Six months after Davos: Carney, Canada, and (racial) capitalism

Hundreds of fires are scorching the land, cities from Toronto to Kamloops are smothered in deadly smoke. As the Earth burns, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, doggedly pursues his agenda to make Canada an energy superpower anchored in massive fossil fuel expansion

This and mega military procurements will supposedly reinforce Canadian sovereignty and check Donald Trump’s plans to make Canada the 51^st state.

But will it?

People who care about the environment are disenchanted with Carney’s agenda. Indeed, the Liberal’s former Quebec lieutenant, Stephen Guilbeault, quit the Carney cabinet late last year to protest Carney’s MOU with Alberta. Environmental groups are mobilizing against Carney’s energy agenda.

Yet Carney and the Liberals retain their popularity. Recent surveys by Leger360 and Nanos suggest the Liberals maintain a ten-point electoral advantage over the Conservatives. Moreover, the polls indicate Carney’s personal popularity is ten to 15 percent higher than his party’s.

So why the disconnect?

Unmasking the Carney mystique

Six months ago, Mark Carney gained international acclaim for his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. An investment banker and former governor of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, Carney was at home at Davos, the preeminent stage for international capital.

However, Carney’s speech attracted global attention because he dared to question American hegemony, argued a rupture was underway in the international order, and suggested that middle powers had to band together. Canada, he said, was going to diversify its trade, double its military expenditures, and fast-track a trillion dollars of investments in energy, AI, and critical minerals amongst others.

In a homily to Carney’s Davos speech and subsequent policies, Andrew Coyne suggested “we are taking an outsized role in the construction of a post-American world.” The Wall Street Journal recently splashed Carney on their front page, describing him as “The Canadian Who Steered Europe Away from the US.”

Such coverage adds to Carney’s aura – a global persona able to use his international connections to defend Canada. Going to China to meet Xi Jinping and the resulting decision to allow Chinese EVs into Canada, reversing previous Liberal policy, suggested Carney is somewhat open to diversifying trade. No wonder, then, that some people believe Carney is standing up for Canadian sovereignty in the face of Trump’s threats.

But is that really the case?

Take away the spin and Carney’s vaunted search for sovereignty is more illusion than substance. His real agenda aims at a global realignment to resuscitate racial capitalism with, or without American leadership.

Racism at Davos and beyond

At Davos, Carney did not bother to acknowledge his roots in Treaty 8 territory. Nor did he mention anything about Canada’s origins – lands occupied by hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans. Nor did he mention the importance of Truth and Reconciliation, arguably a defining moment in Canada’s 21^st century.

 In fact, he did not utter A SINGLE WORD about First Nations.

Carney instead talked about how he was heeding the wake-up call from Donald Trump, that Canada was shifting its “strategic posture” while retaining fundamental values such as sovereignty, territorial integrity, the UN Charter, and respect for human rights.

Such generalities, easily expressed, become platitudes in the absence of substance. Carney’s erasure of Indigenous peoples at Davos is a sign of anti-Indigenous racism that remains a hallmark of Canada’s history as a settler colonial state.

But perhaps the erasure of Indigenous peoples by Canada’s prime minister at Davos was just a misstep, forgivable given the global audience?

His subsequent actions suggest otherwise.

As fires ravaged the country last week, Carney landed in London, ON to proudly announce that his government was investing nearly $2 billion to have General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada build 190 armoured combat support vehicles.

This on the same day that the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation had to flee their village only to watch it burn to the ground as forest fires ravaged the area north of Thunder Bay. Close to 1,000 fires are creating havoc across the country, forcing numerous communities to evacuate, and enveloping cities in deadly smoke.

Yet Carney chose this moment to trumpet the purchase of armoured vehicles to “protect Canadians and support our allies.”

As Brandi Morin recently pointed out, Indigenous peoples make up about five per cent of the population but account for 42 per cent of all wildfire evacuations – the legacy of colonial reserve policy still at work. This is what environmental racism is all about.

At the same time, Carney plans to incorporate First Nations into fast-tracking energy projects, a process that reveals how racial capitalism uses class interests to undermine Indigenous title and rights.

Military illusions

Glossed over in the media hype around Carney’s announcement about the purchase of armoured land vehicles was the fact that the contractor, General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada is a subsidiary of General Dynamics in the US, a major arms producer and pillar of the US military industrial complex.

Given that the only serious external threat to Canada comes from the US, how partnering and relying on US-owned General Dynamics will protect Canadians remains a mystery.

Indeed, the whole military hype is ludicrous given that Canada would be incapable of resisting an American invasion using conventional means, no matter how many German submarines we purchase.

Carney’s recent selection of the German corporation Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) as the preferred supplier for $100 billion worth of submarines may appear as moving away from the US military cyber complex. But scratch the surface and we find that TKMS just signed an MOU with Israel’s Elbit systems to promote collaboration on “the development, integration and commercialization of advanced naval and defense solutions,” and “strategic cooperation between Germany and Israel: based on shared values, mutual trust, and a shared commitment to security and stability.”

