Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent speech is the clearest acknowledgements yet from a senior Canadian figure that the post–Cold War world is over. Not fading, not evolving, but ruptured.
In his speech at The World Economic Forum in Davos, the Prime Minister rejects the comforting language of “transition” and instead describes a global system that has broken under the weight of its own contradictions. Drawing on Václav Havel’s metaphor of the green grocer, he argues that countries have long lived within a lie: pretending that the rules-based international order was neutral, universal, and fair, when in practice it was enforced unevenly and underwritten by American power. That bargain, he argues, no longer holds. “Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
Economic integration, once treated as a pacifying force, has become the weapon it sought to replace. Tariffs, financial infrastructure, supply chains, and even technological standards are now tools of coercion. In this environment, middle powers like Canada can no longer assume that openness alone will deliver prosperity or security. The world, as Carney puts it, is becoming a world of fortresses.
A Strategy for Middle Powers
The PM’s response is not isolationism but realism. He advances a value-based realism that upholds sovereignty, democracy, and human rights while acknowledging diverging interests and incremental progress. It rejects naive multilateralism and the belief that universal institutions alone can reconcile national priorities.
Instead, the PM calls for variable geometry: flexible, issue-specific coalitions that allow middle powers to exert influence without being dominated by great powers like the US, China, or Russia. Central to this approach is strategic autonomy. Canada must reduce vulnerability to coercion by strengthening domestic capacity in energy, food systems, critical minerals, defence, and emerging technologies. This is not autarky but resilience. In a weaponized global economy, dependence is risk.
Most importantly, the PM names reality. The old order is not returning. Denying this weakens both policy and public trust. The task ahead is to ground Canadian foreign and economic policy in material capabilities rather than nostalgia.
A Very Canadian Worldview
Carney’s speech fits squarely within a long tradition of Canadian statecraft.
Canada’s governing ideology has rarely been animated by revolutionary virtue or populist moralism. Instead, it has prioritized material expansion, political unity, and centralized coordination. Described as the Laurentian Consensus or the Court Party tradition, this worldview treats economic capacity and institutional strength as prerequisites for sovereignty. The Laurentian Elite are those who live along the St. Lawrence River, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, though increasingly these individuals are less geography-specific and more so refer to “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” who shaped Canadian identity historically.
Carney’s emphasis on minerals, energy, AI, and infrastructure reflects this tradition. It privileges wealth creation and state capacity over ideological purity. In a hostile environment, the survival and coherence of the state come first.
His call for decisive government action, including the rapid mobilization of fiscal capacity to catalyze large-scale investment, also reflects Canada’s executive-centric political design. Confederation itself, the railway, wartime industrial mobilization, and the postwar welfare state were all built through concentrated authority rather than diffuse consensus. We do not have the same allergy to centralized authority that the US does. It’s one of the reasons the Westminster Parliamentary system produces majority governments, and with the Canadian tradition of party discipline, Canadian majority governments can act more decisively than the President of the United States.
The familiar anti-American realism runs rampant through his speech. The Laurentian elite historically define themselves against American republicanism. The PM warns against being forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers, between great powers and unaccountable private empires. This echoes a longstanding Canadian instinct to seek a sovereign third path, close enough to the United States to benefit, but distant enough to avoid subordination.
Yet, the last decade taught me to be on alert for this kind of rhetoric.
History offers a clear warning about what happens when the language of realism, sovereignty, and national resilience is captured by hyper-capitalist interests. In the United States, economic nationalism was rhetorically mobilized by Trump to challenge globalization, only to be co-opted by the very oligarchic forces that had benefited most from it (think his technocratic sycophants). The result was not renewed sovereignty for workers or communities, but further concentration of wealth, power, and political influence.
Canada is not immune to this risk.
Strategic autonomy cannot become a pretext for corporate rent-seeking, subsidy capture, or the entrenchment of monopolies under the banner of national interest. The Air Canada flight attendant strike was a reminder that Canadian companies are capable of the same kind of greed we often impute to American mega-corporations. Industrial policy without democratic accountability risks reproducing the same inequalities that hollowed out trust in the old order.
If Carney’s framework is to succeed, it must remain grounded in public purpose. Resilience must benefit communities, workers, and regions, not just balance sheets. Otherwise, the language of realism will be emptied of substance and repurposed to defend the status quo it claims to challenge.
Here are some considerations for Brampton
Industrial policy often begins and ends with large firms and national champions. That is a mistake.
Governments at all levels should embed local procurement requirements into infrastructure, defence, transit, housing, and energy projects. This does not mean protectionism. It means using public spending to intentionally grow local supply chains, worker-owned firms, and small manufacturers.
Municipalities and provinces can:
- Break large contracts into smaller tranches accessible to local firms, where possible
- Prioritize social enterprises, cooperatives, and community-owned businesses
- Use “community benefit agreements” to guarantee local hiring and apprenticeships
Hospitals, universities, colleges, utilities, and transit agencies are among the largest and most stable economic actors in many communities. Yet they often behave like footloose global buyers.
A community wealth approach reorients these anchor institutions to:
- Source goods and services locally where possible
- Invest endowments and pension assets in regional productive capacity
- Partner with municipalities to incubate local manufacturing, food systems, and care economies
And as I have written before, Canada should take inspiration from Mariana Mazzucato’s entrepreneurial state. Mazzucato challenges the idea of a lumbering, inept government bureaucracy whose purpose is to merely correct market failures. Historically, the state has been a lead investor, risk-taker, and mission-setter.
Some of her recommendations include:
- Conditionality for public funding tied to domestic investment and job creation
- State-owned equity stakes, royalties, or golden shares in strategic sectors
- Reinvestment requirements for firms benefiting from public support
If these kinds of conditions were in place, the fate of a company like Stellantis could look very different. We are right to call out wasted public money when governments pick losers. But a system like this would also allow governments to share in the upside when they pick winners.
Today, that does not happen. Instead, governments subsidize the private sector by investing in winners without any meaningful mechanism to capture the gains when those investments pay off.
Time will tell
The PM is right about the diagnosis. The era of pretense is over. He’s saying what every left-wing professor of mine has said throughout my education. The rules-based order was always more fragile and more political than we admitted, and its fractures are now impossible to ignore with someone as flagrantly bellicose as Trump.
What I worry about is that the Trump boogeyman obscures the real lesson in the PM’s speech: Trump has not perverted the way business is done. The way business is done produces Trump-like perversions. We saw suggestions of this at the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, the 2008 global financial crisis, as well as the precarity of global supply chains during COVID-19. If we use this acknowledgement of the multipolar reality of our world as an opportunity to entrench corporate greed, we’ve not heeded these warnings. Our PM’s newest test will be his inclusion in the so-called “Board of Peace“.
I am glad the Prime Minister is seeing the world clearly; as it is, not as we may want it to be. We will see how clear this vision actually is.
