Since my reference to it last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney's address in Davos seems to have been both intended and received as a policy manifesto for Canada and also for other countries that feel short-shrifted by what have traditionally been known as the "great powers." The prime minister quoted the Czech president and former dissident Václav Havel that the communist system sustained itself by adopting the habit initiated by a greengrocer, of placing in his window the Marxist tocsin “Workers of the world, unite!”  (The 300 divisions of Stalin’s Red Army had more to do with it.) This gesture to the regime was widely taken up in the Soviet bloc, in what  Havel described as “living within a lie.” Carney considers this analogous to the adherence of Canada and other countries to “what we called the rules-based international order” (a clangorous platitude that reminds me of my bossy Grade 1 public school teacher). Read More