Western Standard - February 03, 2026


HANNAFORD: Carney talks big in Davos, delivers little at home


Episode Stats

Length

27 minutes

Words per Minute

161.72774

Word Count

4,417

Sentence Count

227

Hate Speech Sentences

10


Summary

David Knight-Legg, a former speechwriter for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, joins me to talk about his Davos keynote, and why he thinks Canada should be leading a multipolar world, not a rule-based one.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show
00:00:21.280 of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, January the 29th. Just over a week ago, Prime Minister
00:00:27.140 Mark Carney delivered a widely acclaimed keynote speech at Davos, Switzerland, to the World Economic
00:00:33.720 Forum, and he declared the Old World Order dead and committed Canada to be leading a new one.
00:00:41.360 Technically, as a speechwriter from the old days for a Canadian Prime Minister, I must say that his
00:00:46.840 remarks were well prepared and delivered. But is his analysis correct? And is the strategy that he's
00:00:54.900 proposing for Canada capable of restoring the country's status in the world. Joining us now
00:01:01.140 is David Knight-Legg, a strategic advisor to the Alberta government, energy, and financial services
00:01:08.180 firms. And he is no stranger to the Western Standard. Good to have you back, David.
00:01:13.440 Great to be here. Great to see you again, Nigel.
00:01:16.600 And likewise, David, like everybody else who listened to Mr. Carney's speech at Davos,
00:01:20.780 I was impressed with the remarks as a piece of prose. Aristotle applauds from the grave,
00:01:27.060 and perhaps Thucydides too. And yet I had that feeling there's something off here that I'm missing.
00:01:32.720 I'm being conned. And as I thought about it, it occurred to me that Mr. Carney is lamenting
00:01:37.860 something that is the international rules-based order that never really was. He even says so in a kind
00:01:45.880 way later. So when he remarks that we knew the story of the international rules-based order was
00:01:52.040 partially false, so his basic takeaway was that Trump, we didn't actually name, had ended this
00:01:58.600 apocryphal international rules-based order. And the new reality was a multipolar world in which the
00:02:04.960 big powers did what they wanted. To me, that sounds very much like the world before the Second World War.
00:02:10.000 So first question, isn't Mr. Carney's multipolar world actually just business as usual?
00:02:17.160 Yeah, of course it is. Yeah. I think the appeal of his speech took two or three different
00:02:25.280 vectors. And I think, you know, it was appealing. The thing that's surprising about the speech is it
00:02:34.740 was a speech that would be given by a well-informed spectator. It was a speech of a political science
00:02:41.100 professor, a law professor. In an odd way, it wasn't a speech that struck me as being given by
00:02:47.340 a world leader. And in some ways, I think people find that refreshing. It was long on description.
00:02:54.800 You've noted it quoted Aristotle Thucydides, hero of mine, Vaslav Havel. I think deeply misquoted
00:03:03.060 Vaslav Havel. But as a piece of art, it was compelling because it described very effectively
00:03:10.040 the state of the world to some extent. I think what is odd for a world leader like Mark Carney
00:03:16.340 is that it did not draw any clear prescriptions, courses of action, and to the extent that it would
00:03:23.240 have his actual actions over the last nine months have been completely contrary to the theory of
00:03:31.420 the speech. And that's what's deeply problematic about it. The speech is excellent, but it's almost
00:03:38.260 like listening to somebody that's a good cover band. You can recognize the song. You like it. But it's not
00:03:46.600 the person who wrote it. It's not what was intended by the person who wrote it. And it's being delivered
00:03:52.200 by somebody who in many ways represents, to my mind, the opposite of Vaslav Havel. Mark Carney wrote an
00:03:59.880 op-ed in the middle of the Freedom Convoy calling Canadian citizens seditious. That was carefully
00:04:05.560 chosen language by somebody that knows better. It was followed through on as a matter of sedition. And
00:04:12.680 that his theory of the case, which he wrote in the op-ed, was then shown to be deeply problematic for civil
00:04:20.360 rights for freedom, totally totalitarian in every way. The exact opposite of what someone like Václav Havel
00:04:27.400 would have thought was appropriate for people that were obviously political dissenters of mandates that
