Carney’s WEF speech: Missing true courage

Canadian Prime Minister (PM) Mark Carney's recent World Economic Forum speech has been widely praised as courageous — bringing much-needed candour about the “rules-based international order”.

- Swati Ramanathan and Ramesh Ramanathan

He invoked the metaphor of Vaclav Havel's greengrocer—the ordinary figure who quietly endured an oppressive system until he and others found the collective courage to improve their lives. It is an evocative image. It is also entirely wrong.

Canada was never the greengrocer. Canada was one of the mall owners. It helped design the building, sat on the management committee, enforced the rules, collected rents, and benefited from the security, financial architecture. It was embedded in Nato’s security umbrella, the dollar-anchored financial system, western trade regimes, development institutions, and the rule-writing bodies of global governance. By Carney’s own admission, Canada prospered under this order. It did not silently suffer. It accumulated.

The greengrocer changed because he discovered agency. Canada is changing because it lost power. Because the articles of association have been rewritten, US President Donald Trump did not merely introduce unpredictability; he revealed dependence. Tariffs, alliance conditionality, transactional diplomacy, weaponised finance, and open contempt for multilateral etiquette demonstrated that the protections Canada assumed were institutional were, in fact, discretionary. Middle powers did not own the order; they were licensees to it.