sort of see the sign or, you know, the booth at the freshers’ events. But when I heard that there was this thing, you know, I’d been skating a couple of times in my life, and I thought, you know, why wouldn’t I do that?
So I took it up, and I loved it from the start, and it became quite a big part of my life. I played as an undergrad. I went to university in the States afterwards for a year. I played there, and then when I came back to do another master’s, I was careful to choose one of the two universities that had a hockey team, which took me back to Oxford, which is where I met Mark.
So I loved it. Still enjoy it. I played as an adult here in Canada, but I don’t play anymore.
And what does it teach you? I mean, I love team sports for that. I love the camaraderie. I love the idea that the joy is so much greater when you can celebrate with others, and the pain is so much less when you lose because you can also commiserate with others.
But getting the best out of teams again is something that isn’t an equally distributed talent, right? I mean, some captains, coaches, whatever, we know that they do a much better job at that. Judging by our match success, I’m not sure we quite had that! I think teamwork in general and the idea that you have to be reliable, you have to show up; these are commitments you make to your teammates to go out there, do your best, and be there. These are really important life lessons.
Catherine Clark: But it was a match success! I mean, in terms of life matches, you scored on that match.
Diana Fox Carney: We met because of a mutual friend, a Canadian friend, actually. I lived in his house. He was a course mate of my husband, so we met early on in the semester in a pub with a bunch of people.
I don’t remember much about it. I just remember that we met, but we then did see each other in the context of the hockey arena at strange hours of the night because we used to play at midnight, 2 o’clock in the morning. But it wasn’t, you know, love at first sight!
Catherine Clark: I was going to ask that! So it wasn’t love at first sight. It was a slow burn?
Diana Fox Carney: No, no. I mean, I thought he was nice. But no, it wasn’t a coup de foudre. We took our time. But once we did get together, then it was a strong commitment.
Catherine Clark: You were married quite quickly after that. Is that once you’d made the decision? You were in Africa, were you not?
Diana Fox Carney: That’s correct. So we were together for about four or five months, a little bit between Canada and the UK because it was the summer. Then I went to Africa. I went to live in Africa for a year and a half, and then we got married shortly after I got back.
It wasn’t a traditional thing where we had been living together or spent every day together. But somehow, while I was there, we decided we were going to get married and live happily ever after.
Catherine Clark: I’m just really curious about this. Here you are: You’ve got two master’s degrees. You have a real series of fields of interest for yourself. You must have had some sense that you wanted to have a career of your own. Did it ever weigh on you that you were going to marry this guy who’s Canadian, and that that might take you away from the things that were of interest to you? Or did you just think, “Oh, new fields of opportunity”?
Diana Fox Carney: It’s a good question. He was very upfront when we first met that he wanted to go back to Canada and work in the public service. So I always knew that was kind of on my horizon, and I was pretty upbeat about that.
I’d never particularly assumed I would live in the UK. Even though I grew up very domestically, I’d always valued travel and taken every opportunity to travel that I could. And so the idea of living in Canada didn’t perturb me unduly.
There was a time when I was out in Africa. At the time, I was committed to a career in international development. I said something like, “Amazing to be on this island in the middle of the Indian Ocean,” because I was in Zanzibar. My husband looked at me like, “No.” That’s when I realized it was going to be challenging to do a development, kind of in-the-field development job and be married to him.
So there was that moment where I thought…he’s not going to be a trailing spouse and come and live all around these African countries with me. But then I worked in the same field, but in a think tank in the UK.
I mean, everyone listening knows that marriage is give and take, right? And my career has been significantly and repeatedly disrupted. Let’s put it this way: not only by having four children, but also by moving country quite regularly for my husband’s jobs. We moved to the US on the way back to Canada. That was a sort of stepping stone we knew we were making, then moving back to the UK, and then back to Canada.
It’s hard to combine two careers. But hopefully, I made the best of that, and many, many opportunities. And, you know…I obviously picked a winning horse! It was worthwhile supporting him.
Jennifer Stewart: Can I unpack that a little bit? Because you are an incredible leader in sustainability and climate. You’ve done wonderful things both in Canada and abroad. How did you manage that push-pull? You’ve also had a remarkable career. So how did you manage that with your husband’s trajectory and not, at the end of the day, feel resentful, but feel supportive?
Diana Fox Carney: Well, I think firstly, you’re kind to say I’ve had a remarkable career. I like to imagine that, had circumstances been different, I would have been even more remarkable!
Listen, I think you’ve got to, as I said, realize, similarly to when I was young, that this is just how it is now. I’ll just move forward on this basis.
And I think I’m quite a dilettante in the sense that I, even though sometimes I get frustrated about the fact that I’ve chopped and changed and moved around and done various things, I also know that that suits my personality in many regards. And that had I just been, you know, in one job for a long time, same subject, working my way up in one area, that may well not have suited me.
So, in many regards, this has given me an opportunity to try different things, work with different people, make different connections, and transfer the general-purpose skills that are relevant in different sectors. And it’s been interesting, and it’s also been, in some regards, a luxury to not have to do one thing all the time.
It suits me – but it depends what day of the week you catch me on. Sometimes it’s frustrating because you think, I was just about to do that great thing, and then you have to check yourself and realize that you probably wouldn’t have done that great thing anyway.
Catherine Clark: I think you sell yourself short. Because I also wonder: so many women, not just here in Canada, but in other parts of the world, who are the spouses of especially political leaders, have really fascinating careers of their own, and in many cases attempt to maintain that while their spouse is in power.
But at the same time, they’re being pushed by outside influences, which really view the role of spouse, especially if you’re female, as being about support, appearance, often quiet. We expect our spouses to be quiet. How have you still made this role your own? How have you made space for yourself?