00:04:35.720 ended up being very quickly thrown out for being unscientific. These were the people, these were the
00:04:40.600 shopkeepers that had tossed the sign out of the window, decided to stand up against totalitarian overreach in
00:04:46.280 their country. And the first person to oppose them and demand that the politically correct
00:04:52.760 totalitarian framing of COVID be enforced by a police state was Mark Carney, who just gave a speech
00:05:01.000 quoting Václav Havel.
00:05:02.200 So I'd like to come back to Václav Havel in a minute, but for those people who actually did listen to
00:05:13.320 this speech, Mr. Carney did appear to offer a path forward, a path between what he would say submission and
00:05:23.160 isolation. And it all sounds good, but it was supposed to be a coalition of middle power countries coming
00:05:31.400 together to do what they could, given the polarity of China, the United States, and Russia. But this kind of
00:05:43.240 middle power alliance sounds a bit like the deer are forming a coalition against the wolves.
00:05:51.640 Is that what you're getting at when you say that it's a bit delusional?
00:05:56.920 Yeah, look, I think Canada has the greatest opportunity economically in the planet because
00:06:02.440 we're only, you know, 45, 50 million people. We have 77 to 80 percent of our trade depends entirely on
00:06:11.160 the United States. The next largest trade block we have is about 10 percent, which is all of the EU and
00:06:18.200 the UK together. And after that, China is around 4 percent. And then you've got, you know, single digit
00:06:25.560 percentages around the world. So far, since Mark Carney was elected, we've had virtually no serious progress on the most
00:06:34.520 important trading relationship that we have. So you can give a speech citing Thucydides, and this is what
00:06:40.920 you'd expect of a law professor, political science professor, is an excellent speech for somebody who's
00:06:45.960 a spectator. It was a terrible speech for somebody who's got to renegotiate Kuzma in the summer. It was a terrible
00:06:52.600 speech in multiple levels. First of all, it was the wrong speech to give because it drew a false moral
00:06:58.680 equivalence between great powers as if China and the United States are the same sort of problem
00:07:04.200 because they're hegemons. That's deeply reckless for anybody who sailed out. It's especially reckless
00:07:10.440 for the leader of Canada. We have a series of actions that are being taken by his government
00:07:16.680 that are deeply counterproductive right now in the relationship that we have with the United States.
00:07:21.560 They're counterproductive on the three things that matter most, energy,
00:07:25.480 national security, and economic security and trade. So again, a speech is very important,
00:07:33.400 but the person who gives the speech is as important as the speech when the purpose of the speech is to
00:07:39.640 outline or compel action. And what had happened with this speech is this speech had followed very
00:07:46.840 quickly after a series of concessions were made to the world's most totalitarian state, China.
00:07:53.480 China in a juxtaposition with the relationship with the United States, very intentionally drawn
00:08:02.040 by the prime minister and recklessly so. So I think that the problem with the speech is not the quality
00:08:07.560 of the speech. The delivery of the speech was exceptional. Aspects of the speech were very appealing
00:08:13.160 in that it described the current moment in the way that a great political science professor would
00:08:18.840 describe it. But for Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, to have given that speech in light of
00:08:25.720 the deep confusion around his interpretation of what the shopkeeper with the sign in the window
00:08:31.880 in Václav Havel's book, Power of the Powerless was intended to address. Mark Carney himself represented
00:08:40.440 in his op-ed against the Freedom Convoy, complete totalitarianism in the name of natural political
00:08:45.720 dissent. In the current moment, that Václav Havel comment is all about the political correctness that
00:08:53.560 is dominant in a place like Davos and has been dominant in the rhetoric and the positioning that
00:08:59.960 Mark Carney has had on green issues and finance and things like GFANS. So it's very awkward for someone
00:09:06.360 like Mark Carney to be the one giving a Václav Havel quote. The Thucydides quote on strength
00:09:13.560 is fascinating, but Thucydides, but he seemed to draw an unusual parallel. Thucydides' arguments on
00:09:19.960 strength weren't Nietzschean. Thucydides' arguments and strengths were descriptive, and they were
