Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters on Tuesday he stands by his recent Davos speech that implicitly criticized the United States, after U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Fox News the prime minister walked back his remarks while speaking to the U.S. president.“I said this to the president, I meant what I said in Davos,” said Carney. “It was a broader set of issues that Canada was the first country to understand the change in U.S. trade policy that he initiated, and we’re responding to that.”
While this notion of middle powerdom may seem like a novel approach in an era dominated by two superpowers, it’s in fact an echo from more than a couple of generations ago, an era that many international affairs specialists refer to as “the golden era of Canadian foreign policy.”
Foreign policy specialists, however, warn that the two eras are very different and a return to that so-called golden era, where Canada punches above its weight by leaning into its role as an honest broker and middle power, is unlikely.
The key difference, said Fen Hampson, a foreign affairs specialist at Carleton University in Ottawa, is that Canada no longer has a special relationship with the U.S.
(Sidebar: or the world, really.)
“The golden age was very different,” said Hampson, also co-chair of the Expert Group on Canada-U.S. Relations at Carleton. “We’re not in the middle — we’re on the menu.”
That past era, usually seen as a two-decade stretch from the end of the Second World War to roughly the mid-1960s, is nostalgic for many Canadians who were around at the time, or have studied foreign policy from that period. North America was the envy of the world in its prosperity, life for tens of millions on this continent seemed to be on the constant upswing, and much of the world – pretty much every key region outside China, the Soviet Union’s Eastern European bloc and a few satellite countries – was under the leadership of the U.S., Canada’s neighbour and closest ally.
That gave Canada some pull and prestige on the international stage. Ottawa used the leverage of that relationship for its own political, economic and security benefits, while choosing its moments to act as broker between the U.S. and other countries, particularly the European powers, to advance stability and other aims. That golden era for Canada in the world reached a zenith in 1957 when then foreign affairs minister Lester B. Pearson won a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in preventing war during the Suez Crisis a year earlier and in creating the first United Nations peacekeeping force.
For those intrigued by the idea that Carney’s speech may be the start of a return to this era where Canada plays a special middle-power role, foreign policy specialists say it’s highly unlikely.
There are similarities, however. Canada is once again pushing back against a superpower. Today, it’s of course Trump’s America, whereas during the Suez Crisis, it was mostly two weakened, post-war European powers: Britain and France. Another overlap is that Canada’s response in both cases was to emphasize the need for a rules-based international order and the potential for middle powers to collaborate.
But foreign policy specialists say that’s pretty much where the comparison ends. The critical difference between the two periods, Hampson said, is not just that Ottawa has lost its special status in Washington, but that the two North American neighbours are clearly at odds.
(Sidebar: Canada lost its special status in the world. Do not mistake global dislike of Trump as a sign of Canada's seriousness.)
“The problem we face now is there’s zero respect and it’s mutual,” said Hampson. “What’s different now is that Washington is the problem: it’s gone rogue.”
The U.S. was arguably the biggest beneficiary and leading creator and enforcer of the rules-based world after the Second World War. Washington led the way in designing international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the United Nations itself, locating each on home turf.
But Carney said the world needs to face that that is now history.
“Nostalgia is not a strategy,” he told the international crowd.
After Parliament legalized assisted suicide in 2016, 2,838 Canadians killed themselves with the help of doctors the following year. By 2024, that number had risen almost six-fold to 16,499.Assisted suicide (euphemistically mischaracterized as medical assistance in dying, or MAID) is now the fourth-largest cause of death in Canada, accounting for 5.1 percent of Canadian deaths in 2024, and a shocking 7.9 percent of deaths in Quebec. After the Netherlands, Canada comes in second place as the global leader in assisted suicide, even dwarfing ever-progressive Belgium, where assisted suicide was responsible for 3.6 percent of deaths in 2024.Across Canada, patients are routinely and repeatedly offered assisted suicide as a “treatment” option—including veterans. In March 2027, Canadian law will change again to allow doctors to help mentally ill Canadians kill themselves. Mental illness alone, even without physical suffering or a terminal illness, will be reason enough for Canadian doctors to legally help their patients to commit suicide.Canadians rightfully fear dying alone and lonely, in a sterile and bleak hospital environment, separated from loved ones and from the comfort of home. Many Canadians would choose palliative care and spend their final days at home, or in home-like and agreeable surroundings in a hospice. Yet government policies fail to respect terminally ill patients who wish to spend their final days in care environments that affirm life.In B.C., the government withdrew funding from the Delta Hospice Society over its refusal to offer assisted suicide as part of the palliative care it provided to patients. The same society is now intervening in a B.C. Supreme Court action in which Dying With Dignity Canada seeks to force a Catholic hospital in Vancouver to provide suicide-as-treatment to patients.St. Paul’s Hospital is operated by Providence Health Care Society, which describes itself as “a Catholic health care community dedicated to meeting the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual needs of those served through compassionate care, teaching, and research.” The court action maintains that St. Paul’s willingness to provide information about assisted suicide, and to transfer suicide-seeking patients to other facilities, is not an acceptable compromise. Dying With Dignity seeks to compel this Catholic hospital to assist patients in committing suicide. The goal here is coercion, not autonomy and choice.
