By Drew Garvie
Many people in Canada, rightly concerned with the escalating threat to sovereignty, are finding relief in Mark Carney’s blunt talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos, about an end to the “old order” and proposing a plan to move away from reliance on trade with the US.
But let’s be clear – Carney’s remarks do not mark a fundamental shift towards policies that will make lives better for working people in Canada, nor does it mean that Canada is adopting a foreign policy of peace and respect for sovereignty of all countries.
Instead, Carney’s “triumphant” speech merely confirms the ongoing reality of sharpening contradictions within the global capitalist order and the decline of US imperialist hegemony. He identifies the “rupture” in the post-WWII (or maybe more accurately post-1990) world order of US leadership of imperialism, and that the US is moving away from using international institutions to dominate the world for capital and more and more towards unilateral coercion, now even directed at its imperialist “allies.”
Carney’s call for “middle powers” to “act together” is a response to the decline in US global might, and its increased aggression. However, this call is mostly directed at Europe, where Carney has already worked to deepen partnerships with the EU, including joining the EU defence procurement and championing a Trans Pacific-EU trade bloc.
This is really a realignment of Canadian monopoly capital towards Europe to hedge against US volatility. It is intra-imperialist maneuvering.
Carney’s “principled and pragmatic” grand rhetoric avoids much substance about domestic policy, but what is there is regressive and dangerous. He boasts of tax cuts for capital gains and business, dismantling internal “trade barriers” (which is code for attacks on regulation and labour rights), state subsidizing of fossil fuels infrastructure and AI. He notes that he is doubling the military budget – in fact, he is more than tripling it – but he leaves out that he is paying for that by the most ambitious austerity drive since at least the 1990s.
There is also quite a bit of hypocrisy in the speech. When he calls for respect for sovereignty, he really means a respect of sovereignty inside the US-NATO imperialist bloc. This “selective justice” is clearly displayed in his support for the US abduction of the President of Venezuela and his open consideration about joining Trump’s “Board of Peace” as a new colonial overlord supervising the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
There is definitely a selective application of “value-based realism” that doesn’t apply to obstacles to Canadian imperialism, such as the struggle for sovereignty in Latin America or West Asia.
In fact, his call for middle powers to unite – declaring that “you’re either at the table or you’re on the menu” – definitively leaves out most of the countries of the Global South, the poor, the powerless and the victims of imperialism, who Carney clearly feels can continue to be the on menu.
Just to be clear to his audience, Carney shows his class allegiance by bookending his speech with references to anti-Communist, idealist theories of power. The message is clear: Canada needs to adjust to a new imperialist order, but not leave the imperialist order behind.
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