Mark Carney's Speech at Davos and Four Responses

 I'm posting this here for my own records, because social media is ephemeral and this feels like something worth recording. 

*Edit* Oh my God, the new editor is a nightmare and I CANNOT make the text cuts work properly. Sorry, friends!

( Carney’s Speech )

( Commentary 1: Metthew Behrens )

What I heard today was a warmed over rehash of the 1948 basis for the world order for which a rupture has been named: PPS 23, written by American mandarin George Kennan, that laid out the "pragmatic" (a term Carney loves) rationale behind the global system of violence that has murdered tens of millions of people since 1945 in the name of democracy, human rights, and a stable investment climate. "We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population... In this connection, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security….We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."" 
 

This world order was fine as long as we white people were not the ones being genocided in Sudan or Gaza or Vietnam or East Timor or Guatemala or Rwanda or Turtle Island, among many others, as along as our Muslim loved ones were not being interned in Chinese or Syrian concentration camps, as long as our loved ones did not have to spend decades on boil water alerts in a land occupied by a genocidal state that kidnapped and tortured and mass-incarcerated our children, and still does.
 

Carney’s pretence that the past 80 years of Canadian-supported, funded and armed state terror (with its big brother the USA in the lead) was somehow an OK norm that has suddenly been ruptured because supply chains for massive corporations are at risk, along with bottom lines. It's the ultimate pulling of the wool over our eyes and throwing out the bleak history in which we have played such a nefarious role.
 

Canada as a "middle power" has done significant damage to the global ecosystem and human rights infrastructure. I will have more to write on this, but if we take a breath, appreciate the fine words, and THEN look at who is saying them and why, I think it will become clear why Bay Street and Wall Street (indeed, the Global elites who cause this massive violence and sustain the gross economic inequality and gave Carney a standing ovation) are applauding. Someone is going to save the most rapacious predatory system the world has ever known (notice how Carney used an example of communism, not capitalism, to talk about the illusions of false promises), and we will retire to our elite villa suites in the Swiss mountains to cogitate on it all. 
 

It's because what Carney is proposing is predatory late-stage capitalism on a slightly different axis. We can continue to mine the earth, invade Indigenous territories, burn through fossil fuels, cook the planet, steal from the poor to give to the corporate warfare profiteers, and maintain a good return on investment for all you who can afford the ticket to Davos and reminisce about Vaclav Havel over sherry.
 

To the folks desperate for a warm space tonight on Canada’s freezing cold streets, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in today’s speech for hope. To Indigenous people bearing the full frontal force of climate catastrophe, not a word. To those worried about the repressive new Carney legislation at home, that will strip whole classes of refugees of their status, that will ramp up the deportation machine, that will justify invasions of Indigenous territories, absolutely nothing. For folks in Gaza continuing to be blown up with Canadian weapons, or folks stateside fleeing ICE violence enhanced with Canadian-made armoured vehicles and drones, nothing. 
 

Since he came to power, Carney has made Trudeau’s gaslighting look like child’s play. And while the wool is over our eyes, we will continue supporting the most dangerous economic system the world has ever known, one that threatens to drown or burn us to death on the road to a good day at the stock market. 
 

Applause for a good show, King Carney. But that’s all it was. Oh, and in the meantime, about this Canadian troops STILL embedded in Trump’s violence…. While I cannot access the whole story, the reporter, Christy Somos, points out: "Canadians should be asking questions about how deeply our military has been collaborating with American ops of questionable legality. 
 

((From my first email Jan. 12 to now I have requested answers /statement from the DND – “we’re still working on this” will go on my tombstone))
 

PS: What is the alternative, you might be wondering. While I think there is lots of space for that discussion, let’s actually make sure what we are discussing IS an alternative, not a sequel. But the path to an alternative is being realistic in assessing who our greatest opponents are right now. And many of them are quite close here at home.

