Front Burner - Carney and 'The Speech'

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

It was an eventful World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, with striking speeches by both the U.S. President and Canadian Prime Minister. For his part Donald Trump talked for more than an hour on an array of topics, including his desire to acquire Greenland. His speech came a day after Mark Carney made international headlines announcing the end of the old world order as he sees it, and the need for a new path forward for “middle powers.”In today’s episode Jayme Poisson sits down with veteran journalist Paul Wells to break it down.Check out another episode of CBC's new podcast Two Blocks from the White House from our colleagues in the Washington bureau. It's American politics with Canadian context. This week, they're talking about Davos and Trump's Greenland threats. Listen to the episode here.

Okay, I don't know if you've been noticing this or not, but one of the more surprising trends in pop culture right now is betting. Like if you were watching the Golden Gloves, for example, betting company Polymarket, they ran this ticker of popular bets on who would win the award, like it was like right there on the screen. I'm Alameen Abdul Mahmood, and this week on commotion, I talked to some culture critics about why betting feels like it's everywhere, why everyone wants to take a gamble on who's going to win an Oscar, on who's going to be the most ghoulous celebrity of the year. You can find and follow commotion on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody. It's Jamie. It's great to be back in beautiful Davos, Switzerland, and to address so many respected business leaders,

so many friends, few enemies. After an eventful World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, that saw Trump go on for more than an hour, most significantly about his wish to acquire Greenland. Just a day after a strike. speaking speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that underlined the end of the old world order as he sees it. We're breaking down what the two leaders had to say on this world stage and what it means for Canada's relationship with the world going forward. And we're going to do all of this

with journalist Paul Wells today. And just to note, we recorded this episode before Trump called off his terror threats on eight European countries for opposing American control of Greenland. After meeting with NATO Secretary General, where Trump said they had formed, quote, the framework of a future deal. As of now, little is known about the specifics. We have these two speeches from two leaders in the same time slot on successive days. And we're going to talk about each of them in this episode. But I wonder if you could just start by comparing the two for me in like a bigger picture way. What did you think when you listen to these two speeches side by side or one after the other.

I mean, to some extent, they're difficult to compare. Carney delivered a speech. It was a coherent composition that was read pretty much as written, and that made an argument and was designed to achieve a certain effect. Trump did what Trump did, which is not ineffective. I mean, there's a lot of people who love to hear Trump recite the hits, but this was not a... I was actually surprised by the extent to which this was not a specific speech with a specific intent.

And for the most part, not even with a particular argument. It was the sort of speech that he could have given the day before and the sort of speech he could give again next week. So I was also surprised by the lack of coherence, although there's a part of me that is surprised that I'm surprised by that. Let me go through a couple of the things that he talked about. He talked about a lot of things like windmills and mortgages. but he did talk about Greenland for quite some time. These are matters of national security and perhaps no current issue makes the situation more clear than what's currently going on with Greenland.

Would you like me to say a few words of Greenland? He called for immediate negotiations to acquire Greenland. Just as we have acquired many other territories throughout our history, as many of the European nations have. And he made it sound like it was no big deal what he was asking for. A piece of ice, cold and poorly located, that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection. It's a very small ask compared to what we have given them for many, many decades. But the big headline coming out of this speech so far is that he said,

he wouldn't use force to take Greenland. We never asked for anything, and we never got anything. We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won't do that. Okay? Now everyone's saying, oh, good. That's probably the biggest statement I made,

because people thought I would use force. I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland. Was that new information to you? Did that offer any comfort to you to hear him say that? I did take it as new information.

