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The quiet-spoken Canadian prime minister has spoken unutterable truths
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Opinion — Ted Widmer
Is it perhaps a sign of the times that Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, has become a thrilling orator? A sober banker, he speaks calmly, without many vocal inflections. We expect Canadians to be somewhat flat; even a little boring, and yet Carney has already delivered two remarkable speeches in 2026, and the year is far from over.
The first, at Davos, described a “rupture in the world order”, and “the end of a pleasant fiction”. By that, he meant that the world could no longer depend on the United States to lead the Pax Americana that has largely kept the peace since the end of the second world war.
Carney called for a new “geometry”, allowing nations with shared values to align, and asking middle-sized powers to act together, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”. The United States, traditionally the leader of the west, was not invited to join. Ironically, the speech was delivered on 20 January, the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
The second speech was a 23-minute address, delivered last Saturday, on 22 August, from a drab government interior in Ottawa. The backdrop was unexceptional, a set of eight Canadian flags, behind a wooden podium (carved with a maple leaf). There were few rhetorical fireworks. He hardly ever raised his voice.
Yet the speech signaled an earthquake. The news, as widely reported, was that Carney was calling off the trade talks that many expected to resolve or reduce the trade frictions that have been in place ever since Trump slapped his first round of tariffs on Canada, shortly after assuming office.
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The failure of the talks surely came as a surprise to Donald Trump, who had announced that a deal was imminent. But as is so often the case, US negotiators had undermined their own position with a series of last-minute power moves, bullying the other side.
In this way, the failure was reminiscent of the way the Trump administration continues to blow up its own peace deals in the Middle East, by adding new conditions at the 11th hour and making false statements afterwards.
Carney’s words stung, too. We expect student activists to speak truth to power; it’s a surprise when a former executive of Goldman Sachs and a former governor of the Bank of England takes on the role.
He is no bomb-thrower. But no one can deny that his message reached the world; nothing confirms it so much as Trump’s frenzied counterattack on social media. Reading the flurry of puerile insults posted on Truth Social was like watching a punch-drunk boxer throwing sprawling haymakers at an adversary too nimble to be hit.
In contrast to Carney’s sober tone, Trump’s threatened to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America”, called Canadian officials “clowns” ,, and dismissed Carney as a “governor” instead of a prime minister, as if contemptuous of Canada’s sovereignty. Of course, he laid the groundwork for Canada’s refusal to cave in as soon as he began his second term with a flurry of claims that Canada should become the 51st state.
Unlike the easily-rattled president, the prime minister does not traffic in emotion. His speech was notable for its control of the facts and its unshakable moral authority. This was a economist’s speech, full of accounting.
He began with greetings in both English and French – a subtle reminder that US attempts to strong-arm Canada into relaxing its protections of the French language were never going to work. He promised to update Canadians on the issues behind the talks, then did just that.
Carney furnished precise statistics, revealing just how intertwined the US and Canadian economies are (Canada buys more American cars than the UK, Japan and China combined, and supplies 99% of our natural gas imports). In all of these ways, the speech was like a quaint relic from a different era, when leaders were expected to convey the real truth to their people.
There was also some solid rhetoric, as the speech gained intensity, and grew positively elbows up by the end. Carney referred to “the storm blowing in from Washington”, in a possible reference to the recent forest fires that darkened the relationship some more.
Then he announced that Canada would be seeking to diversify its relationships abroad, in what is obviously a new policy, based on a near-total lack of trust in the United States, a nation that blusters so unpredictably on the world stage that it is as if “its signature was written in pencil”.
Canada is far from perfect; it has faced a threat of secession from Francophone Quebec for generations; and there are new murmurs of secession-talk in Alberta. For centuries it was a “dominion” of the British empire, and not clearly a sovereign nation. But its graveyards are filled with tens of thousands of soldiers who served in the first and second world wars; Canadian resolve should never be underestimated.
The loser is this negotiation is, of course, the United States. It’s not just the financial benefits that would have accrued from a successful deal (and the political benefits that would have come to Republicans in swing states that neighbor Canada, such as Michigan and Maine).
It’s a much larger loss than that. As with the proposed case to annex Greenland, this was an entirely avoidable own goal that will damage US interests for a generation, as Canada seeks new relationships. As Carney said: “We are masters in our own home and the partner of choice abroad.” He added: “We have been under no illusions. We recognized from the start that America has changed.”
Those words should alarm all Americans. We hear a great deal about the “special relationship” that links the UK and the US, and it has often been very important, as it was in the second world war.
Related: Canadians do not seek a trade war – but nor will we be bullied by Donald Trump | Jen Gerson
But the US-Canadian friendship is the healthiest foreign relationship the United States has ever enjoyed. Our economies are deeply connected; as are our militaries (and specifically the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, which has protected both nations from a Russian attack since 1958).
We share the longest land border between two countries in the world, 5,525 miles long, and in most of our history we have barely worried about it. A huge state, Alaska, cannot be reached by land without going through Canada. In short, we need each other.
And in general, we like each other. At least we did. But in 2025, Canadian tourism in the US declined 25%, and US businesses are feeling it.
The rapid disintegration of the friendship should hardly come as a surprise to any who have followed the rapid erosion of American standing in the world. But Carney’s words spelled out the why and how of this erosion with more clarity that we have heard in a long time.
Specifically, he argued that the United States can no longer be trusted, changing its arguing position so frequently that it can only write its signature “in pencil”. While Canada was proposing “long-term partnerships”, US negotiators were offering “short-term transactions”.
That is not a strong foundation for a world order. While continuing to fantasize about Greenland, and raining down insults on Nato members, we are in danger of losing a much more important ally, close to home.
Carney’s final words left little doubt about the path Canada has chosen. The words are beautiful, if tragic:
“Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started. Canadians don’t submit to the weather – we thrive in it. We don’t wait to see which way the wind is blowing. Or surrender ourselves to the waves to be storm-tossed by events. We set our own course. We make our own weather.”
Ted Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, is the editor of American Speeches, and the recently published The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, both published by the Library of America
The first, at Davos, described a “rupture in the world order”, and “the end of a pleasant fiction”. By that, he meant that the world could no longer depend on the United States to lead the Pax Americana that has largely kept the peace since the end of the second world war.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Ted Widmer. Published 26 Aug 2026, 10:00 am.
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