The Value Of Our Fear

2026-01-29

Mark Carney is using Canadians' fear of Trump's expansionism to quietly sell us out to his true allies: US finance & tech oligarchs.

Mark Carney made a big speech in Davos the other day. He described a "rupture" in the prevailing world order, and was hailed by many in the mainstream media for standing up to Trump's expansionist rhetoric and economic bullying. [1]

But there are a number of contradictions within the speech itself, as well as in Carney's responses in the interview that followed. There are also glaring inconsistencies between what Carney is ostensibly saying, and his actual track record.

The central and most obvious contradiction of the speech is the idea that countries can remain principled while treating international relations as transactional:

"... principled in our committment 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 in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values."

And at times, the speech sounds almost like Carney is annoyed at the US for pushing things too far, by threatening Greenland and exposing the fiction of the so-called "rules-based order"; US hegemony was advantageous for countries like Canada and provided an era of stability, he says.

With the obvious point being: stability for who, Mark? Less than 3 weeks before your speech, you were cheering Trump's blatantly illegal kidnapping of Maduro, saying that Canada "welcomes the opportunity for freedom" and refusing to condemn the US military's actions. So you clearly didn't mean stability for people in Venezuela ... or Palestine, Afghanistan, Haiti, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Guatemala, Syria, Congo, Chile, ...? [2]

It seems worth asking: why would someone be fine maintaining the fiction of a rules-based order through all that meddling and warmongering, but as soon as it's Canada and Greenland feeling the heat, wants to drop the facade?

The (market) value of our values

We may never know the answer to that little mystery, although some people have a theory:

Carney wants a new world order - but only for the West (MiddleEastEye.net)

Regardless, we're told we "shouldn't mourn" the death of the fiction of the rules-based order. Carney certainly won't—because a crisis like this represents an opportunity.

Which is why his preferred response to this rupture isn't for "middle powers" to, say, re-form organizations like the UN, only this time without the vetoes for major powers. Instead, he proposes abandoning those institutions, and forming ad-hoc alliances and partnerships on a case-by-case basis, based on mutual interest, effectively turning international relations into a market system, and turning our legal, ethical, and moral principles into negotiable commodities. [Footnote 1]

Presumably this is the thinking that led the PM to hop on a plane to Qatar to sign investment deals less than a week after it was reported that the Gulf nation—with a recent history of using slave labour, as well as other human rights abuses—would be managing the proceeds from Trump's sale of seized Venezuelan oil. [3,4,5]

* * *

The part of the speech that initially just struck me as bizarre, though, came at the 11:55 mark of the official WEF recording. [1] Seemingly out of nowhere, Carney launched into his November pre-budget campaign rhetoric:

"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 defense spending by the end of this decade, and we're doing so in ways that build our domestic industries."

Why on earth was this shoehorned into a speech that otherwise sounded so consequential? I don't know for sure, but here's one possibility: this speech is actually directed more toward Canadians than the rest of the world.

Because guess what, Carney's government has another budget confidence vote coming up, after only narrowly winning the last one in November 2025. Bill C-15 (or if you prefer catchier names, "An Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on November 4, 2025" [6]) has passed second reading in the House of Commons and is now under review by the Standing Committee on Finance. And boy howdy, there's some *really* stinky stuff in there.

So here's what I think is going on:

Carney is using his big moment at Davos to gin up nationalistic sentiment (and with it, support for his leadership), in a bid to scare opposition parties away from voting down this sketchy-as-hell budget bill and forcing an election.

The AI industry's dreams come true

It's a savvy political move, but the consequences are awful for Canadians.

Buried within the 600-page omnibus bill [7] is a section that the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) describes as an "alarming move" that would "enable the executive to easily do away with legal safeguards that protect people of Canada", and "a proposition that any liberal democracy should readily reject" [8]. Basically, there's a set of amendments to existing legislation that would allow federal cabinet ministers to exempt any entity from any law, except the Criminal Code, for the purposes of “competitiveness or economic growth”.

The CCLA's brief to the finance committee also has this to say:

"Potential applications are almost infinite: the executive could use this new power to immunize tech companies from privacy laws when working on a specific project; to waive rights embedded in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to facilitate some AI driven immigration solutions; to override environmental laws for selected entities; or to waive Canada Labour Code requirements for some employers."

