A tale of two Carney speeches

While the world sang the praises of Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a speech he gave two days later, back on “home soil,” largely escaped notice – except in Quebec, where it went over like a lead balloon.

 

Carney spoke at the Quebec City Citadelle, on the Plains of Abraham – the site of the historic battle that saw the defeat of New France by Great Britain. That battle of 1759 was the beginning of what is known in Quebec as The Conquest. 

 

When British General James Wolfe landed in Quebec in 1759 with an armada of 200 sail, 8,500 soldiers and a naval force of 13,500, it wasn’t just a military engagement at the top. Wolfe’s troops ravaged the countryside, reducing more than 1,400 habitants (small tiller) farms to ashes. Wolfe wrote, “…it would give me pleasure to see the Canadian vermin sacked and pillaged.” We must remember that at this time “Canadian” (les Canadiens) referred to the French-speaking settler population.

 

The Canadiens of the time waged a guerilla war of resistance. A startled General Wolfe recorded: “old men of seventy and boys of fifteen take up positions on the fringes of woods and fire on our detachments.” Ultimately the battle on the Plains of Abraham was decisive in the political and economic subjugation of the remnants of New France.

 

This truly was a conquest. It did not merely settle a battle over territory between two great colonial powers but also left behind a settlement of ordinary French-speaking people who could not return to France (as some of the more powerful of New France did). And they were now subject to a new colonial rule.

 

There couldn’t have been a worse place for Carney to deliver any kind of speech about national unity. But his actual words, glorifying this brutality, made it even more unreal:  

 

“The Plains of Abraham mark a battlefield, and also the place where Canada began to make its founding choice of accommodation over assimilation, of partnership over domination, of building together over pulling apart.”

 

Outside voice and inside voice

 

It is not an accident that Carney followed his speech at Davos with an inside-voice speech in Quebec, to show that he can command his own backyard. While the Davos speech was designed to “speak truth to big powers” on the world stage, the Quebec City speech was yet another attempt to whitewash Canadian colonialism and the reality of big power at home. 

 

Carney’s ugly contempt for Indigenous sovereignty is much more despicable than his contempt for Quebec history, but it was still significant that he got called out as a colonialist at the site of British North America's triumph. And called out he was.

 

The speech came on the eve of a major Parti Québécois convention where 1,400 people were expected. The PQ is leading massively in the polls for the October 2026 Quebec election – so much so that current Premier François Legault recently resigned as leader of his right-wing CAQ party. The CAQ is reviled for attacks on healthcare and union rights, and although the PQ’s record is not much better, they are benefitting, with polls showing growing support for their promise to hold a third independence referendum by 2030 if they win.  

 

The leader of the PQ, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, posted a message on social media immediately following Carney’s Plains of Abraham speech:

 

“It’s not the first time in our history, faced with a sovereignty movement that’s growing in strength, that the federal (government) distorts our history and suddenly promises the end of the contempt it displays towards our democratic choices.” In a press conference shortly after he commented: “I don’t think (Carney) realizes that he is following in a long tradition of colonialism that dates back to Lord Durham.” 

 

Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet also picked up on the theme of Carney not knowing his own history: “The banning of French in schools, the Durham report which suggested the assimilation of a people without a history or culture, the hanging of Louis Riel, the October crisis and all the cheating during referendums, that was cooperation.”

 

Even the right-wing CAQ got a shameful bump from Carney’s speech. The CAQ has been viciously anti-immigrant within Quebec, but none other than CAQ Immigration Minister Jean-François Roberge was handed a platform by Carney to speak truth to his incomprehensible rewrite of history: “What a gaffe, what a historic error. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham is the conquest, the culmination point where the English came and defeated the French and burned villages. There’s nothing glorious in this.”

 

While these Quebec politicians must all be called out on the racist double-standard that they show their own linguistically and culturally diverse population – not to mention the colonial legacy they continue towards Indigenous nations within Quebec’s borders – they are nonetheless completely right about the British colonial history that Carney wants to paper over.

 

Know your history, Carney

 

While Carney’s speech paid lip service to “the Great Deportation of the Acadians” and “the Durham Report following the Patriots’ Rebellion,” he asserted that unlike every other conquering power, Canada avoided the “usual scenario of conquest,” one where the vanquished are assimilated, lose their language, their laws, and their religion.

 

Let’s take a look at what actually happened. 

 

The Durham report of 1839 proposed forcible anglicization, and The Act of Union of 1841 enacted this into law. What had motivated this proposal in the first place had been a rebellion of the French-speaking Patriotes in what was then known as Lower Canada – but there was also a rebellion in Upper Canada at almost the same time, demanding better government. In the words of Canadian Marxist historian Stanely Ryerson:

 

“The defeat of the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada inaugurated a period of counter-revolution. In Lower Canada, where the popular rising had attained its widest scope, the Constitution was suspended, and twelve of the Patriote leaders were hanged in a public square in Montreal… Lord Durham’s celebrated report had recommended the granting of responsible government, but also the suppression of French-Canadian rights. The Imperial authorities rejected the former proposal but accepted the latter.”

 

This was hardly “accommodation over assimilation and partnership over domination.” Under the imposed Act of Union, Lower Canada ceased to exist as a separate province, the use of French was banned in the Assembly and Government, and majority representation was provided for the English-Canadian minority. This was only amended in 1848 as a result of democratic pressure from both English-Canadians and French-Canadians.  

 

Whose unity?

 

Carney’s explanation for why British North America became a “unified” Canada was that the British authorities realized they couldn’t stably govern 70,000 habitants against their will, especially with unstable British colonies to the south. 

 

Another historical note left out by Carney is that Benjamin Franklin, inspired by the French Revolution as well as his own, was giving successful speeches to rebels in Lower Canada, tired of having their villages burned down by the British. At that moment in the Americas, the British were the common enemy, the empire on which the sun never set. 

 

To calm the threat, British pragmatism prevailed in Lower Canada. The conclusion of Carney’s unity speech was to assert that out of initial pragmatism and colonial self-interest the dream of a united Canada was born. His speech absolutely follows the usual scenario of conquest, where history is written by the victors.

 

The Canadian state’s colonial history weighs most heavily on Indigenous sovereignty, from past to present. But it is also baked into every moment of so-called “Canadian” history.  

 

Carney, no matter who calls you out, the facts speak for themselves: you are part and parcel of the undeniable colonial history of the Canadian state.