From Gray to Davos: A Tale of Two Speeches

When I was asked to write this essay the editor and I envisaged an article that would offer an appreciation of the principles of Canadian foreign policy since the founding of the International Journal—eighty years of it. For most of that period such an assignment would have been easy to do: one would go to the Gray Lecture given by external affairs minister Louis St-Laurent at the University of Toronto on 13 January 1947. Comprehensive, elegant and forceful, the Gray Lecture laid down the principles of Canadian foreign policy for the postwar world. To some extent St-Laurent was laying to rest the ghosts of the 1930s, a decade in which Canada and Canadians had for various reasons tried to escape from a world that promised only to complicate their lives—as they then saw it. St-Laurent told Canadians that they should be engaged with the world—that they could not and should not avoid it. It was a signature address, inspiring and, up to a point, prophetic.

It was a chronological coincidence and not a reprise of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day that Canada's prime minister Mark Carney was also speaking on a January day, to the 2026 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, in Davos, Switzerland. He had a full house listening to him, and after he spoke the audience gave him a standing ovation. Both the full house and the standing ovation were unusual: Carney, after all, was a Canadian prime minister, and it had been quite some time since Canadians had commanded that kind of attention or indeed that kind of reception in international circles.

St-Laurent also had a full house in January 1947. He spoke in the aftermath of the Second World War, at a time when Canadians’ lives had markedly improved, after sixteen years of deprivation and sacrifice. Incomes were up, unemployment was non-existent, and wartime fears of national disunity had been largely put to rest. At that point the Cold War had not yet taken shape, though signs of discord between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union were plentiful. St-Laurent spoke from a position of relative security: Canada was firmly embedded with its allies, the United States and Great Britain. If there was a threat to Canada it came from within, not without.

St-Laurent had a purpose, some of it important, painful, and local. Canada was a country divided by language, and the government of which he was a part had struggled mightily to overcome the division. And they had. Still, it was well to remind an audience of that fact: to maintain and improve on national unity, the rule of law, the values of a Christian civilization, and, as an objective and an instrument, international engagement. He was trying to rally Canadians to the cause; he did not have to worry about the Americans and the British. Both countries were friendly; and both were grateful for what Canada had done during the war, and for what it was trying to do in the postwar world.

President Harry Truman was friendly to Canadians if slightly naïve about Canada. He knew many Canadians in his hometown of Kansas City: fine people, he thought. Why not admit them to West Point, like Americans, as a sign of appreciation? Truman's staff did their best to bury the idea. Though Truman meant the gesture as a sign of esteem, the Canadians might think they were being assimilated into an American institution—taken for granted rather than singled out. Any hint that the United States wanted to absorb or annex Canada, however nicely, was the third rail of Canadian-American relations. Let sleeping dogs lie, especially if they were Canadians.

On other, larger, subjects Truman's attitudes were extraordinarily congenial, had the Canadians known: indeed they may have gone farther than even idealistic Canadians could have imagined. Truman carried everywhere with him a piece of paper on which was written an excerpt from Alfred Tennyson's poem “Locksley Hall” that he had first read as a teenager. When a copy became too worn and tattered he copied it out anew. Tennyson envisaged a better world, an era of unfettered trade and commerce, a world at peace, where the “war-drums” no longer sounded, and humanity was united, “In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.” Parliaments passed laws, and federations had constitutions, that is, if they were going to work. There was the hope that with the right care and feeding, the many international organizations that had sprung up during the war would eventually assume a true parliamentary function. As for law, when St- Laurent spoke that January day, the Nuremberg trials had just concluded, giving an unprecedented example of international justice. The crime of genocide had been defined—another rule.

Like Truman, British prime minister Clement Attlee had no problems with Canada: indeed he had every reason to be happy with Canada generally and St-Laurent personally. Canada had poured soldiers, matériel, and money into Great Britain during the war, and in 1947 the Dominion was topping it up with a very large, low-interest loan—supported by St-Laurent, a minister from Quebec, in the teeth of nationalist anglophobe opinion in his home province. If the notion of “gratitude” was in the air, it had a Canadian scent, and Attlee—and Truman too—certainly sniffed it.

Historians have made much of the North Atlantic Triangle or the Anglo-Saxon Triangle in which Canada was cocooned. But the fact that there was an Anglo-Saxon Triangle accounted for Canada's existence: the Americans had gradually become reassured that Canada was familiar and not quite foreign. As a British delegate to the Paris Peace conference of 1783 remarked to a French delegate who was gloating over Britain's defeat in the American War of Independence with the consequent loss of its colonies “Yes sir, and they will all speak English; every one of ‘em.”

A common language and a common culture are not in themselves guarantees of peace, harmony, and obedience to a common set of rules, but they help. They also exclude those not so blessed as to speak English. There was an assumption among many—though not all—of the peacemakers and rule-devisers of 1945 that what were originally Anglo-Saxon institutions or conceptions would naturally spread as their necessity became apparent. As for “they will all speak English,” any casual glance at international meetings—the January 2026 Davos event comes to mind—shows that almost everybody in a meeting room will be able to speak English—of course with simultaneous translation to help along those who are not functional Anglophones.