In "normal" times, this type of legislation would be unthinkable. If ministers can exempt companies from regulations on a whim, and without Parliament, then we no longer live under the rule of law, and we can no longer rely on hard-won environmental and labour regulations to be enforced. Not to mention the budget also slashes the watchdog departments that would actually enable that enforcement.

It's unconscionable, Trumpian. And even if for some reason you're willing to trust Carney and crew with these powers—and to be clear, you shouldn't: what do you think the Conservatives would do with them once *they* win an election?

* * *

The CCLA's mention of AI is especially notable, because the AI folks have indeed been pushing for industry self-regulation. For example, check out roughly the 22 min mark of this episode of RBC's 'Disruptors' podcast:

Disruptors (podcasts.apple.com)

where former OpenAI senior advisor Gillian K. Hadfield, now faculty at the Vector Institute, proposes that the government should select AI startups to be "licensed regulators" of the industry, and that any company participating in this regulatory system should get safe harbour—which would mean not being liable if their "algorithm started discriminating against a group of people, or it started behaving in ways that were unpredictable, like in the medical space or something." [Footnote 2]

Is this why the government wants to give cabinet ministers the power to quietly exempt companies from any law at all?

Minister of AI Evan Solomon (whose previous career ended in disgrace when he was caught using his journalistic position & connections to help him broker art sales, including deals where Carney was a buyer [9] has repeatedly indicated that he's aligned with the industry's wishes, saying that he doesn't want to "over-index on regulation" [10]. So the stinky budget stuff could, at least partly, be about enabling an AI free-for-all.

It's also telling that the "Chamber of Progress"—an American tech industry lobby group whose partners include a who's-who of AI companies and major tech corporations—is publicly calling for Carney to quickly pass Bill C-15, in part because it *officially* repeals the Digital Services Tax, but surely also because it opens the door for all sorts of new opportunities to lobby federal cabinet ministers for favours. [11,12]

And look, I'm not opposed to a thriving economy. But this is ridiculous. Who thrives in this scenario, and at what cost to the rest of us? At what cost to marginalized people in Canada, to the environment, and to the rest of the world?

Did Vance privately prefer Carney to Poilievre?

Furthermore, be it with respect to AI, national defense, data sharing, or economic integration, has Carney really done much to distance Canada from the US? Or are we being drawn closer? Who are his true allies?

Let's rewind a bit to early December 2024. Trudeau was a dead man walking, politically speaking, and Carney had yet to announce his bid for leader. But on December 4th, Politico reported that US Vice President-elect J.D. Vance had this to say about Pierre Poilievre:

"It's not entirely clear it's better for us to have a Mitt Romney with a French accent as prime minister." [13]

Now sure, it's definitely possible Vance wasn't expressing a preference for Carney. But at that point Carney was already widely considered to be the front-runner in the Liberal leadership race [14], and Poilievre was enjoying a commanding lead in the polls. So it's difficult to imagine who else Vance might've thought the better option was.

Besides: there are plenty of other reasons to think that Vance was on board with Carney being our Canadian PM.

For starters, there are people in Vance's circle who have spent significant time around Carney, not least of whom is Vance's mentor, Peter Thiel, who in 2016 was the earliest prominent Silicon Valley supporter of Trump. Thiel and Carney both attended meetings of the Bilderberg Group every year for over half a decade, between 2017 and 2024. [15]

And before anyone starts claiming I'm going down some Alex Jones lizard-people conspiracy rabbit hole here: all I'm saying is that these four-day, closed-door meetings of around 120 people—the full roster of attendees would fit into just four highschool classrooms—are small enough that the regulars will have had plenty of time to size each other up. [Footnote 3]

So when Vance was privately talking trash about Poilievre, it's tough to argue that Liberal party front-runner Mark Carney wasn't a known quantity to him. He wouldn't have had to *guess* whether or not Carney would be willing to put "pragmatism" over principles, and play ball with Vance's fascist admin. An added bonus for Vance: Carney, unlike Mitt Romney or Pierre Poilievre, is someone who's taken the time to cultivate a charming public persona, which tends to make it easier for a politician to rally support for controversial policies.

Another direct link: in February 2021, Carney joined the Board of Directors at U.S. fintech company Stripe, whose US$6.87B funding round in 2023 was led by six investment companies including Thiel's Founders Fund, and Marc Andreessen's Andreessen-Horowitz (a16z). [16]

Palantir Pals

There are clear connections between Thiel, Palantir, and others in the upper echelons of the Liberal party, too.

