All that time — from a period dominated by Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mao Zedong to our own era — hardly anyone outside Davos was affected by, or even remembered a day later, any speech delivered in the town’s Congress Centre.
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Then, four months ago, Mark Carney stepped to the podium and issued a rhetorical shot heard ’round the world.
He spoke of the “rupture in the world order,” and he argued that the middle of the third decade of the 21st century represented “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power … is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” And quoting Thucydides, he said that the world was witnessing the emergence of a period when “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”
No one missed the reference, nor the target, nor even the new path forward the Canadian prime minister was offering to what he has come to call the “middle powers” of the world. One person was especially attentive to the Carney speech, and he issued a bitter rebuke that shook the conference.
“They should be grateful to us, Canada,” President Donald Trump told the gathering a day later. “Canada lives because of the United States.”
Then he added: “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
Four months later, the world still remembers the statements that Mark Carney made.
And since then, Carney has mounted something of a traveling salvation show, jetting to world capitals as an evangelist for his gospel of middle powers standing in the middle of a great movement for change — economically, culturally, and diplomatically. He’s told Trump, a real-estate tycoon, that Canada isn’t for sale and isn’t vulnerable to a hostile takeover, and he has moved to reorient Canada’s trade patterns away from the United States — a break with more than a century of established commercial relationships.
Carney has made trips to China and India to seek fresh trade links with the growing economies of Asia; spurred investment deals with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar; and repeatedly reached out to European governmental and business leaders.
Trump may be the new sheriff on the world stage, but Carney is emerging as a quietly influential patrolman.
For the last century, the role of moral leadership of the West has been occupied mostly by American presidents: Woodrow Wilson for his 14-points vision of a new world order; Franklin Roosevelt for his stewardship, along with Winston Churchill, of the endangered democracies in the Second World War; John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama for their idealism and evocative rhetoric, especially in their speeches in Berlin; and Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush for their star turns ending the Cold War and managing the fall of Communism, respectively.
Now, as Kennedy might have said, the torch has been passed. (Kennedy, it’s worth noting, borrowed that signature line of his inaugural address from a Canadian poet, John McCrae.) And it has been passed to a leader with the gray personality of the central banker Carney once was and the quiet defiance that comes with having been born in an enclave of 2,130 souls in the faraway Northwest Territories of Canada on a day when the temperature was minus 6 degrees.
At a time when Trump has shattered the rules-based order that his predecessors built and have maintained since 1945 — and when the leaders of France, Great Britain, and Germany are facing turbulence of one kind or another — the Canadian prime minister has emerged as a new kind of international figure: a symbol of resistance to the United States and its president’s tariff threats, the designer of a new political architecture, the constructor of a new set of trade relationships.
That doesn’t mean that Carney has won immediate success. Canada isn’t a European nation. It won’t be invited to join the European Union. And leaders across Europe have their own domestic problems that give them pause when an outsider enters the stage with a recitative from an unfamiliar libretto.
But domestically, he has made real strides in consolidating power. In large measure because of his resistance to Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51st state, he has prompted three Conservative members of Parliament in recent weeks to “cross the floor” — the Canadian phrase for switching parties. And as a result, he converted his year-old minority government in Ottawa to majority status.
This represents a substantial enhancement of his power at a time when Canada is facing perhaps the greatest threat to its sovereignty and identity since the War of 1812 and the most robust swelling in nationalistic sentiment in its history.
“He has a real opportunity to implement his agenda,” says Andrew Enns of Canada’s Leger public-opinion survey operation. “He’s seen here very much as a credible shield and someone who will stand up to Trump at a time when Canadians are preoccupied with changing their relations with the United States.”
Pollsters note that Canadian prime ministers tend to retain high approval ratings until their 15th month in office. Carney hits that mark on June 14, but his ratings have remained relatively steady. Leger surveys show that 58 percent of Canadians approve of the prime minister’s performance, while 33 percent disapprove. His ratings are especially high in Quebec (62 percent), a province that ordinarily is more likely to express provincial nationalism than federal nationalism.
Carney has his critics. Some argue he is too reluctant to reach a rapprochement with Trump, while others say he is too eager to please the American president; Carney has been pilloried for backing away from retaliatory tariffs as part of an effort to win concessions from Washington.
But he knows the limits of Canada’s power in an economic relationship with what remains the country’s biggest trade partner, even as he knows that in a perverse but inescapable way he owes his position to Trump.
The Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fell from favor, and then from power, for being regarded as unreliable, unfocused, and unsuited for the challenge presented by Trump. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was poised to lead his party back to power with a decisive majority. But Poilievre’s perceived similarity to Trump, by then the sworn enemy of nearly all Canadians, delivered the prime minister’s suite to Carney.
At the center of both Carney’s power and his remit is Canadian anger over the Trump threats to Canada and, perhaps even more, heartbreak over the fraying of relationships — business, family, cultural — that for generations seemed a permanent part of the Canadian psyche even as some academic and political theorists argued that the country’s trade, military, and arts reliance on the giant to the south was both unwarranted and undignified.
To be sure, a strain of resentment about the domination of North America by the United States — a sentiment expressed by prime ministers throughout the decades, notably by the Conservative John Diefenbaker and the Liberal John Turner — has been a persistent element of Canadian domestic politics. Kennedy and Diefenbaker openly disliked each other, Lyndon Johnson actually physically shook the shoulders of Lester Pearson in anger, and Nixon and Pierre Trudeau often clashed.
These were passing storms, for a kind of sibling camaraderie has often asserted itself, especially in the years of Brian Mulroney.
“There have been very few really sour relationships between an American president and a Canadian prime minister, but the Trump years have established a new frontier,” says Arthur Milnes, who was a speechwriter for Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and also the research assistant on former Conservative Prime Minister Mulroney’s memoir. “Prime Minister Carney is demonstrating his skill and effectiveness in trying to define new relationships for Canada in this era.”
At times, that means breaking sharply with Trump. Carney is not hesitant on Ukraine, not an admirer of strongmen, not a protectionist, not a unilateralist, not an isolationist, not a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“He’s presented the most significant foreign-policy conceptual framework ever seen in this country,” says Jeremy Kinsman, who was Canada’s ambassador at various times to Moscow, Rome, and the European Union. “It’s a stress test of his ability to lead a real diversification of material relationships. Trade may be the indicator, but more broadly he’s trying is to reduce Canada’s overdependence on the United States.”
The prime minister has taken steps to bolster Canada’s military-industrial complex, pledging greater spending on arms and personnel, setting out a plan to increase surveillance and deterrence in the Arctic to offset threats from Russia and China, and working to maintain the quiet continuation of military arrangements with the United States to assure the security of North America.
“Carney is deeply representative of a broad trend among Canadian prime ministers in the sense that he is moderate, he pursues conservative fiscal goals while at the same time expounding profoundly liberal ambitions,” says Patrice Dutil, a political scientist at Toronto Metropolitan University. “He’s a classic Canadian in that he is trying to hedge his bets, hoping for a better tomorrow, making do with what he has — even while facing enormous challenges with solutions not easily at hand.”