Although Prime Minister and banker Mark Carney’s speech at Davos has generated admiration in many sectors of Canadian society and beyond, celebrated as a bold call to defend “democratic values” and sovereignty in the face of a world in crisis, it also invites reflection most awkward: what happens when the mirror we use to point out the cracks in the global system first reflects our own contradictions?
Canada presents itself as a defender of a fair order, but its history of interference in Latin America, its complicit silence in the face of genocide in Palestine, and its double-shredder to legitimize governments for its economic interests reveal a gap between its narrative and its actions.
If we truly aspire to build a more equitable world, we must begin by looking at ourselves without historical makeup, recognizing that no country, not even one that proclaims itself “peaceful” and “multilateralist,” is exempt from questioning its role in colonial power structures. Only from that raw honesty can genuine change emerge, not as a moral exception, but as a collective repair.
The Prime Minister’s speech, though wrapped in rhetoric of “broken” and “values,” reproduces the colonial hierarchies that uphold the global order.
In quoting Vacclav Havel to criticize authoritarian systems, Carney deliberately ignores how capitalism, a system Canada defends, has failed to guarantee dignity and the common good to billions in the Global South, the Global Majority. We must not forget that in the Canadian Global South, many Indigenous communities still lack access to the basics to live with dignity: safe drinking water, adequate housing, timely health care, and quality education. While communism is pointed out as an oppressive fiction, countries like Cuba or Vietnam, with socialist models, have achieved advances in health and education that capitalist nations have not equal. Cuba is still under a criminal embargo since the 1960s.
This selectivity is not casual: it is part of the so-called “coloniality of knowledge,” where only the Global North boasts the right to define what is “democracy” or “progress.” Worse yet, Canada has applied opposite standards: it supported Juan Guaido in Venezuela, as president in exile, an unelected leader but according to his interests, while preaching sovereignty and human rights, and today defends the “right of Greenland to decide its future,” but is silent in front of Israeli apartheid in Palestine. Do the southern peoples only deserve self-determination if they obey the designs of the North?
The “coloniality of power” is manifested in its proposal of “values-based realism,” which in practice translates into alliances with authoritarian regimes in the Gulf, such as Qatar, with whom it signed agreements days before the speech, while elected governments in Latin America are punished. His call to “not build forts” clashes with his participation in NATO, an alliance that has invaded countries of the Global South, and with his militarization of the Arctic, where he supports Denmark to control strategic resources. While criticizing the “economic coercion” of other powers, Canada has imposed unilateral sanctions on Venezuela and Nicaragua, measures that starve civilians and violate international law. This hypocrisy reveals that “values” are not universal, but tools to legitimize domination: human rights apply fully only to those who belong to the club of the “civilized” like Canada and the self-so-called “international community.”
On the other hand, the “coloniality of being” exposes the arrogance of believing that Canada knows better than the peoples of the Global South what suits them and how they should behave. The speech in Davos of the Prime Minister omitted to mention the active participation of Canadian mining companies in the plunder of Latin America’s resources, from lithium mining in Chile to oil extraction in Ecuador, and eludes to recognize that the “rules-based order” was designed to perpetuate the dependence of the outskirts. While preaching “resilience” and “strategic autonomy,” Carney promotes trade treaties that will tie economies like Mercosur to neocolonial value chains. How to talk about sovereignty when Canada has stood with the US. and Europe to orchestrate coups in Bolivia (2019) and Haiti (2004) to protect their investments?
The Prime Minister is right at one point: the world can no longer “live in a lie,” that was imposed to plunder natural and cultural resources of the Global South, that “lie” that was for others not for whites, those lies that have been reported for decades and that have been, literally, silenced in blood and fire, with coups, genocides, disappearances, plus a long etcetera, under the lies of “democracy” and “peace.” This would require Canada to stop being complicit in those fictions, created for vassalage. It requires acknowledging that its historical prosperity was built on the exploitation of territories and racialized bodies, and that its “multilateralism” which is often boasted of is a smoke curtain to perpetuate hierarchies, is a white mask.
From Latin America, we know that as long as the Global North continues to impose its agenda under the guise of “democracy,” that has the right to veto if it is not “ours,” we will continue to be trapped in a cycle of interventions and dependence.
The alternative is not in Davos, a private club sponsored by international companies who decide who can speak, but in listening to those who have resisted centuries of colonialism: the silenced peoples, the massacred peoples, the peoples demanding reparations, not charity; self-determination, not guardianship; and climate justice, not green extractivism disguised as progress.
Canada could be a bridge to a fairer world, but only if it first stops looking at itself as an exception and accepts being part of the problem, a historically large part. The mirror is in front of us: will we have the courage to look? Or the other very important question would be how long is this speech going to last before they return it to the empire?
Juan Carlos Martínez is a poet and professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.