Episode Transcript
Anti-Fascist Dad Podcast
Episode 16: Mark Carney Is Not Your Anti-Fascist Dad
Matthew Remski:
Hello everyone. My name is Matthew Remski, and this is the Anti-Fascist Dad Podcast.
Episode 16: Mark Carney Is Not Your Anti-Fascist Dad.
PM Mark Carney:
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 that international law applied with varying rigor 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.
Matthew Remski:
Prime Minister Mark Carney is not my guest today, but after a news item my focus will be on him. So no interview today—just pure antifascist analysis. Because Carney’s recent speech at Davos really is as important as everyone is saying it is.
I’m going to take some time with it, but in my view it’s not important for the obvious truth he just confessed. It’s important for the lessons it provides about the deep contradictions and hypocrisy of liberal politics, and how, when liberalism pretends to stand up to fascism, it’s really asking that the capital order return to an era of better optics.
Carney told a truth about neoliberalism that conceals a bigger lie about capitalist realism.
What’s also interesting is that he pulled this off with the affect of a benevolent patriarch. I think that can be very attractive and distracting.
Before we get into it, some housekeeping. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and on YouTube and TikTok as AntiFascistDad. The Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to every second part of the main feed episode.
This week I’m dividing things up by analyzing the speech itself here, and in the Patreon bonus—which is up now but will unlock here in a few weeks—I’ll be discussing how Carney presents a familiar type of masculinity and paternal caregiving, and also how it falls short.
I’m going to open with a news update. In episode 11 with Richard Gilman-Opalsky, I highlighted a press conference in which the premier of my home province, Ontario, Doug Ford, answered a question about the ethics of an Ontario-based truck manufacturer called Roshel supplying ICE with armored vehicles. Ford basically smirked and said, “I think it’s great.”
The question was about 20 Senator armored vehicles that were rush-ordered by ICE at a price tag of $10 million. The rush order was made on the grounds that Roshel alone could meet the technical and delivery requirements at speed.
The follow-up today is that in videos from the aftermath of the murder of Alex Preddy, who was killed in Minneapolis by either ICE or Border Patrol under the command of Bovino and Noem, a Roshel Senator can be seen entering the neighborhood to confront the protesters who gathered immediately afterward.
So now we see the impacts of this cross-border military-corporate alignment in full view.
There is a fig-leaf law on the Canadian side called the Export and Import Permits Act, which mandates a human rights risk assessment and a review of the sale against Canada’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty. However, Canada has a longstanding U.S. exemption under the EIPA, which means that many military and dual-use goods exported to the United States do not require individual permits or vetting.
A similarly toothless vetting arrangement covers Roshel’s use of the Ford F-550 chassis for their vehicles. Because the Senator is an upfitted vehicle, they don’t build it from scratch. The Ford Motor Company does have to approve all third-party upfitted products, but only in terms of its own technical standards.
No buyer has to disclose whether the truck will be used for military, police, or border security applications. No buyer has to pass a human rights assessment or screening for the end use of their product.
There is a moral tradition here. We should remember that Ford ran a subsidiary in Nazi Germany that produced a full range of military vehicles using forced labor and, at the end, concentration camp labor.
That leads directly into my main story this week, which centers on the fact that capitalism is borderless and anarchic, and that a technocrat like Prime Minister Mark Carney can score a huge diplomatic victory at Davos by admitting this—not because his aim is human rights or environmental or labor protection, but because his aim is to mitigate the financial unpredictability of dealing with a fascist trading partner.
Finally, to underline the interconnectedness of things, it’s worth remembering that Roshel was founded by Soviet-born, Israel-raised Roman Shimonov, who spent 15 years in the IDF.
So here we have a Canadian company owned by an ex-IDF Israeli selling armored vehicles to ICE agents, many of whom receive training through the IDF, and they are using that equipment and training on American citizens.
When antifascist activists say that opposing the genocide in Gaza is a frontline in the global response to fascism, this is the kind of thing they’re talking about.
For 150 years, Marxists and others on the left have contemplated the principle that the modern nation-state exists to regulate the flow of capital for the ruling class.