The most obvious one: David MacNaughton, the President of Palantir Canada, sits on the Prime Minister's Council on Canada-U.S. Relations. [17,18]

MacNaughton was formerly Canada's ambassador to the U.S., but stepped down in August 2019 to take on the role at Palantir. Shortly thereafter, MacNaughton went and broke Canada's ethics laws by offering Palantir's services pro bono to several members of the Liberal government, including Chrystia Freeland. Freeland and others were subsequently barred from having any official dealings with MacNaughton. [19,20]

Palantir, for anyone who's been living under a rock, is a data analytics/surveillance/AI company co-founded by Thiel and Alex Karp that is central to Trump's racist ICE's operations, signed a strategic partnership with Israel's defence ministry in January 2024 to provide AI software that generates bombing targets for their ongoing genocide in Gaza (these bombings constitute war crimes, according to the UN), and has long been under fire for its abysmal human rights record. Palantir's UK wing is headed up by one Louis Mosley, who just so happens to be the grandson of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s. [21,22,23,24]

Despite the fact that our federal government is perfectly capable of looking up this company's history using the same search engines I did, Palantir remains on their list of pre-qualified AI vendors. [25][Footnote 4]

And Carney's government continues to champion Cohere—a Canadian AI company that builds custom AI models for unnamed Palantir customers. In 2024, the Liberals handed $240 million in federal funding to Cohere, doled out as part of Canada's Sovereign AI Compute Strategy; Cohere was reportedly using it to pay CoreWeave—a US company—to build a data centre in Cambridge, Ontario. [26,27]

An ability to bring calm

Peter Thiel's "contrarian" views are pretty well documented, but Palantir co-founder Alex Karp, someone with the vibe of a hairy, wriggly worm with glasses, has mostly kept a lower profile, so I was curious to see what he's been saying recently. Turns out he was also in Davos, for a public half-hour sit-down with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink:

(YouTube)

Judging by the interview, Karp sees Palantir as an extension of the US military and domestic surveillance machine that operates in what he calls "morally grey conditions"; Fink somehow fails to point out that he's saying this at a time when their country is being run by an explicitly fascist and expansionist administration. Karp also speaks wistfully about his German roots, implies that AI has made "large-scale immigration" obsolete—and without a hint of irony, closes the conversation by describing himself as a "card-carrying progressive". Fink, whose company is the largest asset manager in the world with over $10 trillion in AUM, is more than happy to chit-chat with Karp, in what at times feels more like a scripted infomercial for Palantir than a genuine interview.

Here's the kicker: any guesses as to where Larry Fink was less than a half-hour later, mere minutes after helping advertise Thiel & Karp's Amazing Surveillance and War Machine for Budding Authoritarians? [28]

Wouldn't you know it, he was strolling onto the main stage to introduce Mark Carney, praising our Prime Minister's "ability to bring calm in fast-moving, high-pressure moments", and describing him as someone he's "proud to call a friend".

And it's precisely this "ability to bring calm" that's served Carney so well while he manages the fears and desires of the Canadian public. It may well have been this quality that Vance had in mind when he raised questions about Poilievre; no one, not even Conservative party faithful, can really imagine Poilievre uniting Canadians around anything. Carney, on the other hand, once described as the central banker right out of "central casting" [29], now plays the useful role of 'warm but firm father figure' for a Canadian populace frightened by the (legitimately) terrifying bully next door.

Which means that for the transnational capitalist elite, Carney must seem like a godsend. Because what he's doing is almost indistinguishable from what Poilievre would have wanted to do, except the charming Carney can do it all largely unopposed by most *Liberal* voters: hack apart the public sector, ramp up the surveillance state and military spending, dismantle environmental protections and climate policy, and clear the way for extractive industries to run roughshod over Indigenous treaty rights and anything else that might get in the way of shareholder profits. And internationally, transform our foreign policy into an entirely transactional system where principles and human rights are merely commodities, invoked only when advantageous to "the economy".

Fink is correct: Carney's genius, such as it is, is his talent for breaking bad news gently and providing a sense of comfort and reassurance—which is precisely why Fink has trotted him out as capital's messenger boy for what the new rules of the road will be. Does anyone think that Fink—who, to reiterate, is in charge of the largest asset management firm in the world, and was chumming it up literally just a few minutes earlier with the CEO of the company at the heart of the surveillance machine powering Trump & ICE's nationwide campaign of racist terror and violence—is unaware of what Carney is about to say?

