Thank you, Larry. It is both a pleasure, and a duty,
to be with you tonight in this pivotal moment that Canada and the world going
through.
Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order,
the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where
geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no
limits, no constraints.
On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the
other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless.
They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such
as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty
and territorial integrity of the various states.
The power of the less power starts with honesty.
It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in
an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the
strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as
inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.
And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency
for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to
hope that compliance will buy safety.
Well, it won't.
So, what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later
president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in
it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his
window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but
he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along.
And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist
– not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people
in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this “living within a lie”.
The system's power comes not from its truth, but from
everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes
from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the
greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time
for companies and countries to take their signs down.
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under
what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions,
we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of
that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based
order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when
convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that
international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the
accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in
particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial
system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated
in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric
and reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are
in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in
finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme
global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic
integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as
coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit
through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle
powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very
architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result,
many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater
strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply
chains.
And this impulse is understandable. A country that
can't feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the
rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let's be clear eyed about where this leads.
A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and
less sustainable. And there is another truth. If great powers abandon even the
pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and
interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.
Hegemons cannot continually monetize their
relationships.
Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.
They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to
rebuild sovereignty – sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will
increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.
This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk
management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of
sovereignty can also be shared.
Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than
everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations.
Complementarities are positive sum. And the question for middle powers like
Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality – we must. The question is
whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do
something more ambitious.
Now Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up
call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture.
Canadians know that our old comfortable assumptions
that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity
and security – that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests
on what Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has termed “value-based
realism”.
Or, to put another way, we aim to be both principled
and pragmatic – principled in our commitment to fundamental values,
sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except
when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and
pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests
diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.
So, we're engaging broadly, strategically with open
eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we
wish to be.
We are calibrating our relationships, so their depth
reflects our values, and we're prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our
influence, given and given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks
that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.
And we are no longer just relying on the strength of
our values, but also the value of our strength.
We are building that strength at home.
Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on
incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal
barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast tracking a trillion dollars of
investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond.
We're doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we're doing
so in ways that build our domestic industries.
And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed
a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the
European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and
security deals on four continents in six months. The past few days, we've
concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We're negotiating
free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.
We're doing something else. To help solve global
problems, we're pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different
coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So, on
Ukraine, we're a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the
largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.
On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland
and Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's
future.
Our commitment to NATO's Article 5 is unwavering, so
we're working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic Baltic Gate, to
further secure the alliance's northern and western flanks, including through
Canada's unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in
aircraft and boots on the ground, boots on the ice.
Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and
calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and
prosperity in the Arctic.
On plurilateral trade, we're championing efforts to
build a bridge between the Trans Pacific Partnership and the European Union,
which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people. On critical
minerals, we're forming buyers’ clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can
diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we're cooperating with
like-minded democracies to ensure that we won't ultimately be forced to choose
between hegemons and hyper-scalers.
This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying
on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work – issues by issue,
with partners who share enough common ground to act together.
In some cases, this will be the vast majority of
nations.
What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections
across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future challenges
and opportunities.
Middle powers must act together, because if we're not
at the table, we're on the menu.
But I'd also say that great powers, great powers can
afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity
and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.
But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon,
we negotiate from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each
other to be the most accommodating.
This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of
sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry,
the countries in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or
to combine to create a third path with impact.
We shouldn't allow the rise of hard power to blind us
to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain
strong, if we choose to wield them together – which brings me back to Havel.
What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?
First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking
rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised.
Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the
most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.
It means acting consistently, applying the same
standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic
intimidation from one direction, but stay silent when it comes from another, we
are keeping the sign in the window.
It means building what we claim to believe in, rather
than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions
and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage
that enables coercion – that's building a strong domestic economy. It should be
every government's immediate priority.
And diversification internationally is not just
economic prudence, it's a material foundation for honest foreign policy,
because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their
vulnerability to retaliation.
Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy
superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most
educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world's
largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital,
talent… we also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act
decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.
Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public
square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability.
We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but.. A
partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.
And we have something else. We have a recognition of
what's happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that
this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the
world as it is.
We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the
old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a
strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger,
better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the
countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to
gain from genuine cooperation.
The powerful have their power.
But we have something too – the capacity to stop
pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.
That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and
confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with
us. Thank you very much.
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