Mark Carney speaks for the rich

Canadian PM Mark Carney’s speech at the Davos meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF) was viewed in Canada and around the world as an important corrective to Trump’sunilateralism and bullying.

 

 

Initially welcomed by virtue of his resume as a financial technocrat and a rational candidate against erratic Trumpism, Carney is now celebrated as the leader that 'Canadians’ and the other middle powers need in a decaying world order.

 

By diversifying its strategic partnerships with China, ASEAN and MERCOSUR, to name a few, and increasing the capacity for transpacific trade routes for Canadian exports and naming a country like Qatar as a potential partner, he is declaring that Canada pursues what is called in international relations ‘strategic autonomy’, with a ‘value-based realism’, aka new pragmatism of the Canadian ruling class that is actively building diverse alignments to maximize its own interests.

 

As the growing inter-imperial rivalry between the great powers puts pressure over the middle powers such as Canada, the US-led military and economic arrangements are turning into a source of insecurity that the ruling class in Canada seeks to overcome. Having first resorted to multiple rounds of negotiations with the US hoping to restore the past, Canada is now openly expressing its strategic options, in militaristic and economic terms.

 

Carney: “united front” of billionaires

 

After his speech on January 20, Carney was widely hailed as a leader 'speaking truth to power' by the mass media as well as the other middle powers attending the WEF in Davos. As people are looking for an alternative to fight against the devastating impact of economic dislocation, and the threats from the disgusting attacks of Trump, the illusion that Carney's policies could be a solution has spread quickly.

 

Yet, we should never forget that Carney’s so-called answer mainly involves policies designed to benefit the rich. He is calling for a ‘united front’ of the billionaires in the middle powers to maintain profitability. The nationalism that he is whipping up is designed to maintain that project — not create better conditions for Canadian workers.

 

At Davos, Carney boasted that GDP growth in Canada was the highest within the G7 and that Canada has created more jobs than the US. We have to ask who has benefitted from the GDP growth. According to Statistics Canada, the gap between the country's highest and lowest-income households reached a record high in the first quarter of 2025, as wages declined for lowest income households.

 

Carney’s policies are on the neoliberal right. He started his tenure as Prime Minister by suspending the rights of Air Canada workers to collective bargaining and attacking postal workers. He and the Premiers are using the Trump threats to destroy the environment and suspend Indigenous Sovereignty rights. With Bill C-12, he is overseeing a massive attack on immigrants, preventing any path to Permanent Residency and Work Permit renewals for migrants and fueling racist scapegoating across the country. He has implemented Trumpist border policies and massively increased military spending. In essence, he has put in place the right-wing policies that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was dreaming of.

 

Carney began his speech with a reference to a long article by the poet, playwright and later president of Czechoslovakia Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless. Bourgeois leaders love to quote the dissident voices that critiqued ‘Communism’ in the old Stalinist Eastern Bloc. Havel writes that the sign every greengrocer had to put up in their storefront, ‘workers of the world unite’, was a lie that everyone knew yet pretended as if it had been true. Now, Carney and the rest of the Canadian ruling class want everyone to put up a maple leaf in their windows as proof of their patriotism against Trump's threats – as they are putting down the deceitful sign of 'rules-based world order'.

 

Many Canadians have responded to calls from the ruling class here for a new ‘elbows up’ nationalism to protect from the Trump threats. But the measures Carney is implementing are a frontal attack on the working class that even the Trumpist premier of Alberta Danielle Smith is cheering.

 

We have to expose the real antagonism, truthfully. Any direction that posits defending Canadian sovereignty as an antidote to Trumpism, explicit in NDP MP Charlie Angus' call for 400,000 people to register for resistance against a possible US aggression, is misguiding people's legitimate frustration. Today, labour organizations, community activists and politicians elected by labour votes should call for resistance against our own ruling class' offensive that is attacking public healthcare, cutting 40,000 civil service jobs and trampling the rights of Indigenous people.

 

No military solution

 

Trump continues to renew threats to take over the Canadian state — recently posting a picture of a map of North America with a US flag over Canada and once again, a chorus of Canadian nationalism follows the threats.