 

( Commentary 2: Steven McSweeny )

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech presents itself as bracing honesty, but it is really an exercise in elite self-soothing: a technocrat narrating the collapse of a world he helped build while insisting that the same tools, values, and class interests can somehow rescue it. He is right about the rupture, the weaponisation of trade, the exhaustion of the “rules-based order,” and the end of comforting fictions. What he cannot admit is that these are not deviations from liberal capitalism but its logical outcomes. The speech diagnoses symptoms while fiercely protecting the disease.

 

The most revealing moment is his invocation of Havel. Carney borrows the parable of “living within a lie” to scold states and firms for pretending the old order still functions. Yet in the same breath, he sneers at the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” as a hollow ritual, missing, or deliberately obscuring, that the slogan failed not because it named a falsehood, but because it named a truth too threatening to be realised. Carney’s real discomfort is not with lies as such, but with lies no longer working. When he urges companies and countries to “take the sign down,” he does not mean dismantling exploitation or hierarchy; he means adjusting the branding of power so that liberal capitalism can survive in a harsher geopolitical climate.

Throughout the speech, capitalism is treated as a neutral terrain on which values compete, rather than as a system that structurally subordinates people, nations, and ecosystems. Carney laments coercive supply chains, financial weaponisation, and extreme global integration, yet proposes more trade deals, more investment corridors, more militarised infrastructure, and more competition, just better coordinated among “middle powers.” This is not a break from the logic that produced Trump or US imperial overreach. It is an attempt to manage that logic more politely, with spreadsheets instead of slogans and multilateral dinners instead of unilateral tweets.

 

The core contradiction is stark. Carney wants sovereignty without breaking from global capital, resilience without challenging accumulation, and peace secured through expanded defence spending and arms production. He calls this “values-based realism,” but it is simply realism for capital, with values stapled on after the fact. Doubling defence budgets, fast-tracking trillion-dollar investments, and deepening extraction of energy and critical minerals are not neutral acts of self-protection; they entrench the very material rivalries he claims to fear. You cannot outgrow militarised competition by feeding it.

 

What makes the speech politically dangerous is its tone. Carney speaks calmly, reasonably, and fluently in the language of responsibility, which is why many people, especially those repulsed by Trump, are celebrating him as a voice of sanity. But this is precisely the problem. Liberalism in crisis often rebrands itself as the sensible alternative to barbarism, while quietly normalising surveillance, militarisation, border fortification, and economic coercion. The content shifts rightward while the rhetoric stays humane. This is how authoritarianism with good manners enters through the front door, applauded for not shouting.

 

Carney insists this is not a return to naive multilateralism, yet everything he proposes is an attempt to reconstruct a pre-Trump world minus its illusions, not its injustices. He wants the same hierarchy with better risk management; the same global capitalism with more insurance; the same dominance of capital over labour, just distributed across a broader club of states. The people who suffer most under this system (workers, migrants, indebted countries, those on the front lines of climate collapse) appear only as abstractions, never as agents. Their role is to be protected, managed, and spoken for, not empowered.

 

By framing the crisis as one of middle powers versus great powers, Carney carefully avoids the more uncomfortable conflict between capital and life itself. The real rupture is not just geopolitical; it is social and ecological. A system that requires endless growth, extraction, and competition cannot be stabilised by better coordination among its managers. The reason the old order is not coming back is not Trump’s personality or China’s assertiveness, but the exhaustion of liberal capitalism’s legitimacy.
 

In that sense, Carney’s speech is less a vision of the future than a plea for continuity: a request that we trust the same class of experts to steer us through the wreckage they helped create. It is not living in truth; it is living in a newly updated lie, one that sounds mature, responsible, and urgent, while foreclosing the more radical honesty the moment actually demands.

( Commentary 3: Simon Dougherty )

Mark Carney's Davos speech redefines Progressive Conservatism, and not in any good way.

 

On one hand, it is amusing to see him describe the liberal "rules-based international order" as it has been accurately described for decades by the left:

 

A "nice story," but a "false" one, of "accommodation" with, and "subordination" to, the powerful – "living within a lie" in order to benefit from the "brutal reality" of "American hegemony" while concealing the empire's coercive violence and hypocrisy by avoiding any acknowledgment of "the gaps between rhetoric and reality."

