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Carney’s First Year: Clear Eyed Abroad, Tone Deaf at Home

He speaks fluently about the global order. Canadians are missing that same clarity on rent, wages, and the cost of living

Weeks after it was delivered, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech is still generating ripples—quoted in think tanks, parsed in Ottawa, and invoked as shorthand for a world tilting away from frictionless globalization.

“We knew,” Carney told that room of elites, high in the Alps in January, “the story of the international rules-based order was partially false.” Just because Canada benefited from it, Carney said, didn’t hide the fact that it was unfair. The rules didn’t apply equally to everyone. “The strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,” he said. Power, not principle, set the terms.

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Carney likened this awareness to Czech dissident Václav Havel’s assertion that, until it collapsed, communism survived because ordinary people continued “living within a lie.” Communism’s power, Carney said, came from “everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true.” When it comes to the old post–Cold War consensus, Carney argued, it’s time to stop living within the lie.

In many ways, it was a very good and necessary speech. Carney left Davos having punctured the fiction that the Donald Trump era of bullying and threats can be managed as if nothing fundamental has changed. That it landed on the same day that Trump released texts from Emmanuel Macron, in which the French president invited him to dinner, was a handy proof of point.

And yet, embedded in that confidence was a tension that went largely unremarked. Nearly a year into Carney’s time in power, it’s starting to come into........

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