- This blog contains the full transcript of a special address by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, delivered at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos.
- Carney emphasized the end of the rules-based international order and outlined how Canada was adapting by building strategic autonomy while maintaining values like human rights and sovereignty.
- The Canadian PM called for middle powers, such as his own, to work together to counter the rise of hard power and the great power rivalry, in order to build a more cooperative, resilient world.
This transcript was produced using AI and subsequently edited for style and clarity. The edits do not alter the substance of the speaker’s remarks.
Thank you very much, Larry. I’m going to start in French, and then I’ll switch back to English.
[The following is translated from French]
Thank you, Larry. It is both a pleasure, and a duty, to be with you tonight in this pivotal moment that Canada and the world going through.
Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.
On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.
The power of the lesser power starts with honesty.[Carney returns to speaking in English]
It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.
And faced with this logic, there is a strong 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.
So, what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn’t believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this “living within a lie”.
The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
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.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.
And this impulse is understandable. A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let’s be clear eyed about where this leads.
A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. And there is another truth. If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.
Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.
Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.
They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty – sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.
This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty can also be shared.
I’ve been reporting on Sundance non-stop for the past week.
We won the vote and, as far as I am aware, the Silvis Education Association still has negotiating rights with the Silvis School Board. In order to get that right, our organization had to interview and then back new candidates for the school board. We campaigned for our endorsed candidates, whom we interviewed at the local library, and put up billboards. I organized a phone tree to contact local voters. We won, but it took three years of work. We elected four members of a seven member board. Unlike DJT, we were not out for revenge. We just wanted what every other school district’s employees had: collective bargaining rights.
