III

After his weird linguistic breakdown, Carney moves onto the middle powers bit of his speech that the International Right so admires. He wants his peer countries to be:

Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights.

The first part of this sentence up to territorial integrity sounds exactly like a white settler, the second part sounds exactly like a white settler wanting to hide what they are up to. And he boasts that he is leading by example:

Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, capital gains and business investment, we have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade, and we are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors, and beyond. 

While appreciating that his speech was delivered at Davos, natural habitat of the most inhuman portion of humanity, one asks whether this is really the speech that has inspired the global elites? He is only there to sell Canada, saying that aside from the EU and “twelve other trade deals”—unintentionally sounding very Trumpian—“To help solve global problems, we are pursuing variable geometry.” Note that the bold formatting here is courtesy of the Prime Minister’s office. In summary, he appears to mean that Canada will side with all the white countries, and their allies, plus China. The present writer is unsure how newsworthy this information is. He notes however that:

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future. 

How can two parties have a unique right to determine something; two parties with opposing interests, and utterly asymmetrical power? Where one party is the native nation, and the other an invading nation? One wonders whether Carney would refer to Ireland and England’s unique right to determine Ireland’s future.

We are working with our NATO allies (including the Nordic Baltic 8) to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, submarines, in aircraft, and boots on the ground, boots on the ice.

This is menacing.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

So is this.

He takes little excursions into plurilateral trade (which shortly reappears as the more normal multilateral), the “hegemons and hyperscalers” of AI and “critical minerals”—regarding which Canada is “forming buyers’ clubs anchored in the G7 so that the world can diversify away from concentrated supply”, which appears to elide the difference between the G7 and the world.

IV

Carney draws a distinction between great powers and middle powers so that the former can carry the burden of the violence in which they all participate.

When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

Great, and what of other kinds of intimidation, such as war, invasion, genocide? The middle powers criticise Russia; are we now to see them criticising zionism? Of course not: apart from anything else, Carney’s interest is solely the economic sphere, and zionism is good business. In fact he goes so far as to say that “Building a strong domestic economy should always be every government’s immediate priority.” When Communists come to power, their immediate priorities are literacy campaigns, vaccinations, securing food supplies, emancipation of women: perhaps for Carney these things come under the heading of a strong domestic economy, but why render lived experience in such terms?

Diversification internationally is not just economic prudence; it is the material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

Is this correct? Countries earn the right to have principles by reducing vulnerability? So Cuba, a vulnerable state, had not earned the right to assist Angola, for example? How do non-state parties—movements, individuals—earn the right to have principles?

This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from a world of genuine cooperation.

How can it be said that the middle powers—countries with higher quality of life than people in the superpowers—could possibly have the most to lose? Strictly speaking, it is true that they have the most assets to lose, but there is no actual chance of Canada becoming Haiti. There are people with very little to lose because they have already had everything taken from them, if they ever had anything at all. It is tasteless in the extreme to focus on the fear of the rich that they will lose their wealth.

Let us be clear: Carney wants a new set of Illusions. Like Lee Oswald in DeLillo’s Libra, Carney is the perfect person to step into a space already created exactly for him. They needed a handsome 60 year old white man, preferably English-speaking, who can run a marathon in 3.5 hours, who has a doctorate, who married his Oxford sweetheart, also an economist. (But, Macdara asks, how does a man with three grandparents from Mayo look like a lab-grown North American settler?) They needed a man like this to say enough to make it seem like he understands the need for change, but to promise them that the change will be only what they really seek: to go back to the conditions of their familiarity and greed, the conditions that gave rise to a powerful Far Right in all the countries where the Liberal Right has squatted in power for decades. But no matter, because they will always want to go back to their conditions of greatest comfort, will always pretend to believe that this is possible, that any deviation rightwards is a blip, everything remains perfectly recoverable…as long as there is no threat from the Left!