Neoliberalism’s Second Life

Internationally, geopolitical change is charging towards an unknown outcome. What re-emerges is not the ‘embedded economy’ of the post-WWII era but a deeply divided, heterogeneous landscape of ‘one battle after another’, one broken treaty, promise or right in rapid succession.

Only a few days before the Canadian prime minister’s landmark speech on January 20th 2026 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Canada’s transformation remained, to say the very least, ambivalent.

The Jan 20th speech, however, directed a bright light on the leadership in Ottawa that appears poised to head off a forceful and indeed visionary political renewal, marked by a self-confident assumption of sovereignty and the pursuit of effective alliance building with other ‘middle powers.’

Where some or perhaps many might have taken Mark Carney to be, above all, ‘a banker’, the recent speech directs our attention to something much more substantive. This is why a meeting such as ours will need to do some hard thinking and heavy lifting to assess the options and steps moving forward. Carney seems not to be asking the tough questions who owns what we build, who benefits, who sacrifices, who decides? These are key Issues in any democracy and even more so in a country with a long and painful history of being the weaker partner.

How is and can the longstanding and continuing hollowing out of Canadian businesses be addressed? Is Carney’s strategy moving in the right direction with his plans for infrastructure investment? Rejecting export led growth model? Saving Canada’s car and steel industries? Can there be a hard pivot to the EU and Asia? What are our red lines in the CUSMA negotiations? What’s missing from his strategy?