And so it was that at Davos everybody in the room listening to Canada's prime minister Mark Carney speak on 20 January 2026 could understand English either directly or, in a few cases, at one remove. It is true that understanding does not necessarily lead to sympathy or agreement. The writer Oscar Wilde is commonly believed to have said that England and America were “separated by a common language.” He didn’t put it in quite those words: it is a case where the legend of what Wilde wrote is better than the original. (He actually wrote, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the language.”)

Carney's address came seventy-nine years since St-Laurent had spoken. The time lapse is significant: everyone who had sat in the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall to hear the minister had passed away. More to the point, almost everyone in Canada or anywhere else who had had experience of the Second World War and the Great Depression was gone. Historians and sociologists and their popularizers make much of generations, but it is a commonplace that people born at the same time will likely relate to common experiences. And of course it works in reverse. The generation of 1945 were gone, and with them any strong memory or sense not only of the victory over fascism but of the chaos that had preceded the war—what the war was all about, as they would have seen it.

As the Englishman of 1783 had predicted, the American population of 2026 all speak English, even if it's with a Spanish accent. Indeed, for many of them it was the signature or the very definition of Americanism. As Oscar Wilde said, English could have very different meanings in very different circumstances. Carney's most important audience was not in the room but three thousand miles away: President Donald Trump. He was not quite the same kind of listener as Harry Truman might have been, seventy-nine years earlier.

St-Laurent's address was hopeful as well as forceful. He knew the people in the room were sympathetic, but he also knew that the inhabitants of the American embassy in Ottawa and the State Department in Washington were sympathetic, starting with his arguments for Canadian national unity. Truman and his colleagues, political and bureaucratic, were liberal in thought and temperament. So were almost all Truman's successors—almost. A functioning international system, working according to accepted rules that included respect for legal forms and norms, was key. As Carney said in his address in Davos, this did not happen all the time.

It was particularly noticeable in matters of trade. When local pressures were sufficient to flutter the executive, the Americans had no hesitation in making exceptions: lead and zinc imports in the 1950s, uranium in the 1960s and 1970s, oil in the 1950s and 1960s, wheat consistently—special cases, the Americans argued. The most obvious, though possibly not the most painful case, was softwood lumber, an irritant that has plagued every decade since the 1980s. And because they were able to cover off these exceptions, and because the exceptions were sectoral and limited, they were seen as the price to be paid for larger American commitments.

These were covered off with a veneer of hypocrisy. America's special virtues and unique history could be cited to cover off the circumstances—and ironically the roots of American virtue could shelter under the ironic term “exceptionalism”. Exceptionally good was what was meant, different from all other countries and therefore a model to all. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared: “I think the word of the United States has been as good as gold in its international dealings and its agreements.” Eyes rolled, teeth ground, but life went on. The fact was that the United States’ word was usually kept, Americans were not that hard to get along with, and arguably on truly important matters—grand strategy, European security, international health, support for international institutions including the United Nations—the Americans were supportive, even eloquently supportive. And sometimes quietly, if ineffectively sympathetic, as foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy found, when promoting the International Criminal Court or the Land Mines Treaty at the end of the 1990s, the decade when Madeleine Albright affirmed that the United States was the indispensable nation.

An American economist even came up with a term to describe behaviour that was “good enough,” evoking the phrases, “life goes on,” or “go along to get along,” or “just okay” and similar sentiments: his invented word was “satisficing”. Without systematic satisficing, life might not go on, gears would not engage, political synapses might not fire. Its applications are infinite, and are almost a universal value in business, academe, politics, and of course international relations. Harry Truman, as an old pol, would not have seen anything strange in all this, nor would St-Laurent, who would not have survived sixteen years as a politician—nine as prime minister—had he not seen the practicability of the adage. Granted, the 1940s and 1950swere blunter decades than the present, and politicians frequently said what they meant, and used plainer terms than the smooth but meaningless statements customarily emitted by official sources in the twenty-first century.

As Carney observed, 2025 marked the beginning of a different era. Disdaining the hypocrisy that had customarily covered many kinds of international activities, the American administration since 2025 has indeed been plain. Those observers who had complained about diplomatic or political hypocrisy immediately began to long for its return. For it was not just an American trait, though because the United States was larger and more important it touched everyone. Instead of the smooth tones of practised hypocrisy, there was now toe-curling mendacity. Instead of the pretense that some unpalatable measure was good for all, and that a rising tide raised all boats, it was “America First,” by which was meant, “America only.”

The world of Louis St-Laurent and Harry Truman has, as Mark Carney said in his elegiac speech at Davos, passed away. As International Journal turns 80, it does so in is a new era that calls for new measures, unpalatable and, as Donald Trump would say, “frank.” As St-Laurent and Truman would say, it is a world without hope—or at least without their kind of optimism. And who can say that they would be wrong in thinking that the world has regressed into the kind of barbarism that they had once fought against? Much has changed in eight decades, most notably America's place in the world. What that portends for Canada remains to be seen, but surely the portents look ill, at least in the short term. So although Carney counselled that “nostalgia is not a strategy,” as one contemplates the nearly eighty years from Gray to Davos, some wistful thinking can be forgiven.