Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday.Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press
John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.
Precisely one year after Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States, Mark Carney delivered what is arguably the best speech Canadians have witnessed from a prime minister in a generation. It was stark, in some ways shocking, much like the past year.
Yet through his words Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Prime Minister gave Canadians what many have sought for a decade or more – a clear national purpose – securing our economic sovereignty and helping others do the same.
This purpose carries meaning beyond our borders, defining a place for ourselves in a world we turned away from in disbelief when we saw it coming. Mr. Carney presented a mission to Canadians and Canadian businesses on Tuesday that makes our cause as a middle-power as essential domestically as it is noble internationally.
We can help bind new coalitions of middle-powers to better withstand economic coercion.
Honesty is the first step in that mission. Canada cannot succeed unless we recognize the reality of the time we now occupy. In Mr. Carney’s words, that reality is, as has often been said in this newspaper, “That the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The great powers of today are weaponizing economic integration against those they can.
Canadians know this too well.
Read and watch Mark Carney's Davos speech at the World Economic Forum
Freighted with historical allusions and literary intent, Mr. Carney spoke of “the end of the pleasant fiction,” a phrase made famous in Charles Dickens’ serial novel, Nicholas Nickleby, published in the 1830s.
That “pleasant fiction” today is the international rules-based order. The World Trade Organization, and the United Nations, are, admitted our Prime Minister, now “greatly diminished.”
Dickens‘s dark novels are filled with primary characters so incredible – Ebenezer Scrooge, the Artful Dodger and Uriah Heep – as to defy imagination, much as the current President of the United States does.
The Dickensian era did not end well. It started in the Victorian period when industrial capitalism emerged. Its new merchant class came to dominate the economic and political classes. Rapid urbanization ensued, new technological wonders were invented, empire building was in vogue, a civil war tore America apart, and the enormous gulf between the rich and everyone else caused political upheaval.
Together, those factors gave birth to modernism that soon culminated in “The War to End All Wars,” which began for Canada on a quiet summer’s day in August 1914.
On that day Canadians were the weak that suffered “what they must” as events, powerful countries and political alliances most Canadians barely understood would forever change their lives.
Carney leaves Davos without meeting Trump after speech on U.S. rupture of world order
History doesn’t repeat and Mr. Carney is reminding Canadians of this in Davos. Canada isn’t powerless. As a middle-power Canadians can help drive a new era that “integrates our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states.”
Most importantly Canada and other middle-power countries must resist the impulse of protectionism and building national economic fortresses. “A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable,” warned the Prime Minister.
To succeed Canadians are being asked by Mr. Carney to do what they have not had much practice doing in recent times. They must name reality, that is live in this world and not a wished-for one. Build what we say we believe in and “reducing the (economic) leverage that enables coercion.”
The Prime Minister has been on a tour de force signing 12 trade and security deals in the last six months and added deals with China and Qatar most recently.
He has in his sights the creation of a new trading block uniting the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, creating a 1.5-billion people strong trading zone. “This is not naïve multilateralism,” Mr. Carney said. “It is building the coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together.”
In Dickens’s novels those in business are most often caricatures of unfeeling, detached, self-centred people. Yet there are exceptions.
Mr. Carney is depending on Canadian business leaders to be exceptions. Business in this country isn’t just a matter of balance sheets, income statements and taxes now.
Business leaders have an existential role to play in securing Canadian sovereignty.