 

Carney declares a "rupture" with this old world order, but in thoroughly anti-communist terms so that people will not associate his meaning as conceived by a communist like Alain Badiou. Here ends any progressive pretence of Carney.

 

On the other hand, it is deeply troubling to see that Carney's "solution" to decades of intensifying capitalist crises is to double-down on the same conservative remedies that got us into this mess in the first place:

 

"...cut taxes on incomes, capital gains and business investment"..."[remove] all federal [regulations] to interprovincial trade"..."[fast-track] a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors"..."[double] defence spending by 2030"...remain "a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per-capita contributors" to NATO's proxy war in Ukraine...rapidly sign corporate free "trade and security deals."

 

Without irony, Carney believes, as Tony Blair originally did, that all these neo-liberal "solutions" are a "third path" that will transcend "the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination." But sovereignty for whom?

 

Carney is only talking about the sovereignty of capital and the military-industrial complex in middle powers that are already integrated with the imperial core.

 

He is not talking about the sovereignty of everyday people (especially not that of workers and Indigenous people), nor is he talking about planetary needs over Trump-like profiteers beyond the United States. There is nothing liberating or emancipatory in his speech, despite its core conservatism being bookended by ostensibly progressive and even radical rhetoric.

 

Carney's answer to one false story is to create another that deliberately sidesteps the possibility of peace with justice on a sustainable planet. Ultimately, his vision is the militarization of capitalist enclaves that Trump is attempting to Balkanize and more directly colonize.

 

Don't fall for it.

 

( Commentary 4: Zilla Jones )

Several people have asked me for my take on Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech at the World Economic Forum yesterday, so here it is.

 

(Several paragraphs of “this is my Facebook page and I can express my opinions and if you don’t like it you should fuck off!” removed for purposes of clarity and messaging because it’s just not relevant for the purposes of my own blog.)

 

Mark Carney begins with a plea for honesty, and then delivers several minutes of lie upon lie.

 

He launches into a story from the Communist ruled Czech Republic, about a shopkeeper putting up a sign saying "Workers of the World Unite" although he doesn't believe it, just to go along with the crowd and avoid trouble.

 

I'm already annoyed. What's the problem? you might ask. The Communists were bad, and they did suppress freedom of speech. It's a valid example. 

 

The problem: Carney chooses a Communist regime in Europe that was dismantled 35 years or so ago. He chooses a leftist, socialist regime. However, the current threat to the world is from the right. We have had extreme right-wing regimes also denying freedom of speech over the past 35 years. Yet Carney makes his attack on the defunct Communist bloc. He's reminding everyone that he's a capitalist first and foremost. He's not here to truthfully analyze and critique late-stage capitalism. He's here to unite the corporations  and billionaires of the world through a shared hatred of the old Commie bogeyman - the lowest hanging fruit there is.

 

It gets worse.

 

Carney says, "For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order," and then says, "We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false."

 

NO IT WASN'T. It was wholly false. In fact, there was no rules-based order.

 

Let me back up here. I have to go back to the birth of modern European colonialism. If you don't like me talking about this, you really need to leave now. But this is where the story starts. And this isn't a comprehensive history of colonialism, just some thoughts.

 

When Europeans first began realizing that there was a world beyond their shores, it was intoxicating. There were all these foreign places just full of free land and untold riches - gold, jewels, wood, furs, spices, rubber, sugar - with just the pesky obstacle of the dark skinned peoples living there. But this too was a blessing because they were heathen souls who could be brought to Christ, and even better, could be used as a workforce to harvest this wealth. By conquering these lands, Europeans could both grow rich beyond their wildest dreams and earn favour with God. 

 

There was a race to claim these lands, with no thought that they were already occupied. But it became a free for all. Wars were fought over this place or that place. Pirates sailed the seas robbing merchant ships. There were attempts to create order. The Pope divided up the yet unconquered lands - one side of the line to Spain, one side to Portugal. Much later, the Berlin Conference divided up Africa amongst European powers. Euroepan nations absorbed the newly acquired territories into their Empires and competed to see whose was the biggest.