Perhaps unwisely, I take the president at his word. I think he was saying something that he means, which is that there's not an invasion force imminent. I mean, knock on wood. And I think it's significant. I think it shows the limits of his interest in acquiring Greenland. Why does he want Greenland? I think at some point some military officers have said to him that missile defense,

as a continental matter, is easier if you can intercept missiles further north, and the Greenland's up there. I think he took that and he latched onto that. In his inaugural address, which was absolutely coherent and written and prepared and delivered more or less as written, he talked about, the United States has a country whose mandated mission is to expand. The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory,

builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. Which is ominous for any country near the United States, but this was a bit of a climb down. I see all the pundits and the headlines afterwards. And I did feel like maybe people were taking a little bit too much relief in it because that's great that he's saying that they're not going to invade Greenland militarily. But, you know, in my mind, what he has really been doing vis-a-vis Greenland is threatening economic force

and threatening to punish all of these European countries with tariffs if they don't just give him Greenland. And it does seem like there are different ways to define force here, and he's not backing down on that front. Yeah. In at least two big ways, it was hardly a reassuring speech in general when it comes to relations between Trump and the rest of NATO. First is the astonishing assertion that NATO has never done anything through the United States. So what we have gotten out of NATO is nothing except to protect. Europe from the Soviet Union and now Russia. I mean, we've helped them for so many years. We've never gotten anything, except we pay for NATO. This seems to be the President of the United States for getting the entire aftermath of 911.

When NATO invoked Article 5, the collective defense doctrine for the first time, and it was every other country in NATO agreeing to defend the United States. And they put their money and human lives where their mouths were by sending law, large deployments to Afghanistan where they stayed for many years and took huge numbers of casualties, more than a hundred Canadian soldiers died, for instance. And I don't get as offended as often as normal people do, but I was very offended at the assertion that NATO has never done anything for the United States. One. Second, he says, So we want a piece of ice for world protection and they won't give it. They have a choice. You can say yes. And we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember. And my hunch is that that memory will not come without a price and it will manifest itself in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

Yeah. What did you make of his comment that? Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that? Mark, the next time you make your statements. We talked about how he watched our prime minister's speech yesterday. So I disagree with Trump that Canada is essentially a horrible place that is being propped up by American largesse. But first of all, I know he's not the only American to think that.

That's been a common theme of particularly conservative Canadian thought towards Canada for many years. It's not without it's part of truth. But it's also kind of inherent to Trump, which is that he believes that he's surrounded by ingrates and that it's only his genius. that is keeping the world turning. And the Canada is only one manifestation of that. And as for the specific threat to Mark Carney, watch it, Mark, because I hear when you're mean to me. Again, he's just going to say that to everyone. And on some days, it's a badge of honor.

If you bend yourself into pretzels to avoid offending Donald Trump, then you turn into people like Mark Ruta, the Secretary General of Nehado, and Kira Starmor, the Prime Minister of Britain and make yourself an object of domestic ridicule. And that tactic of trying to appease Trump ends up paying rapidly diminishing returns. So you might as well say what you have to say and just suffer the consequences, rather than forever praying that your silence will buy peace. It doesn't. Fitz and Arch are back.

St. Pierre has a serial killer. Hell of a start to a day. On a new case with an old pattern. Why am I getting the feeling that you guys have seen something like this before? Because, yeah. And to uncover the truth, they must put everything on the line. You are my partner. If you win, I win.

If you go down, I go down. That's how it works. Trust me. San Pierre, new season. Watch free on CBC Gym. Well, let's talk more about Carney's speech then. So it came the previous day. And he's been building to the speech for some time.

We've heard some of those lines before that we heard in the speech. But the way he packaged it together, the form in which he delivered it in front of all of these world leaders at Davos, the moment in which it came after weeks of threats to Greenland, it felt pretty striking. And in your newsletter, you referred to it as the Carney doctrine. And so maybe we could just go through something. of what he said to help us better understand what the doctrine is, starting with this sort of opening anecdote where he references an essay by a former Czech dissident-turned-present-turned-president 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 the green grocer. 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 any way to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street

does the same the system persists, 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 green grocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down. What did you make of this as sort of the heart of the speech? I think it's Carney beginning to acknowledge the limit. of the appeasement of Trump strategy. I mean, appeasement's a loaded word for anyone who's studying 20th century politics. And I don't want to use it in its most overloaded term. But the idea that