00:09:25.000 descriptive in a way that was compelling courage in the face of challenges. And what I've seen in the
00:09:30.520 Carney government is so far, and I'm hoping that this will change, especially in the next few weeks,
00:09:37.000 and I hope quickly, there has to be a new level of honesty in this government on the cause of our
00:09:45.080 economic decline and our problem with trade. The rapid rise in the decline of Canadian cities and the
00:09:52.360 rapid rise in violent crimes across Canada, the rapid rise in physician-assisted suicides,
00:10:01.000 the 50,000 kids that have died out of fentanyl and opioid overdoses in the last decade of this,
00:10:08.120 you know, complete nihilism with respect to drugs and the drug trade, the rapid growth of criminal and
00:10:15.960 terrorist syndicates across the country. Donald Trump is not to be blamed for any of this. This has
00:10:21.640 happened under a government that's adopted deeply progressive flawed ideas about what to do in the
00:10:28.200 face of crime. They've created more debt in, I think it's the first seven years of their government
00:10:35.720 than all of their governments put together, and Mark Carney's just delivered the worst, you know,
00:10:40.920 peacetime deficit or the worst non-emergency deficit in the history of the country. So you've got
00:10:48.280 extraordinary debt, you've got the worst performing GDP per capita performance in all 40 OECD nations,
00:10:55.800 the worst performance in GDP growth in the G7 for the last 10 years. You've got extraordinary
00:11:03.080 problems with crime, you've got the worst results in the public service in spite of the fact that in
00:11:08.920 the last 10 years they've bloated the public service more than 45% and made it 75% more expensive. There's
00:11:15.240 almost no metric right now that you can point to that you could say the problem that Canada faces is
00:11:21.480 Donald Trump. Almost every single one of these metrics that are affecting our quality of life,
00:11:27.160 our national security, the ability of people to feel safe walking in our cities, you know,
00:11:34.040 the rise in anti-Semitic crime. It just goes on and on and on. This has to do with a series of failed
00:11:38.840 policy ideas and failed presumptive ideological ideas that Mark Carney has been in the forefront of
00:11:45.240 in his party and that his party is responsible for. And what they discovered when they ran the last
00:11:50.920 election is that people, especially the older demographics that depend on mainstream media that
00:11:58.360 is funded by the government, will see their lives and see their opportunities through the lens of the
00:12:04.360 framing that the government's given. And what was convenient was to say, you know, there's this scary
00:12:09.320 person running the United States and we're going to stand up to them. And I think there's a certain
00:12:14.920 amount of sort of political real politic and strategic nous in the way that they ran that election.
00:12:22.360 But I also think that that's bordered very quickly on complete cynicism. And the fundamental problem
00:12:28.440 with Mark Carney's speech is not that it wasn't an excellent speech or that it was descriptively
00:12:32.680 accurate of the moment we live in. It's that the person giving it doesn't represent remotely
00:12:38.840 the ideals behind what Vasilevavel was speaking about. And as a result, it struck me very much
00:12:44.040 like the elbows up thing, tactically effective, but deeply cynical.
00:12:47.320 So what is the game? Is he a true ideologue? There are things that he has been associated with
00:12:59.080 that would make you think that he was a green prime minister and that was all that mattered. We have
00:13:03.640 to save the planet when there are so many arguments that if the planet has to be saved,
00:13:07.560 it isn't going to be Canada doing it. Is he just getting electric cars from China so that we can
00:13:16.840 have lower emissions? Or is there something more deeply cynical? Is he trying to make Canada a
00:13:21.880 different kind of intentionally? Trying to make Canada a different kind of place?
00:13:27.720 Look, I don't want to believe that of anybody that gives a lot of their time and energy and
00:13:33.880 effort to public service. I think that at the end of the day, they must want to create a better world for
00:13:41.800 our kids to inherit. I mean, I think that's the point and that's the purpose of most people that
00:13:47.000 engage. I think that what happens is the first order sort of instincts of anyone in politics is
00:13:54.200 to win elections, hold the power so that you can then exercise it in the manner in which you think