This isn't ancient history. These countries didn't begin to gain their independence until India in 1947. For most, it was the 1960s and 70s. Some are still not free. And once they became independent, they were ravaged and broken after centuries of exploitation and violence. They became what was variously known as the Third World, the underdeveloped world, the developing world, and now the global South. 

 

The other thing that happened just before 1947 was the end of World War II, which some believe was a continuous conflict with WWI.  After WWI, the League of Nations was formed. It was founded in response to the horrors of the Great War in an attempt to promote peace and security in the world. Countries that were still colonies were not represented, unless they were Canada and Australia, say, who were majority white settler colonial nations and were granted representation. 

 

After WWII, the League became the United Nations. The United Nations was set up with a Security Council as the primary body for ensuring world peace. It has five permanent members: Russia (formerly the USSR), China, the US, the UK and France, and a rotating cast of other members. The permanent members each UN was being established, colonized nations of the Global South were demanding independence. One of the great fights was in India. Britain was opposed to losing what they called "the jewel in the crown." Here's where I remind you that Winston Churchill (to whom some have compared Carney's speech) said regarding the displacement of Palestinians,

 

"I do not admit ... for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

 

He also was recorded as agreeing with the slogan "Keep Britain White" and as having said regarding white US racists "why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority, that we were superior, that we had the common heritage which had been worked out over the centuries in England and had been perfected by our constitution".

 

So at the same time that the UN was being set up to promote peace in the world and make the new rules, it excluded much of the world from having a voice and gave the greatest power in that body to their oppressors who had contempt for them.  As the post-colonial era began and they were admitted, the former rulers had little patience for their grievances or concerns. The UN wasn't intended for them so why should they get to claim space in it now?

 

Now - back to Carney's speech.

 

"This fiction" (of a rules-based order) was, he says, "useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

 

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetorics and rituals. This bargain no longer works."

Here's where I feel the full weight of the gaslighting and disregard I have felt my entire life. And it comes not from the fascists, not from Trump, but from our smiling, liberal, corporate, banker Prime Minister.

 

Listen to what he is saying. We knew it was BS. But we didn't care, because we benefitted from it. So we didn't care about who was being harmed, and we didn't speak up for them.

In 1983 when the US invaded Grenada illegally? A few words of criticism, nothing substantive.

 

Apartheid in South Africa? We traded with them for decades until finally shamed out of it.

 

Unjustified US boycott in Cuba? Look the other way

 

US interference and violation of international law in Panama, Nicaragua, Chile? No problem

 

US support of death squads in Chile, El Salvador etc? No problem 

 

US starting a brutal war in Iraq based on a lie? Ehhhh. We'll keep cozying up to war criminals like Bush and Cheney. We'll even help them out in Afghanistan. 

 

As long as the sea routes were open and banking was good, nothing to see here, folks. It wasn't us being invaded and terrorized, so.... so what?

 

This is like a man saying "I knew there was sexism but I benefitted from it - free labour at home, no accountability for my sexual crimes, earning more than I deserved, so I went along with it."

 

Or a white man saying "I knew there was racism but I didn't care because I got to take advantage of it."

 

So you might say: well, at least they're acknowledging it. That means they're going to repudiate it and do better, right?

 

WRONG.

 

Complaining about tariffs, etc. Carney says "You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

 

BECOMES? For much of the world it always was. The global integration he speaks of rests on the sweatshops and child labour of the global South.

 

And the solution? Carney says:

 

"As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions. They must develop greater strategic autonomy...... When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself." He goes on to describe a new approach of being "principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, respect for human rights."

 

Really? Isn't Canada still sending weapons to Israel?

 

He also calls for us to be "pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner shares our values."

 

Isn't this in direct contradiction to what he just said about principles? We stand for human rights, but if we want to trade with, say, Qatar, where migrant workers are enslaved and dissidents often vanish off the face of the earth, we recognize that they "don't share our values" and go ahead anyway with no more than a little finger wag at them. That's pragmatic, but it's not principled.

 

"We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for the world as we wish it to be."