you can constantly please Trump and that it will pay dividends, he's saying that the return of great power politics with essentially Russia, China, and the Americans doing whatever they want makes a mockery of any claim that we live in a rules-based international order. And that persisting in that fiction is paying rapidly diminishing returns, I think was a good way to parse that part of the speech. Yeah. And I mean, he returns to this notion of being honest and clear-eyed about the circumstances of the world over and over again. 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 rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. It did feel to me as provocative, right, to call out this rules-based international order as essentially a,

fiction. This isn't something that you typically expect from a liberal, prime minister, a guy who's been part of and benefited from the system for a very long time. Especially because that specific term, rules-based international order, was a mantra of Christian Friedland, in particular and of the Trudeau government more generally. We must likewise recognize that authoritarian regimes have as little fundamental respect for rules-based order among states as they do. for the rule of law within their own countries. This notion that, and still very dear to many international officials,

I'm thinking of Kirstarmer, the Prime Minister of Britain, that the Americans simply can't do what Donald Trump wants because one simply mustn't act that way. That's been an idea that's been invoked again and again and again. And Carney is saying that at a minimum, it's tapped out. Like, congratulations to anyone wants to keep saying that, but it's not working. And you know, I know that we discussed economic force earlier,

but I want to come back to it because it's this part of this speech. 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 is leverage, financial infrastructure is 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.

That is kind of playing over and over in my head. This to me is what I think about when I hear Trump saying he's not going to use force, he doesn't need to because of what Carney is describing here in the speech. like that the force comes from the system that we have been part of and have previously celebrated. And I just, I hadn't heard it laid out in such a clear way before. And did that part stand out to you? It suggests that a profound miscalculation of the late 20th century has continued to undermine the international system in this way. Bill Clinton and most of his contemporary Western leaders thought that letting China into the World Trade Organization would, make China more like the West in its respect for democratic norms. And we've spent most of the

21st century so far, finding out that that doesn't really work. Now Carney is saying what I think a lot of people would already have noticed, which is that Trump's United States has begun to use the system against the other players in the system, that we've traced the call and it's coming from within the West and that what we used to call mutual benefit, what Christopher Freeland and others tried for a few years after COVID to call friend shoring is still not going to work because one of our longtime friends, the United States, is no longer acting from the same understanding of rules and benefits that everyone else has been following. In the place of this, Carney calls for something.

more pragmatic, right? Something more ad hoc. This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work, issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. And he talks about the need for middle powers like Canada to work together, rather than trying to go to do one-on-one with the U.S. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegement, we negotiate. We negotiate, from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

What was clear to me was that the speech was not only a blunt descriptor of the reality of the moment, but it was also a kind of rallying cry. He was, in my mind, maybe even telling Europe to get its act together. Like, how did you read, read all the middle power stuff? So this is one of many ways in which I worry that the Carney speech is a bit of a roar shock test and that everybody has read into it whatever preoccupies them, even though he was saying real things. And even though his language was fairly specific, people are loaded up with so much hope and concern that this reasonably well-dressed fellow shows up in Davos and everyone says, aha, that's it. I mean, I've seen, for instance, never Trump Republicans in the United States say that at last. someone's willing to stand up to Trump. Well, no, he sure isn't. What he's saying is this is closer to the written rhetoric of Carney's campaign in the election

a year ago than to some of the TV ads with Mike Myers saying elbows up. Will there always be a Canada? There will always be a Canada. All right. Elbows up. Elbows up. The whole elbows up ideas sounds like a belief that you can contain or stand up to Trump or rebut American power when it's used as a blunt force instrument. What he's saying is, no, we have to take Donald Trump, and incidentally the Russians and