00:14:00.040 can secure the future for our kids and create a better society. I think one of the things that I was
00:14:05.080 hopeful about with Prime Minister Carney is that when he ran for the election, coming from outside
00:14:12.200 the country as he did, I was actually hopeful that that was a strength and that he would see that
00:14:17.160 certain things about his party's ideological positioning, particularly with respect to energy
00:14:21.240 and energy security, had gone way beyond any sort of rational rapprochement between the environment,
00:14:28.360 energy and economy, and it had become completely dogmatic in ways that were just ridiculous. The
00:14:34.520 C-48, C-69 represents that. But he got rid of the carbon tax, he got rid of the capital gains tax,
00:14:40.040 some of the things that were deeply harming the economy. And so my hope was, and it still is,
00:14:47.480 obviously, because he is the Prime Minister, that he has great people around him that are giving him
00:14:53.480 good advice that the mistake that he made by calling the Freedom Convoy seditious,
00:15:01.320 the enormous mistakes they've made by maintaining C-69 and C-48, which are just poking the bear in
00:15:11.000 Alberta in terms of the new run for independence. You know, these are things that I am hoping that he
00:15:17.320 will see his way through to something that's far more centrist and far more representative where most
00:15:22.600 Canadians are at. I thought the speech was excellent. Most of my friends have sent me notes saying,
00:15:27.960 we really like your speech, congratulations, you've got a great Prime Minister. So you have,
00:15:33.000 it's hard for me to say, I think the speech was morally confused. And that it's like, you know,
00:15:39.400 a cover band covering a song that I like, you know, I love hearing anybody give Vaislavelle's Power of the
00:15:45.080 Powerless airtime. And I think there's something deeply moving about his language. And I think there's
00:15:50.760 a lot about his language that's pertinent to the current moment, especially if you think about
00:15:55.240 these unbelievable places like Iran and Russia and China under socialist Marxist or Islamo-Marxist
00:16:05.480 Catalitarian regimes. You hope that there's more Vaislavelle and Thucydides and some of those comments
00:16:13.160 going on. But what I hope in the case of Mark Carney is that he looks at the opportunity right now to
00:16:19.000 change Canada, to upgrade Canada's current political approach and policy approaches to a freer economy,
00:16:27.480 where we can go back to being one of the most prosperous nations instead of the least prosperous.
00:16:31.320 Well, but that takes us back to the very public choice that he made to go and embrace China.
00:16:36.760 I mean, with his earlier experience through Brookfield with China, no doubt he knows his
00:16:45.480 ways around the corridors where the decisions are made. But I find, just speaking for myself here,
00:16:52.680 the idea of dumping the United States, even if you don't like Mr. Trump, who won't be there in three
00:17:00.520 years' time, to embrace a nation with the ideals and practices of the People's Republic of China,
00:17:09.080 I find that quite abhorrent. We have a bad history with China. That makes me suspicious of what Mr.
00:17:19.400 Carney's goals really are. And you're making the case that we should give him a chance, I think. And
00:17:26.200 I think we've given him a year. Why are you not as cynical as I am, David?
00:17:33.720 Well, look, I think there's... I don't think you're cynical, Nigel, first of all.
00:17:39.960 A lot of people do.
00:17:41.720 Well, I think you're hopeful. And I think one of the things that you're very good at is pointing
00:17:47.000 out what you think is not working. And I think that's the appropriate role of a good journalist,
00:17:52.280 is to sort of find whatever you think the gaps are between what's being said and what's actually
00:17:58.280 being done. And I think that's the biggest challenge for the Carney administration in Canada right now.
00:18:04.440 I think that Canada needs to do business with China. China's a very important trading partner,
00:18:10.680 but it's only 4% of our export GDP. The United States is 77%. The issue is not whether or not Mark
00:18:18.520 Carney has a conversation with China about their tariffs on canola. That was a conversation that
00:18:25.080 needed to happen. The issue is the craven way in which Canada seems to naively bend the knee to China
00:18:34.120 so easily and so often and in so many ways. The open border with respect to Chinese triads in the Port of