Diana Fox Carney: It’s important to me that I do continue to work. I’ve worked for a long time. Because of all this moving around, I’ve worked effectively freelance and worked for a variety of people, and I still am able to do that.
And there was a bit of pushback on that initially, but I’m very insistent that that’s what I want to do, and I think that helps.
The fact that I know that I have people who need me to do things in a traditional work-type way makes it easier for me to do the things that perhaps come less naturally to me – the sort of more decorative aspect of political spousalness, because I know that I’ve got my real life, as it were, that’s going on here.
That said, I think there are huge opportunities. The fact that my husband has had interesting roles that I value, I think it would be harder for me if my husband was a big executive in some business that I didn’t care about. But because he’s done things and I care about public policy, and I’ve always worked close or often worked close to government things, and because I value what he’s doing, it makes it much easier for me to want to support him.
And there are also huge opportunities in what he’s doing for me. I meet people, I have access to conversations and things that I wouldn’t necessarily if I didn’t have him.
And I think in this specific role, I’m very aware. Although I want to carry on and do my own things, I’m very aware that I have opportunities now that other people don’t. This is quite unique.
I try to think quite a lot about how to use my time, both in support of him and the government more broadly, and things that I believe in. I have my own opinions, but am broadly in support of many of the things that are going on.
If I can do things like that, in areas that I care about and know about, that I can bring people together in those areas and engage people around issues that I believe to be important, and to try and support other people that are doing things that I believe to be important, then maybe I can make a difference.
I don’t want to cause problems; it’s not my objective. If there are things that I don’t agree about, I’m not going to talk about those things publicly. I want to be helpful, but I also want to be advancing things that I care about.
Maybe this was my granny when I was young, but I want to make the world a better place. It’s a bit of a sort of banal objective in life. It’s a bit non-specific too, but, you know, if I can try – and I have a better opportunity to do that than many people do, having this role.
Now I have things I have to do, like caring more about what I wear. I mean, we all want to look nice, but I didn’t use to have that many clothes, but now I do!
Jennifer Stewart: I like how you said you need to be really intentional with how you use your time, and then you married that with wanting to have impact. So, is there a project you’ve worked on in the past or that you’re working on now that you’re particularly proud of that kind of marries that intersection?
Diana Fox Carney: There are! I’m involved in a few areas. One of the things I care a lot about is cultural life and the arts of all sorts, the visual arts and creativity, particularly in this time where stuff tends to be quite digital.
So I’m trying to support a bunch of things in that space, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for Canada to do more and be prouder of its cultural life more broadly.
There are also social issues that I care about, like homelessness, and people are doing such great things that if my help can bring more power to them, then that’s good.
The other piece is always nature and the environment, and how we take care of the resources we have been so generously bestowed with.
Catherine Clark: You deal with a tremendous amount of scrutiny now that you probably haven’t had to deal with at the same level in previous parts of your life. How do you handle that?
Diana Fox Carney: What’s interesting is I do, but in a way, when I was in the UK and when my husband was governor of the Bank of England, everyone knows that the UK press and the UK are just much meaner and much more kind of gotcha on personal stuff. So I was schooled early on. If I hadn’t had that experience, I think I would have been less cautious, in a sense. But I’ve learned that the danger lurks around many corners.
In general, I don’t particularly feel hostility here in Canada. In fact, I’ve been happily surprised by how nice people are. When I go out there, people are so kind and generous to me, and so grateful. And particularly now, in the times we’re in now, grateful for the efforts that my husband’s making on behalf of the country, but also for, you know, the family, my efforts, the family efforts to support him, etc.
So it’s been a real joy meeting people.
Although you feel scrutiny, and you know people are always going to have an opinion of you – which is something most people don’t have to live with – you just learn you need to be a little careful.
I’m quite a private person, so I’m not someone who seeks attention for attention’s sake. I’m happy to support things and people I care about; I don’t mind being in pictures and stuff like that. But I’m not kind of shouting about myself, I guess.
Jennifer Stewart: So what do you feed yourself emotionally and mentally, then? Do you stay off social media? What books do you read? How do you kind of quiet that noise of that very loud life that you live?
Diana Fox Carney: I don’t look at comments. I unsubscribe from most news feeds so I’m not tempted, because I could spend all day and get sad. So that helps me enormously.
I run. I go out in nature. I go for hikes. I’m lucky enough to have great girlfriends in Ottawa. I can’t imagine doing this job if you’re a real outsider in Ottawa, like making friends, having that support. I’m super fortunate that I have that here.
And then, if I get the opportunity, we’re lucky enough to be able to go to Harrington Lake, the government cottage, but we have our own space, which is kind of my happy place, not too far from here. And I have a pottery studio there, and I make – I make pots and go on my paddleboard.
Catherine Clark: Oh, that’s so fun! I want to follow up on the running too, because my understanding is that you literally are a next-level runner. Like, you are super fast.
Diana Fox Carney: I tried to be really fast this year, and I got injured. I would say I run fast relative to people my age! I love to run. Well, actually, I don’t love to run. I love to have run. You know, I like the experience of having run! And I love to ski. I do a lot of cross-country skiing.
Catherine Clark: And you were telling us just before our podcast that you listen to podcasts while you’re running?
Diana Fox Carney: I do. I listen to people, and if I get annoyed with them, if I disagree with them, that makes me run faster! I find it very useful. I listen to a lot of my kind of work-related things – I listen to stuff on climate and energy and people talking about their businesses and stuff in relative calm.
This transcript has been edited. Listen to the full episode to hear the full conversation!
