Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was given the honour of a standing ovation following his Jan. 20 speech to the World Economic Forum. In the history of forum speeches, this honour has only been bestowed on figures like Nelson Mandela and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
That’s because Carney’s speech directly addressed the tectonic shift that global politics has taken following President Donald Trump’s election. Carney did a good job of addressing the immediate worry in everyone’s minds, not directly, but alluding to recent actions.
“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” Carney said.
He touched upon an important truth: that the performance of rules-based international order, which has worked so far, no longer works. When someone with immense power behaves like a 10-year-old who has found his father’s gun, all semblance of rules and order suddenly goes away.
“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” Carney said.
Although this was not hopeful or optimistic, Carney chose to be pragmatic and precise. It was not the time to sing the praises of a nation that is actively threatening others.
In a sense, President Donald Trump, in his own speech the next day, confirmed Carney’s beliefs. “Canada lives because of the United States,” he said.
Trump added that Canada was not “being grateful” in his 70-minute speech. His comments barely hid their threatening nature.
As a result of Carney’s speech, Canada was uninvited from joining Trump’s “Board of Peace”, a self-appointed, vague forum, foregoing Canada’s need to pay US$1 billion. Canada, however, continues to be a part of the U.N peacekeeping missions.
Many Canadians, like Greenlanders, now share the fear of being taken over and having their sovereignty taken away. It is a fear that leads many people from around the world to emigrate to countries like Canada.
Carney’s speech offers some hope. Canada is indeed an energy superpower, with access to critical minerals. Before his speech, he visited China and Qatar to negotiate new trade deals.
So perhaps it is time to face the truth that the United States is no longer a reliable partner. Carney’s speech was yet another confirmation that Canada still needs to have its elbows up – and probably most of Europe as well.
President John F. Kennedy, in his address at the Canadian Parliament in 1961, extolled the relationship between the U.S and Canada.
“Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies," Kennedy told Parliament. "Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.”
Now, 65 years later, after Trump was elected, this amicable, natural relationship seems to have sundered irrevocably.
The late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s comments in 1969 about U.S.-Canada relations are now more prescient than ever.
“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” Trudeau said in his meeting with then-President Richard Nixon. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
Trudeau was only half correct. The elephant is no longer even-tempered, and global politics, as Carney said, is undergoing a rupture, and the country must forge a new path into the future.