 

So enjoy your poverty, your genocide, your second-class status. It's not like anyone can do anything about it. It's not like this isn't a room of billionaires from nations sucking up a disproportionate amount of the world's resources and causing a disproportionate amount of its climate change. 

 

That's it for the global South. That's all you get. But then Carney turns his sights to home. And this is what he has to say about life in the true North strong and free:

 

"Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, capital gains and business investment, we have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade, and we are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors, and beyond. We are doubling our defence spending by 2030 and doing so in ways that builds our domestic industries."

 

Wow. We've CUT taxes. We have a housing crisis and an affordability crisis and we've cut taxes, not on the most vulnerable (who don't pay taxes anyway) but on capital gains and business investment. Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, we've given them yet another break. 

 

We're fast-tracking investment in energy. This includes OIL and pipelines. We're going to continue destroying the environment.

 

We're investing in AI? Which also wrecks the environment, not to mention is devastating to arts and culture.

 

We're investing in critical minerals? What's the environmental impact? Do we just not care about climate change anymore?

 

He goes on for a while about the great things he's doing. Gives a nod to standing with Greenland and Denmark - of course, he will never name the threat to them, because that might upset the big, bad bully, and we're pragmatic, you know. All that stuff about honesty at the beginning of the speech? That was a lie too. So when he asks "What would it mean for middle powers to live in truth?" and answers his own question, "It means naming reality," my question is, whose reality?

 

There is nothing in this speech about Indigenous peoples on overcrowded, underserved reserves, some without water. There is nothing about the immigrants and migrant workers our government has blamed for every problem Canada faces. Nothing about the guy on the street who doesn't know where his next meal is coming from, or how he will get out of the cold tonight. There's nothing there, because these people don't matter. They were expendable in the old order and they're invisible in the new one.

 

And I know some will say "That's because it's the World Economic Forum. They're there to talk about the economy, not all that social justice stuff." 

 

My answer? The poor, the unhoused, the vulnerable ARE the economy. You cannot talk about the economy without them, because they are the victims of the late-stage capitalism Carney is describing. If you do what he's advocating, you create and maintain an underclass of people who get left behind - and who are overwhelmingly racialized or otherwise members of vulnerable minorities. Just like the UN left the colonized world behind. You build them out of the system and then blame them when they don't make their way back in. You certainly don't do anything to help them.

 

But there's also nothing about the rest of the populace. Nothing about strengthening Canadian arts and culture in the face of threats from the AI you want to invest in and US aggression. 

Nothing about protecting our democracy from foreign interference. Nothing about building our social cohesion by addressing systemic discrimination in all its forms. 

 

So to sum up, Carney has a few more gems. He tells us to, "Stop invoking the rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised."

 

It always has functioned as advertised. The one rule is: the US can do what it wants. Always was the rule, is still the rule. You just don't like what it wants any more.

 

Near the end, he tells us "The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it."

 

I'm not mourning it! I've been talking about how harmful it is for almost my entire life, and have been gaslit and condescended and talked down to and insulted for daring to do so.

 

In summing up, Carney uses a whole bunch of words he's used throughout the speech. Values. Power. Cooperation. Strength, Strong. Honesty. Gain. Build.

 

My final thought: you know what word never appears?

 

Justice. 

 

Any new world order worth having must be founded on justice. Reparations for the destruction of colonialism and capitalism. Racial justice. Class justice. Global justice. Climate justice. A strong and effective and fair justice system domestically. A properly functioning international court that actually deals with war crimes and human rights violations. I have been waiting my whole life to see justice, and it seems I will have to wait longer.

 

A politician who actually has the courage and honesty people are attributing to Carney would call for justice and would take steps to make it happen. None of them have done this. It doesn't matter if the leader is a woman, it doesn't matter if they're Black, it doesn't matter if they're Indigenous. Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Harris, Kinew, they love their drones, their bombs, their pipelines, their jails as much as anyone else, which is why there are limits to representation. And it is why it so often feels so isolating, so heartbreaking and pointless to exist in this world where denial of reality is called truth and celebration of exploitation and greed are considered greatness.