Opinion: The Davos Illusion

Mark Carney’s Masterclass in Rebranding Without Rupture

Mark Carney stood before the global elite in Davos and delivered what many called the speech of the forum. He declared that the world is experiencing “a rupture, not a transition” in the international order. He quoted Václav Havel about living within a lie. He warned middle powers that if they’re not at the table, they’ll be on the menu. The audience gave him a standing ovation. Journalists proclaimed it a pivotal moment. And for a brief window, Canada’s new Prime Minister looked like the truth-teller the world desperately needed.

But strip away the soaring rhetoric and examine what Carney actually represents, what policies Canada actually pursues, and what interests this supposed rupture actually serves, and a very different picture emerges. This was not a bold break with a corrupt international order. This was a rebranding exercise by a banking-class politician trying to repackage Western hegemony for an audience that no longer believes the old sales pitch. It was damage control dressed up as moral courage, performed by a man whose entire career has been spent managing and stabilizing the very system he now claims to critique.

Let’s start with who Mark Carney actually is. He’s not some outsider insurgent or anti-establishment voice. He’s a former Goldman Sachs executive who went on to serve as Governor of the Bank of Canada, then Governor of the Bank of England, before returning to lead a country in profound economic distress. His entire professional life has been dedicated to central banking, financial regulation, and preserving the stability of global capital markets. He is, in the most literal sense, a creature of the system.

And what a system it is in Canada. The country’s housing market has become a grotesque speculative bubble, with prices completely detached from what ordinary people can afford. Roughly 40 percent of the Canadian economy is now tied to real estate, turning the entire nation into what I can only describe as a glorified money laundering operation. Illicit capital from around the world, lightly taxed wealth, and speculative money have poured into Canadian property for decades, inflating prices to absurd levels while wages stagnated and young Canadians gave up hope of ever owning homes.

This didn’t happen by accident. It happened because of policy choices made by successive governments and financial regulators, the very institutions Carney has spent his career managing. Canada became a playground for global elites parking their money in Vancouver condos and Toronto real estate precisely because the rules were structured to allow it. Now Carney arrives as Prime Minister with the housing market in crisis, capital and talent fleeing the country, and hundreds of thousands of people homeless in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

His solution, in my assessment, is not to restructure the economy or crack down on money laundering or build affordable housing at scale. It’s to find new buyers for Canadian toxic assets. It’s to attract fresh foreign capital, particularly from China and the Gulf states, to keep the bubble inflated a little longer. And his Davos speech, with all its talk of middle powers and new partnerships and values-based realism, provides the perfect ideological cover for what is ultimately a desperate search for someone else to hold the bag.

The centerpiece of Carney’s Davos message was that middle powers must apply “the same standards to allies and rivals.” He positioned Canada as a country finally ready to tell the truth, to stop living within the lie, to challenge economic coercion from all directions, not just from designated enemies. It sounded principled. It sounded refreshing. It sounded like a genuine break with the hypocrisy that has defined Western foreign policy for generations.

Then you look at what Canada actually does.

Canada maintains sweeping, comprehensive sanctions against Russia. It has imposed punishing economic measures on Iran. These are presented as moral necessities, as the price that must be paid for violations of international law and human rights. And yet, as Israel conducts what numerous human rights organizations, UN experts, and genocide scholars have described as a genocidal campaign in Gaza, Canada has imposed no meaningful sanctions whatsoever. Not on Netanyahu. Not on Gallant, both of whom now face ICC arrest warrants. Not on senior Israeli military officials. Not on Israeli arms manufacturers. Not on the financial infrastructure that funds the occupation and the killing.

In the two days immediately following Carney’s stirring Davos speech about applying consistent standards, Israel killed more Palestinians in Gaza, including journalists and children. No Canadian minister issued even a token condemnation. No sanctions were announced. No economic penalties were considered. The machine of complicity rolled on exactly as before.

