When I was researching a profile of Mark Carney for Maclean’s last year, I was struck by the PM’s extraordinary accomplishments and also by his arrogance: he was known for his high-handed responses to journalists, and colleagues complained about testy exchanges behind closed doors that left them with bruised feelings.

After watching his speech in Davos on Tuesday, it occurred to me that his lack of humility is understandable, because he knew what the rest of us did not. That he would be able to do what he said he would—lead Canada, and maybe the world. “If the U.S. no longer wants to lead, Canada will,” he said during the campaign. That is what he did in Davos on Tuesday, rallying the world’s economic, media and political elite to co-operate to resist the increasingly erratic demands of the Americans.

The speech, which he apparently wrote himself, was a masterful piece of persuasion, calm and carefully reasoned. He started with an anecdote from a 1978 essay by Václav Havel—then a Czech dissident, later the first post-communist leader of the Czech Republic—about a grocer hanging a sign in his shop window reading........

© Macleans