the Chinese essentially as red. And the rest of us have to find our own accommodations to advance our own values to the extent possible. Essentially, we have to put orange traffic cones around Donald Trump's administration and all of American wealth and force and find detours. And there are detours that Canada needn't be alone in taking. what that other countries can also take. Well, let me push back on you a little bit there. You don't think that he was going further than that, that he was, like, telling people or other leaders or other countries

what he thinks that they should do to. Like, let me read you this quote. 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 like he's telling them to do something different essentially I think to stand up right

and in another part of the speech he talks about how the question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls or whether we can do something more ambitious yeah but in the in the home stretch of the speech he essentially frames it as an invitation which they can they can accept or not nostalgia is not a strategy but we believe that from the fracture

we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers. The countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation. It will go much better for Canada if, as many other similar countries, take this path of pragmatic mutual accommodation and cooperation as possible. But he's not, I mean, he's leaving free will in the, question. But it's kind of a stoic stance, right? Because he's not saying, let's all get together

and change Donald Trump's mind. Essentially, he's saying, to hell with that. Let's get together as many of us as want to and see our own benefit in it and believe our own souls are better served by this. And you don't see that as a kind of rallying cry? You know what I mean? Or holding himself up as like a leader in a real leadership position globally? I just think it's got limits. He's not saying, like, people have been looking for a hammer they can use to hit Donald Trump. And I don't, I don't read this speech as Mark Carney saying, I'm your hammer. It's much closer to what he's been saying all along.

Incidentally, every part of this speech is something he's said many times before. The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperations is over. Middle powers must compete for interests and attention, knowing that if they're not at the table, they're on the menu. The kind of applause lines that, I mean, I watched it as it was happening on Tuesday, people around the world were just astonished at all these turns of phrase that if you listen to Mark Carney speeches for a living, you've heard before. I'm just saying that it was a recognition of the limits of hope

as much as an expression of hope. He wasn't saying, let's get together and change America. He was saying, let's get together and build as much as we can despite America or with only partial reference to America. It was, I think it was a speech about resignation as much as it was about inspiration. I don't, and I don't, that's not a criticism. You know, it's a recognition of, I think a recognition of reality.

How are you thinking about the standing ovation that he got at the end of the speech in Davos? Why do you think he got it? I think people are very worried in general about the direction of the world. And obviously a big part of that is people are very worried about Donald Trump. Even extremely powerful people, even oligarchs and heads of government, even the people who were pretty happy at Davos. when Donald Trump was first elected because he represented essentially, they thought, many of them thought, tax cuts. They've seen that that's not the only thing on the menu and that to some extent what's on the menu is some of them.

And so you're looking for something that sounds what? Smarter, more familiar, like a beacon of a world that is more predictable and to some extent feels fairer. And Mark Carney is all of that. But again, I had friends texting me excitedly from Davos in 2017 when Xi Jinping gave his ode to multilateralism and environmentalism at Davos. Good reviews from Davos are excellent, but they're not the world. And the main thing I want to remind the people who are so excited about Carney's speech is that a speech is just a speech. and that the work starts about an hour after you leave the stage. And Carney provided a framework for thinking about the challenges of the 21st century world,

but he did not in any way make those challenges disappear. He also found himself, as you talked about in the crosshairs of Trump. And, you know, do you think on balance that the speech was worth it? Do you think it's going to come with consequences? I think so, and to some extent, that's why I think stoicism is a pretty good stance. Trump is going to be like the weather. There will be sunny days and rainy days, and you can't really organize your life trying to make choices in your own world that might have the effect of reducing the number of rainy days. That way lies madness. That to some extent is the shopkeeper's

metaphor that he's white from Havel. And on, Honestly, there will be many, many days when Trump's wrath is kind of a badge of honor. You've done something that pushes back against his excesses, and he notices that and grumbles. So neither very surprised nor very worried when Trump gets a little cranky about a Mark Carney speech. Because happy Donald Trump, who really likes Mark Carney, has levied all those tariffs, threatened Canadian sovereignty. ignored Canada as a NATO ally already for a year. So how much worse can unhappy Donald Trump be? I don't know.