This is not an oversight. This is not a lag between rhetoric and implementation. This is the actual policy. Canada will sanction adversaries with the full force of economic warfare while shielding allies who commit mass atrocities. The “same standards” Carney spoke about in Davos do not exist in practice. They exist only in the speech, as part of the rebranding, as a way to make Western power seem more honest and more principled without changing any of the underlying structures that make it violent and selective.

If values-based realism means anything, it means ending this kind of double standard. But that would require confronting Israel, which would require breaking with the United States, which would require an actual rupture with the architecture of Western power. And that is precisely what Carney is not offering. He is offering the appearance of rupture, the language of rupture, the aesthetics of rupture, all while carefully preserving the alliances and hierarchies that created the crisis in the first place.

Carney’s speech invited the world to see Canada as a newly assertive middle power, no longer willing to simply accept what the hegemon offers, ready to forge its own path and build coalitions with other countries tired of great power bullying. It’s a compelling narrative, especially for Canadians exhausted by years of being treated as America’s junior partner and, more recently, by Trump’s deranged talk of making Canada the 51st state.

But the narrative collapses under scrutiny. Canada is not breaking free from American dominance. It cannot break free. It is geographically, economically, and militarily locked into a relationship with the United States that no amount of inspiring rhetoric can overcome. The vast majority of Canadian trade flows south. Canadian energy exports depend on American markets. Canada has no meaningful independent military capacity and relies almost entirely on U.S. defense infrastructure. Even if Carney wanted to chart a genuinely independent course, the structural realities would make it nearly impossible.

What Carney is actually doing, in my view, is repositioning Canada within a hierarchy that remains fundamentally intact. He’s not leading a revolt of the middle powers. He’s scrambling to adjust to a new phase of imperial decline in which the United States is becoming more openly predatory toward its own allies. Canada enjoyed decades of privileged access to American power, benefiting from the international order while bearing relatively few of its costs. Now that the arrangement is souring, now that the hegemon is turning on its clients, Carney is trying to find new patrons and new markets without actually severing the ties that bind Canada to Washington.

His much-touted strategic partnership with China illustrates the limits perfectly. The deal includes small quotas for Chinese electric vehicles, some tariff relief for Canadian canola and seafood, and vague promises about future cooperation. It’s not nothing, but it’s hardly a geopolitical realignment. It’s a modest commercial arrangement that leaves Canada’s fundamental dependencies completely unchanged. And even this modest arrangement was likely cleared or at least tolerated by Washington as part of a broader strategy to manage the relationship with Beijing, not as a Canadian declaration of independence.

I see Carney’s classical references and invocations not as a blueprint for resistance but as a lament from a favored vassal now facing exploitation by its own empire. The speech reads less like “we’re breaking free” and more like “we used to have a good deal and now it’s falling apart and we need to scramble.” That’s not emancipation. That’s panic management by a political class that built its wealth and status on proximity to American power and now faces the consequences of that dependency.

There’s another reading of Carney’s ascent and his Davos moment that I think deserves attention. Canada has often served as a testing ground for policies that later get rolled out in the United States and across the Anglosphere. The country’s political culture, its media landscape, its regulatory environment, all make it useful for trying out new approaches to governance and social control before scaling them up in larger markets.

Carney himself fits this pattern. A technocratic banker with progressive branding, fluent in the language of climate action and stakeholder capitalism, capable of acknowledging the failures of the old order while offering just enough rhetorical rupture to seem fresh without threatening any fundamental interests. He is, in many ways, the perfect politician for a moment when traditional center-right and center-left parties have lost credibility but the establishment still needs to maintain control.

His Davos speech can be read as a trial run for how Western elites plan to navigate the next phase of imperial contraction. Admit that the old rhetoric was always partly a lie. Acknowledge that the rules were selectively applied. Concede that great powers, including the United States, engage in coercion and bullying. But then, instead of dismantling the system or holding anyone accountable, simply rebrand. Call it values-based realism. Call it middle power cooperation. Call it anything that sounds honest and fresh and principled, and then continue the same policies under new labels.