With a single stroke of the pen, Carney’s German option is further enmeshing this country in Israel’s genocidal regime, a pillar of the US-led global military cyber complex. Not only is Carney thumbing his nose at the thousands of activists who worked with Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, Just Peace Advocates, and Independent Jewish Voices who forced Scotiabank to divest from Elbit, he is spitting at the majority of Canadians who believe Israel is committing genocide.

Also forgotten in the flag-waving is that the demand to increase defence spending to two percent, then 3.5 per cent, and eventually five per cent of GDP was Donald Trump’s demand, one backed by the Business Council of Canada as well as NATO.

In that sense, Canada’s military expansion is deceptive, but makes sense as a means of providing capitalist arms manufacturers with more resources to strengthen what has been termed the transatlantic alliance – the accord between the Five Eyes (the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the US) and the European imperial states.

Carney’s Eurocentrism

As a former governor of the Bank of England, Carney is well connected in European capitals and has used that access to build stronger economic and military ties.

This plays well with some Canadians. British walking tours, French wines, and Italian vacations are a staple for many. Now, such activities even brandish a gloss of anti-US imperialism as travel to the US is frowned upon

A glass of beaujolais may help some believe that Europe’s imperial past is dead when in fact it is not even past. The transatlantic slave trade. Fascism. British colonial atrocities across Asia, Africa and the Americas. France’s imperial brutality in Algeria and Indochina, Germany’s genocide in Southwest Africa – the list is virtually endless.

Even in the contemporary, should we forget the French government’s nuclear testing in the Pacific that contaminated at least 110,000 Pacific islanders? Or their sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand? Or their recent brutal repression of Pacific Islanders in New Caledonia?

And what of NATO’s heinous role in provoking Russia’s ill-advised invasion of Ukraine, not to mention its military intervention in Kosovo without UN approval? Or its misuse of UN sanctions to justify a massive bombing campaign in Libya that has left that country in shambles?

Or what about the Europe of the racist, far right movements that are targeting racialized migrants and refugees. Are Marie Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage and Reform UK, or the AfD (Alternative for Germany) our allies of the future?

Carney’s European gambit may appear as a means of weaning Canada from its reliance on the US, but it is riven with a deeply racist assumptions that Europe somehow represents the civilizational future. Such assumptions echo earlier biases that justified the genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples around the world.

However, Carney may have overplayed his hand. His government has been touting the creation of a “Defence, Security Resilience Bank” to promote investment in the military. In March, Canada convened a launch event involving 18 unidentified countries who miraculously recommended that such a bank be headquartered in Canada.

However, at the recent NATO summit, Carney was only able to garner support for this initiative from eight minor players while countries such as France, Germany, and the UK essentially boycotted the initiative.

At Davos, Carney may have gained the attention of Europe but his capacity to influence Europe’s imperial centres remains weak. And those centres are deeply committed to strengthening the transatlantic alliance but on their terms.

Catering to Donald Trump

Carney’s campaign to capture the flag, to portray his government as standing up to the vagaries of Trump and the American empire are flagrantly misleading.

At almost every turn Carney has stood with Trump.

When the US and Israel began their illegal war against Iran, Carney was first out of the gate in publicly supporting the Trump/Netanyahu aggression.

When the US invaded Venezuela and kidnapped the president, Carney’s government immediately condemned Maduro and Venezuela while remaining silent about the US aggression, further undermining the UN charter and the prohibitions against unjustified military action.

When the US imposed further sanctions against Cuba, Carney’s government dithered, and Canadian corporations and airlines doing business with Cuba withdrew. While offering some limited humanitarian aid, it effectively cut off the Cuban government and abstained in a recent UN vote to debate the US blockade against Cuba.

Carney’s government decided to provisionally recognize a Palestinian state. Yet it continues to allow Canadian arms to be used against Gaza, refuses to recognize that a genocide is taking place, and persists in upholding Canadian ties with Israel.

In the Asia Pacific, Canadian Armed Forces are actively participating in US-led RIMPAC war games in preparation for a war with China in which Israel is also participating.

Canadian foreign policy remains deeply committed to the US empire.

This will not end well

Carney’s class politics focus on appropriating the taxes paid by ordinary folks and channeling them into capitalist coffers, mainly in the energy and military sectors. Not only are many of these corporations American-owned or financed, but their outputs can only exacerbate the environmental catastrophe and intensify war anxieties.

Grounded in the mantra of growth-at-all-costs, this economic agenda is sold as a means to create jobs and prosperity in the hope of winning over a section of the working class.

At the same time, it is a deeply racist agenda that aims to over-ride Indigenous title and rights, intensify racism towards Indigenous peoples, and promote unfounded fears of imagined enemies. As the abolitionist activist and scholar, Ruth Wilson Gilmore elaborates in her YouTube video Geographies of Racial Capitalism, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.”

The geopolitical crisis is real but Carney’s agenda to make Canada an energy superpower, to dramatically expand its military, and to ally with Europe can only lead to a deeper involvement in imperial preparations for a global war.

The post Six months after Davos: Carney, Canada, and (racial) capitalism appeared first on rabble.ca.

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