Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called out the United States in a World Economic Forum speech Tuesday, saying that economic rules are enforced “asymmetrically” and “the strongest will exempt themselves when convenient.”
Though the prime minister did not name President Donald Trump directly, he did call out “American hegemony in particular.” Carney said in the speech that for a time it was useful, allowing for a variety of mutually beneficial economic and security policies, but now “the bargain no longer works.”
Carney’s speech referenced a landmark 1978 essay by Czech dissident and later president, Václav Havel, called “The Power of the Powerless.” The essay uses the example of a grocer keeping a “Workers of the World Unite” poster in his window, not because he stood with the idea but because he feared retaliation for not displaying the sign. Havel calls for people to remove the signs and endorse a different world order than the one imposed upon them.
Carney said that Canada once proudly placed a sign in the window endorsing the economic world order led by the U.S. and other major powers, but now “great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”
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“Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down,” he said, urging middle powers of the world to “adapt to the new reality.”
This speech comes less than a year after Carney’s March 2025 declaration that Canada would end the “old relationship we had with the United States.”
Prior to Carney’s Tuesday speech, Trump posted a fake photograph meeting including a map showing a U.S. flag over Canada, Greenland and Venezuela.
“Canada’s geopolitical decisions are not the hinge on which history swings,” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, said Tuesday in Davos, adding that “the reality is, Canada’s GDP is 75 percent dependent on the United States.”
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