Do anyone believe that US corporate leader Larry Fink, whose entire business is based on prediction and risk management, is fond of surprises? Or fond of his friends announcing "ruptures" in the world order that he isn't positioned to capitalize on? In other words, does anyone believe that US elites are in the slightest bit uncomfortable with any single word that's coming out of Mark Carney's mouth?

And yet, for some reason, much of the world seems to be repeating the same mistake it made a decade ago, looking to Carney as someone who works on behalf of the people, for the greater good, not recognizing he actually works on behalf of folks like Larry Fink.

If only we'd learned our lesson the first time.

The tragedy of "The Tragedy of the Horizon"

In 2015, Carney delivered his famous "Tragedy of the Horizon" speech to Lloyd's of London [30]. The title is an echo of the phrase "tragedy of the commons", a debunked concept (which claims that a lack of ownership of a resource results in its overuse and mismanagement) that gets invoked to justify things like the enclosure movement in the UK, whereby land held in common—land which had been successfully managed by "the commons" for hundreds of years—was appropriated and turned into private property.

By invoking the idea of the tragedy of the commons when it comes to climate, Carney is mistaking the dictates of the capitalist system (whereby businesses seek to externalize anything that harms profit, or else get outcompeted and fail) for something essential to human nature. It's demonstrably not true: most people, upon seeing a piece of litter in a public park, do not immediately empty any trash in their pockets onto the same ground. But Carney is either constitutionally incapable of imagining anything other than a market-based capitalist system, or sees the climate movement as a threat to that system, and to the elite capitalist class he belongs to.

So, while he claims to understand the threat of climate catastrophe, he also worries about a climate transition that is *too rapid*, warning that "an abrupt resolution of the tragedy of horizons is in itself a financial stability risk". Much better to let markets do their work and slowly price in all the risk & reward, by calculating the financial returns each company can expect when drought, flood, wildfire, and once-in-a-lifetime storms become the day-to-day. That oughta solve it, right?

His speech paved the way for the 2021 creation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) which, in the words of a former GFANZ advisor, was pitched by Carney as "a money-making opportunity" with "trillions to be made".[31]

Those early to the gold rush did great: Larry Fink's BlackRock, as a matter of fact, saw $25 billion in new investment that year for its ESG funds. And although it's true the overall investment thesis was hampered by attacks from the usual suspects—Leonard Leo, the Heritage Foundation, the Koch brothers, and so on—it was never a deeply-held commitment for any of the participants: just a few days ago the NY Times quoted an anonymous former BlackRock executive who said that "it [GFANZ] was a bunch of empty promises from a bunch of Wall Street types who abandoned their pledges when it was no longer convenient". [32]

So, the result of Carney's words and deeds was a decade where instead of meeting the moment with meaningful systemic reforms and rapid decarbonization, the world was calmly assured that the market would fix things. Even if Carney really was in it for more than just the money back then, these days he's clearly not interested at all in tackling the climate crisis. [33,34]

Ultimately, the strategy that "the market" landed on is "overshoot": an acceleration of economic growth into a future of 3-degree-or-more warming, where calamity and disaster is the norm, but where as-yet unknown technological advancements (hopefully) come to our rescue. Fingers crossed I guess? In that heat, it'll be a real advantage to have the ice-cold blood of an actuary. [35]

This is always who he was, this is always who they were

Because his 2015 speech continues to be widely misrepresented as a call for swift action on climate, it's not surprising that what most people saw in Carney's 2021 book "Value(s)" was what they wanted to see, even though it contained all the signs of a man entranced by the shiny technologies coming out of the worst folks in Silicon Valley. Canada's (literally) 11th-hour cancellation of the Digital Services Tax was framed as a strategic concession, but it's always been very clear where Carney's bread is buttered:

There's a story in chapter 13 about how when he was in London, Carney strolled down the street to meet with his good pal Doug, the head of Amazon's EU operations, for advice about how to run meetings at the BoE. Amazon, whose CEO is a prominent backer of Trump, recently announced a partnership with Flock that it's expected will give ICE access to video footage from their network of Ring doorbell cameras. [36]

In chapter 14, Carney references Marc Andreessen's "It's Time To Build" [37]; Andreessen, a major cryptocurrency and Trump backer, would become one of the lead investors in Stripe in 2023, and that same year published another essay, the widely-reviled "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" that names Italian fascist Tommaso Marinetti as one of his personal "patron saints". [38]

Chapter 5 is largely devoted to discussing fintech like cryptocurrency and related products such as stablecoins and smart contracts. Carney talks about the positive potential of things like Facebook's 'Libra' (the company is now Meta, the currency now 'Diem'), and discusses the opportunities that would open up for private money issuers to integrate users' spending data into their surveillance-capitalist systems. Of course, he uses different terms for this, saying that these new currencies "would create opportunities for private innovation including integration into smart contracts and, depending on consumer preference, the pooling of data to improve digital services to them."

