Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where we are still talking about that standing ovation in Davos, there is no escape from geography, and China feels a little too close for comfort. Let’s get to it!
It was not that long ago when Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau corrected a woman in Edmonton for saying the word mankind instead of peoplekind, and wore Bollywood-style clothes during an official visit to India. Compare those cringe-inducing moments with Mark Carney’s visit to the World Economic Forum last week. Very few speeches in Davos end with a standing ovation. Mark Carney’s did.
The prime minister opened his speech with a story from Václav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel wrote about a greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia who put a sign in his shop window—Workers of the world, unite!—even though he didn’t believe it. Like everyone, he did it to avoid trouble. And that, Havel argued, was how the system survived: not just through force, but through millions of small, daily acts of going along with something everyone knew wasn’t true.