If this works in Canada, if Carney can win a large majority on the strength of this narrative despite changing nothing fundamental about Canadian complicity in atrocities or Canadian dependence on unsustainable financial bubbles, then you can expect to see similar figures emerge in Britain, Australia, and eventually the United States itself. The playbook will be refined and copied. The rebranding will become the new consensus.

I predict that Carney will call an early election, win big on the strength of his Davos image and his reputation as a steady hand in turbulent times, and then embark on an aggressive phase of asset stripping. He’ll sell off more of Canada’s economic base, attract more foreign capital into the housing bubble, continue the money laundering economy, and preside over worsening conditions for ordinary Canadians while protecting the interests of capital and creditors.

All of this will be justified in the language of pragmatism, of navigating a difficult international environment, of making hard choices to preserve Canada’s position in a changing world. The rhetoric of middle power assertiveness and values-based realism will provide moral cover for policies that amount to managed decline and the transfer of wealth from the many to the few.

Meanwhile, billions will continue flowing to fund wars and geopolitical projects abroad while domestic infrastructure crumbles, while social services buckle under strain, while homelessness explodes, while young people abandon any hope of stability or prosperity. The gap between Carney’s soaring language about Canadian exceptionalism and pluralistic societies that function will become impossible to ignore, but by then the political groundwork will be laid, the opposition will be fragmented, and the rebranding will be complete.

There is a way to judge whether Carney’s speech represented a genuine rupture or merely a rebranding exercise, and it’s quite simple. Watch what Canada does, not what it says. Does it end its complicity in the Gaza genocide by imposing real sanctions on Israeli leadership and arms manufacturers, the same way it sanctioned Russia? Does it confront the housing crisis by cracking down on money laundering, taxing speculative real estate, and building affordable housing at scale? Does it reduce its dependence on the United States by making genuinely costly decisions that Washington opposes? Does it apply the same standards to allies and rivals, as Carney promised?

So far, the answer to all of these questions is no. And that tells you everything you need to know. The Davos speech was brilliant political theater. It gave people who are desperate for honesty and moral clarity from their leaders a momentary sense that someone finally gets it, someone is finally willing to tell the truth. But theater is all it was.

Carney is not dismantling the system he spent his career managing. He’s trying to save it by making it sound more honest. He’s not ending Canadian complicity in atrocities. He’s just hoping people will be satisfied with better rhetoric while the policy stays the same. He’s not charting an independent path for Canada. He’s repositioning the country within a failing imperial order, looking for new buyers for toxic assets and new ways to keep the bubble inflated a little longer.

The tragedy is that the diagnosis in his speech was largely correct. The international rules-based order was always partially a fiction. The powerful always did exempt themselves when it suited them. International law has been applied with varying rigor depending on who violated it. And yes, we are living through a rupture in how global power operates, with the United States becoming more openly transactional and predatory even toward traditional allies.

All of that is true. Carney’s willingness to say it out loud was genuinely unusual for a Western leader. But acknowledging the problem while offering no real solution, while continuing the same policies that created the crisis, while shielding allies who commit genocide, while managing a money laundering economy disguised as a housing market, that’s not leadership. That’s brand management.

The world doesn’t need leaders who can eloquently describe the failures of the system they serve. The world needs leaders willing to break with that system, to face the costs and consequences of doing so, to build something genuinely different even when it’s difficult and dangerous. Carney is not that leader. His speech was not that moment. And anyone who mistakes his performance for the real thing will be disappointed when the policies remain unchanged and the atrocities continue and the housing bubble keeps inflating until it finally, inevitably bursts.

We deserve better than rebranding. We deserve rupture. Real rupture. Not the kind you perform at Davos to applause, but the kind that transforms how power works and who it serves. Until that happens, speeches like Carney’s will remain what they are: beautifully packaged illusions designed to buy time for a failing system that should have been dismantled long ago.