Canada does not need to reinvent itself as a country cautiously navigating between giants

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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address in Davos was polished, ambitious, and deceptively fluent. But it cannot be read in isolation from his remarks in China last week, where he spoke approvingly of a coming “new world order.” Those words are not neutral. They carry a long and troubling history, particularly when invoked in Beijing, where the phrase is often used to justify the erosion of liberal norms in favour of hierarchy, managed markets and political control.

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When a Canadian prime minister echoes that language, even indirectly, it risks lending legitimacy to systems that reject the very principles Canada claims to defend. Seen in that light, the Davos speech reads less as sober realism and more as an attempt to reconcile democratic values with an emerging order that is neither benign nor aligned with Canadian interests.

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