Canada has to do better, and that starts with the prime minister

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Since my reference to it last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address in Davos seems to have been both intended and received as a policy manifesto for Canada and also for other countries that feel short-shrifted by what have traditionally been known as the “great powers.” The prime minister quoted the Czech president and former dissident Václav Havel that the communist system sustained itself by adopting the habit initiated by a greengrocer, of placing in his window the Marxist tocsin “Workers of the world, unite!”  (The 300 divisions of Stalin’s Red Army had more to do with it.) This gesture to the regime was widely taken up in the Soviet bloc, in what  Havel described as “living within a lie.” Carney considers this analogous to the adherence of Canada and other countries to “what we called the rules-based international order” (a clangorous platitude that reminds me of my bossy Grade 1 public school teacher).

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His point was that the “rules-based system” was being abused and that Canada and other countries are the victims of it. “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness,” he said. He went on to criticize great powers for using “tariffs as leverage” and treating “supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” He was clear that he regarded the United States as the wrong-doing hegemon, and represented his recent trade deal with China as a strategic pivot.

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