Carney’s brief break with the “rules-based order” in Davos gave way to a rapid return to Canada’s familiar role within American power, writes Peter McFarlane. Photo courtesy Mark Carney/X.

The following is an excerpt from Last Call for Canada: Sovereign Nation or Vassal State by author, journalist, editor, and arts administrator Peter McFarlane, set to be released June 1, 2026 by Baraka Books. For more information, visit www.barakabooks.com.

When Mark Carney arrived in Beijing on January 14, 2026, it was an important moment in Canadian-Chinese relations after ten difficult years. Since then, the hope of it leading to a bold new Canadian foreign policy has been lost as his government offers the occasional brave words while continuing to serve American foreign policy interests.

The previous visit by a Canadian prime minister to China had been in December 2017 when Justin Trudeau announced that Beijing and Ottawa were beginning negotiations on a Canada-China free trade pact. That initiative was quickly abandoned three weeks later when the US declared China a strategic rival. The following year, Canada formally surrendered its right to enter into a free trade pact with China in the 2018 CUSMA trade agreement. The following day, on December 1, 2018, relations between Canada and China collapsed completely when Canada arrested the Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, at the request of the Americans.

The Carney trip in January 2026 only came after the US had opened the door to China again with the October 2025 Trump-Xi meeting at the Asia Pacific summit in South Korea. After that meeting, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Anita Anand, felt secure enough to announce that “Canada now views Beijing as a strategic partner.”

In Beijing, Carney lifted the crushing 100 percent tariff Canada had put on Chinese electric vehicles in 2024 under the direction of the Biden administration—opening the door to the import of 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada, representing three per cent of the Canadian auto market. In return, China agreed to lower its retaliatory tariffs on Canadian canola from 85 percent to 15 percent by March 1, 2026.

Immediately after his China visit, Carney made an even higher profile move. From Beijing he travelled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and on January 20 gave a speech entitled “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path” that was heard around the world.

Carney told the Western business and political class at Davos that “the rules-based order is fading, and he quoted the Thucydides’ line that we were entering a world where “the strong do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

Carney said there was “a tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety. Well, it won’t.”

His most surprising admission was that:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

It was this first half of his speech that set the liberal world on fire by suggesting, in carefully moderated language, that the rules-based order was a Western instrument to circumvent international law while pursuing military and economic dominance. In effect, Carney had admitted to the world at Davos what would have gotten you labelled as a Chinese or Russian propagandist a day earlier.

Those who focused on the first part of........

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