The answer to that. I mean, maybe he can be worse. I don't, yeah, but sure. You mentioned Freeland before. You were actually on this show a couple years ago in 2022. And we had you on to talk about what we called them the Freeland Dockren. These are very... You're on to me.

Whatever happens, I just had the word. doctrine and it makes me sound smart. Very creative titles that we're all coming up with. And so it was after Freeland gave the speech in D.C. where she talked about the end of a geopolitical era and hers was marked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the new paradigm that she saw that should flow from that. A better alternative is what U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, has described as Frenchwring, that democracies must make a conscious effort. effort to build our supply chains through each other's economies. Where democracies must be strategically vulnerable, we should be vulnerable to each other.

And just, I wonder if you could spend a bit more time kind of painting that contrast between what we heard from Freeland then and what we're seeing from Carney now. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to push a contrast between Carney and Freeland too. far because they're both Canadian liberals, they're friends, and they have often worked together. But it's funny, she used to stand out as one of the real pragmatists in the Trudeau government, especially on foreign policy. She understood the Russian threat against Ukraine earlier than anyone and really helped to inflect Trudeau government policy on Ukraine. But for a long time after Trump was elected and through the Biden administration, she clung to the hope that

the old rules could have diswasive effect against the Trump administration. And it really didn't work. Carney is simply benefiting from coming along a little later in the story and it having been drilled into everyone's head that the rules-based international order is uninteresting to Trump. And to some extent, he views it as a sign of weakness. And so he is able to draw conclusions that for all I know, if there had been a prime minister, Christian Freeland today, maybe she would have been able to draw some of those conclusions by now, too. But Carney comes later, he gets to do that. Maybe she would have. But what, if anything, do you think, is lost when you kind of abandon that old paradigm that did at least pay lip service, more lip service to values to international institutions? in favor of this more kind of pragmatic way of interacting with the world?

Well, it's really not ideal, but it is what it is. I still think Carney's speech should be read in the context of his many, many distinctions between the things Canada can't control and things that can control. The things that can't control are basically the tree stump in the middle of the lawn that is called Donald Trump. And all of your landscaping efforts have to be around that tree stump, because you're not going to be able to pull that thing up. And the things you can control are a more vigorous internal Canadian market, if we're lucky, and alliances and trade relationships east and west and further south because the longstanding partnership to our immediate south has become more pragmatic.

To torture my metaphor, just because that tree stump is there doesn't mean you can't do any beautification of your lawn. It just means there are severe limits that you're better. better to acknowledge than to deny. Do you think when we look back on this week, including Carney's speech, which has gotten a lot of attention around the world, do you think that we'll see it as some kind of inflection point as a very historical moment? Or will it become another blip, you think? I think it was an important speech. I mean, I've been insisting on the limits of an important speech because I think everyone else

was sort of on a sugar high for a couple of days. But I was really pleased to see a public figure describing in detail their thinking on a set of important issues. To say the least, we don't have nearly enough of that in Canada. Will it go down in history? I mean, yes, to some extent. What's the extent? Well, in 1947, Louis Saint Laurent gave something called the Gray Lecture, which outlined the best thinking in Ottawa on foreign policy after.

the Second World War, and more than 50 years later, a guy like me is able to tell you that, but almost no one has ever heard of it. The great thing about a speech is that it forces you to think coherently about your own decisions and then allows you to communicate your thinking to other people. And the shortcoming of a speech is you should probably give another speech at least next year and probably more often than that. That doesn't mean there's no point giving speeches. it's a strong argument for giving more speeches. And as many people have pointed out, it'd be handy if Carney did something like that on Canadian soil.

Okay. Feels like a good place to end. Paul, thank you. Thanks. Before we go, I just wanted you to know about a new podcast from our colleagues in the Washington Bureau. It's called Two Blocks from the White House. And this week, they're talking about what's been going on in Davos.

Okay, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.