00:18:42.120 Vancouver and the fentanyl trade is disgusting. And it's something that has been allowed to
00:18:47.880 metastasize. It's one of the worst cancers in Canadian society, and yet it's somehow swept under
00:18:53.320 the rug and not talked about very openly. We have 50,000 kids that are dead because of the fentanyl and
00:18:59.800 opioid crisis in this country. And when this was raised by the Americans as part of their concern on
00:19:05.480 the border, it was poo-pooed by our media. It was treated as a pretext. And instead of us just
00:19:11.960 acknowledging, we have a huge crisis and it's a moral crisis. So 50,000 young lives are gone in
00:19:18.120 this country. Where do you read about this? You know, I find it absolutely extraordinary that we
00:19:23.160 have something, death at that scale with a known supply chain that we seem completely incapable of
00:19:30.520 actually changing our laws to deal with. It's well known across Vancouver that the Mexican cartels and
00:19:35.800 the Chinese triads are in bed with each other. The Chinese look after laundering and they look
00:19:40.120 after the port and the cartels do whatever they want. The embarrassment to me of this issue being
00:19:45.480 raised and having our leadership scoff at the idea that we were potentially a fentanyl problem when they
00:19:51.720 knew it was all the southern border. And yet the amount of fentanyl that they said that we had found
00:19:57.000 crossing the border was less than the amount sitting on one shelf in one super lab that gets busted with
00:20:02.600 the help of the FBI six months later. I mean, it's just, it's extraordinarily embarrassing when you
00:20:08.200 look at the crisis, the different pillars of crisis, the relationship between China and the United States.
00:20:15.240 I was stunned when Meng Wanzhou was taken by Canada and put under house arrest at one of her
00:20:21.720 three mansions in Vancouver and they illegally took hostage two of our diplomats. The fact that their
00:20:27.880 ambassador wasn't sent packing the next day was extraordinary to me. The Chinese see Canada is
00:20:33.320 incredibly weak and pliable and I don't know why. And I know there's a lot of good work done. There's an
00:20:37.240 incredible young journalist, Sam Cooper, who does exceptional work on, on the Canada's overall security
00:20:45.160 issues, but he is, he is very, yeah, we know Sam. Yeah. And there's others that have done that too,
00:20:50.440 but I think he's, he's exceptional. And, and so I think that for Canada to do any kind of business
00:20:56.360 with China, we've got to not be seen as weak and naive. And unfortunately I think we are seeing that
00:21:01.320 way. And I think we're seeing that way with respect to their secret police stations. We're seeing that way
00:21:05.320 with respect to the way that they have been able to override any kind of common sense on some of the
00:21:10.200 people that are put out for parliament. And you know, CSIS has talked about this. So that's in the
00:21:16.840 background. I understand why you would say you're cynical. I think that as a nation, we've got to be
00:21:22.600 able to do deals with all countries. I'm a free trade maximalist. You know, I think Canada should be
00:21:28.600 working very hard at creating global market infrastructure. I think that for instance, when China,
00:21:35.240 when the U S took over Venezuela and I wrote an op-ed on this, defending it is illegal,
00:21:40.040 uh, that what they did was legal when they were in addition to Maduro. Um, uh, you know,
00:21:46.280 China lost around 550,000 barrels a day from that, uh, incident from Venezuela, Venezuela on heavy crude.
00:21:54.280 Um, Alberta can actually provide all of that. If we reinstate the Northern gateway, uh, we could provide
00:22:02.040 all of that back to China. It would be a $16 billion a year trade for us. It would give us
00:22:08.040 additional leverage in China. We go as 15% more of our output, uh, going in the direction of a, uh,
00:22:14.600 another, uh, superpower other than the United States. It would give us diplomatic leverage in China that
00:22:20.600 actually matters to the Chinese. And it would have been something that I would have loved to have seen
00:22:25.160 come out of the China conversation. So I don't want to be hypocritical in saying there are things that I
00:22:30.280 would love to see us do deals with China. And I think the Americans would have expect us to do
00:22:34.440 that. Uh, the president Trump was asked about this in Seattle. I'm glad they're doing deals to China.
00:22:38.840 Uh, you know, people are realists and Canada needs to be realistic, but I didn't see us do a massive