 

The Globe and Mail in an article designed to whip up fear of a potential invasion states that Canada hasn't the military capacity to repel an invasion. This is obvious to anyone who pays attention. The US is the dominant military power in the world — spending trillions of dollars on weapons over decades of the largest military buildup in human history. A conventional battle would be incredibly short given the geography and the balance of forces.

 

There won't be a military solution to the conflict. The only path forward is unity between workers and Indigenous Nations on both sides of the Medicine Line (Canada/US border) against Trump and the capitalist system as a whole.

 

The revival of Canadian nationalism as a response to the crisis is a dead end. Nationalism at this time means only defending Canadian capital at the expense of people and the planet.

 

We won't argue for the preservation of the Canadian state. It is itself a product of Imperialism and is a prison house of nations build upon the genocide of Indigenous people — as is the United States.

 

This situation is a product of Canadian partnership in the US imperial project which has provided a huge return for Canadian corporations abroad. As a sub-imperial power itself Canada has performed a role both as a political cover for US aggression — often taking over roles as international organizers of US/NATO led invasions from Afghanistan to Haiti. The overlapping interests of Canadian and US imperialism have created conditions where withdrawal from that arrangement will be difficult and the price will be paid by workers and Indigenous peoples here – if we fail to challenge the Carney narrative that 'we are all in this together'.

 

Trump embodies the ‘morbid symptoms’ of a system on the way to collapse. But that collapse is not confined by borders. Across the world, the rich are profiting off of genocide, environmental destruction and the squeezing of the working class. The rulers' only solution to the resistance to their destruction is more repression.

 

What can we do against these attacks by both Trump and Carney?

 

1 – Build solidarity with those in the US who are at the point of the spear in the fight against Trump. From Minnesota to LA to New York, people in the US are fighting back. Statements of solidarity from Canadian unionswith the trade union movement in Minnesota, who are mobilizing strike action against ICE on January 23rd, can help build the forces that can undermine the assault on working people on both sides of the border.

 

2 – While it is understandable that Canadians would want to protect their country and the relatively better conditions of life here, such as universal healthcare, the real threat to those services is coming from inside the country. The Canadian ruling class has used the Trump threats to destroy environmental and workers rights and protections and is ramping up attacks against Indigenous land defenders to further their own profit motive. The enemy lies within as much as without, as our domestic mini-Trumps attempt to build a world that will only benefit the 1% here.

 

3 – Oppose Canadian complicity in the global US-led Imperial project. Carney may have lamented the unevenness of the application of International law, but has been a strong supporter of that very unequal system for decades. In a 'rule-based international system', Canada was happy to be the middle power alongside the US military as an occupying force. 

 

For many decades, Canadian mining companies have operated in the Global South (DRC, the Philippines, Mexico, Turkey and so on) with numerous human rights violations, and environmental destruction.

 

Carney has been onside with the genocide in Gaza providing political support and weaponry to the Israeli state. 

 

Carney’s speech was not the first time that the rules-based order was denounced as unfair. The  myth of the benevolence of the western powers and international law lies under the rubble of Gaza. The genocide there has radically ruptured the legitimacy of that order. The Liberals and Carney have done nothing to oppose the attacks on international law that could challenge the Israeli state. Building the movement for a Free Palestine is crucial to widening the radicalization that has developed among millions around the world in the past 2 years.

 

4 – Carney used the word sovereignty many times in his speech, while he simultaneously attacks the sovereignty of Indigenous nations in the Canadian state. However much he tries to reassert the significance of sovereignty as a 'national' principle, his real aim is to generalize the interests of the Canadian ruling class to the whole society. Against this hypocritical invocation of sovereignty by the ruling class, building solidarity between workers and Indigenous Land Defenders is a key task.

 

5 – Crucially, oppose Carney's racist scapegoating of immigrants here, and stop the growth of far-right 'Maple MAGA' forces that seek to organize racist anti-immigrant movements that align with the Trump agenda.

 

The border is no protection for people in the Canadian state. Against the patriotic fever in Canada, the working class needs its own "strategic autonomy" from the ruling class projects so that we can see the capitalist state and ruling class as they are – and develop actions that express solidarity with those that can defeat Trump and US imperialism on both sides of the Medicine Line.