This means that domestic and international legal frameworks, as Carney admitted at Davos, have a pretense of legitimacy until they are bent, broken, and discarded when they interfere with power. In antifascist circles, it’s common knowledge that we get as much government support and democratic input as capital allows.
You could have sat in any one of a thousand union halls or cafés over the past generations and heard a version of Carney’s analysis: international bosses control the money and buy the politicians who make the laws to regulate the money.
But if you shared that analysis in a union hall or café, there would have been a moral to it. You would have told it for solidarity, to affirm that you were in it together, that your individual failings were shaped by structural forces. You would have strengthened your awareness of your class condition.
That is not why Mark Carney shared his analysis. He wasn’t in a union hall or a café. He was on the dais at Davos, speaking to G20 leaders and the wealthiest investors in the world, on the final leg of a trade mission to China and Qatar to lock in new deals for Canada in response to fascist instability in the U.S.
Carney did not share this analysis to express solidarity with workers at the mercy of U.S. hegemony. He expressed solidarity with fellow leaders and investors who now feel confused and dysregulated because the world’s superpower is no longer a dependable trade partner.
He is talking about how companies from smaller countries get dominated by companies from more powerful countries. In doing so, he echoes complaints made by British and U.S. officials in the late 1930s and early 1940s about how doing business with Hitler had become inconvenient.
On January 17, 1940, Sir Ronald Cross, minister of economic warfare under Chamberlain, summarized the struggle this way:
“For years past, Germany has been conducting her foreign trade, particularly in the Danubian countries, not as an ordinary trader in a free country, but by elaborate clearing and barter organizations which had the effect of giving her a substantial hold over the foreign trade of a number of smaller countries. Germany has wielded her commercial, industrial, and military power into an effective instrument of economic warfare.”
Another little-noted aspect of Carney’s speech is that it is framed in anti-communist terms from the start.
PM Mark Carney:
In 1978, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. He asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
His answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world, unite.” He doesn’t believe it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along.
Because every shopkeeper does the same, the system persists not through violence alone, but through participation in rituals people privately know to be false. Havel called this “living within a lie.”
When even one person stops performing, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
Matthew Remski:
There is so much going on in this anecdote. African Canadian lawyer and writer Zillah Jones points out that Carney chooses a communist regime dismantled decades ago, when the current threat to the world is from the right. He reminds everyone that he is a capitalist first and foremost, uniting billionaires through a shared hatred of the old communist bogeyman.
He equates the humble greengrocer with middle powers like Canada, which have propped up imperial capitalism for decades. He equates “Workers of the world, unite” with the illusion of the rules-based order.
Havel himself embraced NATO expansion, U.S. interventions, and neoliberal shock therapy. His politics emphasized moral conscience over class struggle, shaped by his family’s loss of bourgeois status under communism.
Carney’s speech breaks into two themes. First, the diagnosis: the rules-based order was a useful fiction. Second, the cure: tax cuts, deregulation, and massive investment in oil, AI, and shipping corridors.
Absent are labor unions, social safety nets, redistribution, anti-racism, migrant rights, education, or culture. His politics are those of a banker.
What stands out is the silence between confession and prescription. He admits complicity, but does not dwell on its consequences: dead bodies, felled forests, precarious labor, and global warming.
His eloquent melancholy deflects responsibility. The word “bargain” stands in for complicity. Strategic transparency fosters trust while discouraging deeper probing.
If Carney had given this speech at the International Criminal Court instead of Davos, it would sound very different.
What troubles me most is how decent he seems. Calm, measured, soft-spoken. A benevolent patriarch in contrast to Trump’s horror show.
Liberalism’s greatest advantage is its ability to reassure us that things will be okay. But antifascist culture has long understood that liberals will choose order over change, and negotiate with stronger forms of domination rather than let the working class decide its future.
Trump has thrown us into a search for kinder fathers. But I think we need parenting that leads outside the sweatshop altogether.
That’s all coming up in part two on Patreon, and it will unlock here in a few weeks. Take care of each other, everyone.