00:22:44.600 energy deal with China. I saw us allow, uh, EVs into our country. The problem with EVs, by the way,
00:22:50.280 for those who think that the Americans are, are simply trying to be economic bullies, EVs are like, uh,
00:22:56.680 iPhones on wheels. You know, they, they are extraordinary data collection machines. Um,
00:23:03.160 all of the BYD EVs have been kicked out of one country in particular because of the security risks
00:23:09.080 in the metadata that gets transferred back to China. Uh, there's a lot that I think Canada has
00:23:14.200 just been on a vacation from history and the, and the hand is therefore naive about China. And the
00:23:19.480 reason for that is because we're completely protected by the United States from the geopolitical
00:23:25.080 realities that they take on. And so I would, I would love to see us just understand what the
00:23:33.880 Americans have told us several times, which is they're integrating energy security with military,
00:23:40.680 national security, with trade security. And Canada continues to make a series of steps that I think
00:23:47.080 are just naive to the point of reckless with respect to all three. And so we've got to finish our
00:23:54.760 F-35 purchase instead of holding it up for yet another after 20 years, you know, internal, you know,
00:24:03.560 uh, evil gazing around what we're going to do on this. I think we have to expand NORA to include naval
00:24:08.760 security in AUKUS. I think we have to integrate what we're doing in the Arctic with what the Americans
00:24:14.200 are going to be doing with Greenland. I think we have to get on with, with a proper trade negotiation
00:24:19.000 that acknowledges some of the risks that the Americans want us to address. And I think we have
00:24:23.960 to get rid of this decade long experiment with green alarmism and get on with just building Canada's
00:24:32.200 global energy infrastructure. And if we don't, we're going to start to see the country fragment.
00:24:37.560 Well, I think that's what a lot of people are, are speculating about right now. And for all the
00:24:42.520 reasons you've given, we're almost out of time. Let me just ask you this. Uh, I believe you're traveling
00:24:47.640 in your own business trip to the Middle East. Where are you today?
00:24:51.320 Yeah. Middle East right now. I'm in Abu Dhabi right now.
00:24:54.120 Yeah. Uh, how are you finding it?
00:24:56.280 That's incredible. It's, uh, you know, uh, the, the Emirates were a dream, uh, back in the fifties and
00:25:04.600 they, they made it into an extraordinary reality. Uh, there are, there are several countries in the UAE.
00:25:11.160 Dubai is very well known. Abu Dhabi is the largest and the, and the energy rich, uh, nation. Um,
00:25:19.160 you know, Alberta, Alberta could easily be the wealthiest, uh, uh, nation in the world actually
00:25:25.560 with 5 million people and more, more oil than Russia, China, the United States put together
00:25:31.320 and as much gas as Qatar. And this is what I think, uh, Prime Minister Carney has got to be
00:25:36.760 very careful about right now. You can't continue to tie the hands of one of the world's largest
00:25:45.000 energy superpowers, Alberta, behind their back out of some dated idea of what, uh, Eastern-based
00:25:51.960 federalism looks like much longer before you're going to start to just create strains that will crack.
00:25:56.200 The first thing we should do is, what we do is build something in Calgary that's taller than the
00:26:01.240 Brookfield building. That's what I, that's what we say. Well, the Burj Khalifa here is, uh, you know,
00:26:09.480 Dubai built the Burj Khalifa actually as a tribute to, uh, to the gentleman from Abu Dhabi who built the
00:26:15.800 Emirates. And, uh, uh, you know, it's extraordinary to see what that, what that level of vision can
00:26:21.320 create. And that, that's what I hope for Canada. It's what I hope for Alberta. Um, and I, I think that
00:26:27.560 Mark Carney has a lot of potential. I was one of the very few, I liked the, like you, the, the speech,
00:26:34.680 the way that I like a song, but I, I thought that it was being played by a cover band, not somebody
00:26:40.120 that can speak for Vasslav Havel after writing about sedition when it came to Canadian dissent on COVID.
00:26:47.320 David, we'll leave it there. And thank you for that. When you get back, if you want to find it,
00:26:53.240 finding a 57 Buick, so you don't give all your personal information to the Chinese, you'll join a
00:26:59.160 few. All right, ladies and, ladies and gentlemen, thank you, David. For not for the Western Standard,
00:27:05.960 I'm Nigel Hannaford.