Weeks after it was delivered, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech is still generating ripples—quoted in think tanks, parsed in Ottawa, and invoked as shorthand for a world tilting away from frictionless globalization.

“We knew,” Carney told that room of elites, high in the Alps in January, “the story of the international rules-based order was partially false.” Just because Canada benefited from it, Carney said, didn’t hide the fact that it was unfair. The rules didn’t apply equally to everyone. “The strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,” he said. Power, not principle, set the terms.

Carney’s argument rested on two ideas that sat—still sit—uneasily together. On the one hand, he spoke of sovereignty, of the need for Canada to secure its supply chains, deepen its industrial capacity, and reduce its exposure to geopolitical shock. On the other, he reaffirmed a faith in the very global systems whose unravelling has made sovereignty newly urgent: open capital flows, integrated markets, and rules-based co-operation led by familiar powers.

The contradiction was not rhetorical; it was structural. Davos itself is built on the promise that global integration can be managed, even as the world that gathers there is busily preparing for its limits. Carney’s speech captured that paradox perfectly. He offered a vision of Canadian independence that still depends, in many ways, on a global system stable enough to respect independence—the very thing he said is eroding.