Prime Minister Mark Carney departs Zurich, Switzerland, on Wednesday, after attending the annual World Economic Forum in Davos.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
It is not often that a Canadian prime minister captures the world’s attention, if not imagination, as impressively as Mark Carney did this week in Davos. His speech before global elites at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland brought the room to its feet and garnered rave reviews in the European media. Even Le Monde published a large excerpt.
His core message – that the old, rules-based international order has ruptured, requiring middle powers such as Canada to build new alliances amid the new great-power rivalry – laid bare the hard truths facing this country and many others as the United States turns its back on the multilateral institutions that emerged under its postwar leadership.
This new world disorder has shattered any pretense of a benevolent hegemon – as the U.S. was long seen to be – providing the financial underpinning and security umbrella that had enabled the value of global trade to grow by nearly 382 times between 1950 and 2024. Given the chilling geopolitical portrait of a lawless world that Mr. Carney painted, one might have expected the audience in Davos to be crying, not clapping.
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After all, nothing symbolized the “extreme global integration” (Mr. Carney’s words) of the old world order more than Davos and the WEF. For decades, global elites met there every January to preach the virtues of the ever-deeper economic integration that had made their countries and companies ever-richer, though often at the expense of their own workers. This year, it was as if they came to mourn the end of an era, and Mr. Carney delivered the eulogy.
One suspects that what the folks in Davos were really applauding, then, was the frontal attack on U.S. President Donald Trump that Mr. Carney was seen to be levelling in his speech. Mr. Carney spoke the day before Mr. Trump arrived in Davos and made his spectacular (though hardly unexpected) U-turn from his threat to take over Greenland, and his vow to slap additional tariffs on European countries that expressed their dissent.
There was a brooding and resentful tone to Mr. Carney’s address that perfectly matched the mood in the room. Anger had been building over the bullying Mr. Trump’s latest affront to U.S. allies, and Mr. Carney’s speech provided his audience with a much-needed release.
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Yet, for all the hard truths Mr. Carney’s address delivered, it left many others unsaid. Not least of which is that one of the reasons why the American hegemon has soured on the multilateral system it long upheld is its sense that it has been taken advantage of by free-riders that do not contribute enough to their own defence. This is likely what Mr. Trump was getting at when, in reacting the following day to Mr. Carney’s speech, he said: “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way.”
One wonders whether the standing ovation Mr. Carney received in Davos will have proved worth it once he gets down to renegotiating the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement with Mr. Trump. Not long ago, Mr. Carney was still bragging that Canada had “the best deal” of any country, with more than four-fifths of Canadian exports entering the U.S. tariff-free under the agreement. But his speech in Davos made it sound like he thinks the USMCA is already dead.
The biggest problem with Mr. Carney’s speech, however, lay in its misplaced reference to a 1978 essay by Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel to draw an awkward analogy between the coercive methods used to sustain the communist system and the go-along-to-get-along mentality that prevailed under the rules-based order.
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Not only was the analogy disrespectful to those who suffered (and suffer still) under totalitarian rule, it obscured the combat Mr. Havel led to bring freedom to his country and its citizens. He sought to overthrow the communist system, and landed in prison for it. The essay served as an inspiration for dissidents across the Soviet Bloc who bravely challenged their cruel and despotic rulers.
That Mr. Carney dared to reference Mr. Havel in a speech just after travelling to Beijing, where he signed a “new strategic partnership” with China, speaks volumes about the Prime Minister’s willingness to put Canada’s values on the back burner as he pursues a mercantilist agenda to diversify our trading partners, regardless of whether or not they oppress their own citizens.
Canada’s approach, Mr. Carney said in Davos, is “pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner shares our values … We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.”
One wonders what Mr. Havel, who lived to change the world, would have made of it all.