Holocaust survivor Hedy Bohm says there are similarities between the time leading up to Nazi rule in Germany, and eventually Europe, and antisemitic incidents that are happening in Canada now.Already this year, swastikas were spray-painted on the windows and walls of a synagogue in Winnipeg, a message calling for the death of Jews was graffitied under a bridge in Toronto and an Alberta MP pushed for investigations into Canadians who served in the Israeli Defense Forces, which a Jewish advocacy group condemned as an “antisemitic witch hunt.”Bohm said that during the Second World War, in her small town in what is now Romania, she didn’t know what was happening to Jews in the rest of Europe. “And didn’t believe it, even if we were told about it,” she said. Upon reflection, even though she was unaware at the time, she said she does notice parallels between the hate being aimed at the Jewish community back then, and in Canada now. But she is hopeful for the future of the country.“Canada is more aware of the world and what is going on in the world … than it used to be, which is wonderful,” said Bohm, in a written interview with National Post.
Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we honour the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and mark the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Eight decades later, the challenge of passing on the lessons of the Holocaust is ever more daunting, with the danger being less its outright denial than its distortion or revision — efforts to minimize or reframe the systematic murder of six million Jews. Recent surveys reveal an alarming number of young people in North America believe the Holocaust has been exaggerated, a reflection not so much of disbelief that it happened, but of the subtle erosion of the truth.One of the most consequential forms of historical revision appears in those academic and pedagogical settings where the Holocaust is framed primarily through the lens of imperialism and colonialism. In such accounts, Jews and other victims are presented as part of an undifferentiated mass, with their suffering attributed less to the Nazis’ deliberate “final solution” than to yet another historic manifestation of European power and domination. Nazi perpetrators are portrayed as another authoritarian or colonial regime and Nazism cast as another chapter in the continuum of imperial violence. Regrettably, this perspective downplays the unique, ideologically driven obsession with Jews that defined Nazi policy and practice.
Cabinet yesterday in an abrupt climbdown suspended MPs’ study of what it touted as a key bill to combat anti-Semitism. The quick withdrawal by Liberals on the Commons justice committee came only minutes after the Government House Leader demanded passage of Bill C-9: “This is about making Parliament work.”
The Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) welcomes today’s news that Bill C-9 has been put on hold, calling it a necessary response to serious and unresolved conflicts between the proposed hate crimes legislation and Canada’s Constitutional protections for free expression.
Bill C-9 was unsound from the start. Rather than narrowly targeting violence or threats, it would have expanded criminal law into the realm of ordinary expression, lowered the threshold for criminal speech, and stripped away long-standing safeguards designed to protect Charter rights. As the bill developed, its problems only became more glaring. A December amendment to the bill even threatened to remove good-faith religious belief as an exemption from hate speech.
The CCF was at the forefront of opposition to Bill C-9. Litigation Director Christine Van Geyn spoke before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights in November, and submitted a comprehensive written brief, warning that the bill posed an unjustified threat to freedom of expression. The CCF consistently called on Parliament to withdraw the bill entirely, including by mobilizing public support through a widely-circulated email campaign that helped more than 7,000 Canadians write their MPs.
“Bill C-9 threatened Constitutionally-protected expression and would have led to the chilling of necessary public debate across Canada,” said Van Geyn. “Shelving it for now is an important step toward preserving free speech, which we hope leads to the full abandonment of this deeply flawed legislation.”
The CCF hopes the Carney government will now recognize that legislation built on such deep constitutional defects cannot be salvaged and should not be pursued.
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