Canada's Mark Carney Calls On World To Adapt To ‘rupture’ Caused By ‘great Powers’  

​​​​Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says a global order based on rules has been rendered “fiction” and is urging smaller countries to forge new strategic alliances to keep from being subjugated by “great powers” acting in their own self-interest.

Carney’s speech Tuesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, did not specifically name-check President Donald Trump or his administration, but it amounted to a rallying cry for smaller countries to work together to wrestle economic control of their future.

“This fiction was useful,” Carney said. “This bargain no longer works.”

Carney was walking a political high-wire — balancing the need to stand with European allies facing an unprecedented attack on their sovereignty from Trump’s Greenland annexation threats, while not provoking a mercurial president ahead of this year’s review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, with billions of dollars at stake.

Carney said all is not lost in the world order, calling on middle powers to come together to “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,” Carney added.

Carney evoked the landmark 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless“ by former Czech freedom fighter Václav Havel, who eventually led the Velvet Revolution that led to free elections in his country in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall toppled the Soviet Union. Havel later received a hero’s welcome in Canada in 1999.

“We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We are taking the sign out of the window,” Carney said, invoking the central metaphor of Havel’s essay. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Carney’s speech at the WEF builds on his landmark declaration that Canada’s traditional relationship with the U.S. is “over” — a dramatic repositioning of Canada-U.S. relations that he announced in a live address to Canadians in March 2025.

In that speech, Carney succinctly telegraphed that while Canada needed to strengthen its own economy, it would face a day where it would have to lead to the creation of a “like-minded” new world order of countries that excluded the U.S., something Carney dubbed both a “tragedy” and a “new reality.”

In his Tuesday speech, Carney made a thinly veiled reference to Trump’s trade war on Canada, which was launched in earnest even before Trump was inaugurated one year ago, saying: “Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture.”

Carney’s Davos speech capped a three-country trip that included “new strategic partnerships” with China and Qatar, as well as seeking free trade pacts with India and the multilateral trading blocs in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

“We’re engaging broadly strategically with open eyes,” Carney said. “We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.”

He reiterated Canada’s strength as an “energy superpower,” positioning the country as a desirable partner in new alliances.

“We're pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests,” Carney said.

“On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future,” he added, reiterating Canada’s commitment to NATO’s Article 5, which affirms an attack on one member state is an attack on the alliance.

Ahead of the speech, Trump raised the stakes with a Truth Social post featuring a fake map that showed Canada, Greenland and Venezuela draped under the U.S. flag.

Meanwhile, Carney is among Trump’s invitees to the Gaza “Board of Peace,” which includes Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others. French President Emmanuel Macron declined Trump’s invitation, saying the proposed board threatened to overshadow the work of the United Nations.

Trump replied to Macron’s snub with a threat to impose 200 percent tariffs on Champagne and French wine.

Earlier Tuesday, Canada’s Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne told reporters in Davos that Canada was still pondering Trump’s Gaza invitation, but added Canada wasn’t interested in paying the president’s $1 billion entry fee for a seat at the table.

Carney and Macron met earlier Tuesday on the Davos sidelines, where they reaffirmed their commitment to Denmark and Greenland’s sovereignty and a shared commitment to working through NATO to preserve Arctic security.

Macron used his speech at Davos on Tuesday to double down, calling Trump’s tariff threats “fundamentally unacceptable, even more so when they are used as a leverage against territorial sovereignty.”

Carney echoed that theme in his remarks.

“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said.
“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Tuesday in Davos that “the reality is, Canada’s GDP is 75 percent dependent on the United States.”

He added: “Canada’s geopolitical decisions are not the hinge on which history swings.”

Trump is scheduled to address the forum Wednesday.