Bill C-15, incidentally, sets out the rules for companies to issue stablecoins linked to the Canadian Dollar.

* * *

And the Canadian tech-bros who have Carney's ear are just as rabid as their US counterparts.

Carney is directly influenced by Build Canada (a conservative business advocacy group that walks like a Canadian version of DOGE and quacks like a Canadian version of DOGE, but says they're definitely not a Canadian version of DOGE), to the point of quoting them almost verbatim in speeches on multiple occasions. [39,40]

Many of Build Canada's policies have also been endorsed by Pierre Poilievre and Danielle Smith. [41]

Build Canada's members include Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke (who in 2017 defended hosting an online store for Breitbart [42], and in 2025 repeated Trump's lies about fentanyl, arguing that Canada should not implement retaliatory tariffs) [43], and Eliot Pence (previously of Thiel-funded drone/weapons company Anduril). [44]

Carney's book, by the way, contains seven mentions of Shopify, a company where he very nearly took on the role of President in 2020, despite their CEO's eagerness to defend the monetization of far-right US propagandists. [45]

And the federal government has put up no barriers that would limit the collaboration of Canadian companies with ICE in the US.

Canadian independent journalist Rachel Gilmore has been compiling a list of these firms [46], and is expected to publish details very soon. But at least three are already known to have a relationship with Canada's federal government.

Canada has continued to sign contracts totalling in the millions of dollars with Garda, headquartered in Montreal, even after news broke that the company is staffing DHS's concentration camps in the US [47,48];

Brampton-based company Roshel took a contract in late 2025 to supply 20 armoured vehicles to ICE, and on January 26, Gilmore reported that the Canadian government brought them on a trade mission to the US—just six days after ICE murdered Renee Good [49];

Hootsuite, who have been working with ICE since September 2025, have received over $18 million in Canadian government contracts and is still under contract with the feds to this day. [50,51]

* * *

Mark Carney continues to talk about distancing Canada from the US. But it's quite clear from his actions that he has no intention of doing anything that will harm the interests of his fellow transnational corporate elites. If Canada wants to be on the right side of history, then we need to be clear-eyed about who this man is, and clear-eyed about how he's leveraging our fear of Trump to get us to abandon our principles, while simultaneously setting us up to be over-run by the rapacious desires of the exact same US tech and investment oligarchs that brought fascism to the US, and who call Carney a friend.

If there was ever a time to get angry and loud, it's now.

* * *

Notes

1.

Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand reiterated this stance in a CBC interview on January 25th:

Anita Anand on BlueSky

And all of this is very similar to Carney's thinking throughout "Value(s)". The book begins and ends with Pope Francis' parable likening human society to 'wine' and the market to 'grappa', and asking the assembled bunch of neoliberal elites to change the grappa back into wine. Grappa, the pope says, is what happens to wine when you remove all the other (wonderful) aspects of wine; my reading of the book was always that Carney misunderstood (or misrepresented) the parable as its inverse—taking the position that wine is just grappa, but with other things inside it.

2.

Incidentally, the Vector Institute's top ten funders, other than the federal and Ontario governments, are: Canada's "Big 5" banks, Loblaw, Shopify, Google, Nvidia, and Thomson Reuters.

3.

The only years that Carney and Thiel didn't both attend were 2020 and 2021, but that's because *nobody* attended; the meetings were cancelled due to the Covid pandemic.

Arguably, even the fact that Carney was willing to be a polite participant (almost) every year alongside folks like Thiel, Alex Karp, and Henry Kissinger is an indication of the degree to which he'll tolerate the intolerant.

Kissinger, incidentally, would have been on that short list of perennial fixtures, but was unable to make any meetings past 2023; by then he was being roasted in the fires of eternal damnation.

4.

I couldn't help but have a dark chuckle at the fact that Palantir had the *absolute fucking gall* to sign the "supplier's commitment to support the Government of Canada's effort in leading the way on ethical AI".