Diagnosis

And the doctor?
Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada.

In Davos, standing high above the Alps, he did not just speak to an audience — he spoke to history.
And, for once, the room had an adult in charge.

Carney’s speech was clear, surgical, and free of political sugar-coating.
Almost two thousand words, and not a single empty one.
It was an honest diagnosis — clinical, intelligent, and deeply human.

“The power of the less powerful begins with honesty.
Every day we are reminded that we live in an age of great-power rivalry,
that the rules-based order is fading,
that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
But obedience will not buy safety.”

Rarely does a political speech offer such precision without despair.
Carney didn’t stop at describing the illness — he prescribed treatment.

“In 1978, Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote an essay titled ‘The Power of the Powerless.’
It begins with a greengrocer who hangs a sign in his shop window —
‘Workers of the world, unite!’
He doesn’t believe in it; no one does.
But he hangs it anyway — to avoid trouble, to show conformity.
Because everyone else does, the system survives.
Not by violence, but by participation in a ritual everyone knows is false.
Havel called this ‘living within the lie.’
Its fragility begins the moment one person stops playing along.
It is time for nations and companies to take down their signs.”

The subtext was unmistakable — a polite but firm message to the southern neighbour under Donald J. Trump.

“In recent years, major powers have begun weaponizing interdependence:
tariffs as leverage,
finance as coercion,
supply chains as vulnerability.
The multilateral institutions on which middle powers depend — the WTO, the UN, the COP — have been weakened.”

Then came the line that shifted the tone from diagnosis to strategy.

“For middle powers like Canada, the question isn’t whether we adapt — we must.
The question is how:
do we simply build higher walls,
or do we build something better?
Middle powers must act together,
because if you’re not at the table,
you’re on the menu.”

That one deserves to be framed — maybe even hung above the national bed.

I have been a Canadian citizen for just over a year now,
but rarely have I felt so precisely — and proudly — in the right place at the right time.

“We are taking the sign out of the window.
The old order isn’t coming back — and we shouldn’t mourn it.
Nostalgia is not a strategy.
But from the break we can build something stronger and fairer.
The powerful have their power.
We have something too — the courage to stop pretending,
to speak truth,
to strengthen what is ours,
and to act together.
That is Canada’s way — open, confident, and shared with any nation ready to walk beside us.”

Many voices in the media understood what he meant.
So did ordinary citizens around the world.
The world is no longer as we want it to be — it is as it is.
Now we’ll see who accepts that truth — and who has the courage to face it.

From here in Canada, I hope this wake-up call travels far —
across oceans, across walls, across doubt —
to bring the world a little closer together again.