By Thomas Axworthy

February 20, 2026

At the January 26th Massey College conference on “A Changed America,” many speakers, including the keynote speaker, former UN Ambassador Bob Rae, praised Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech, which had been delivered the week before.

In the audience was Jean Thérèse Riley, granddaughter of Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent. Applause erupted when a comparison was made with the foundational foreign policy speech her grandfather delivered at the University of Toronto on January 13, 1947 — with the clear hope in the room that Mr. Carney’s address would prove just as significant.

What was so important about St. Laurent’s 1947 Gray Lecture, and what lessons can Carney draw from it to ensure his Davos address truly sets a new path?

Direction

Only four months into his tenure as Secretary of State for External Affairs, Louis St. Laurent faced a difficult task as he addressed an audience of 2,000 in Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto that night. St. Laurent knew that a new international framework had to be created to avoid the calamities of the 1930s — that “low, dishonest decade,” in W. H. Auden’s phrase — and the resulting horrors of war that cost more than 45,000 Canadians their lives.

But he also knew that his own prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, had been complicit in the worst aspects of that decade: toadying to Adolf Hitler, supporting appeasement, and admitting fewer than 5,000 Jewish refugees — the lowest number of any Western Allied nation. As Roy MacLaren writes in Mackenzie King in the Age of the Dictators, “In no affirmative sense did he offer his fellow Canadians an active, positive, creative foreign policy before the Second World War — and little enough during and after it.”

The very recent war, Canada’s sacrifices in it, and the diplomatic failures that produced it formed the essential backdrop as St. Laurent rose to speak.

“No one can fail to be affected by the poignant circumstances in which this lectureship has been established,” St. Laurent said by way of introduction, “nor by the symbolic significance of this occasion in the life of our country.”

Tensions with the Soviet Union were already evident. St. Laurent’s meaning was clear when he warned, “We have realized that a threat to the liberty of Western Europe … was a threat to our own way of life,” though he did not mention Russia directly.

At the United Nations General Assembly in September 1947, only months after the Gray Lecture, St. Laurent became the first Western leader to raise the possibility of “An association of democratic and peace-loving states willing to accept more specific international obligations in return for a greater measure of national security” — in effect, the forerunner of NATO.

In this postwar world of conflict, St. Laurent recognized in the Gray Lecture that it was “fashionable to speak in terms only of hard realism in the conduct of international affairs” but countered that “no foreign policy is consistent nor coherent unless it is based upon some conception of human values,” especially the rule of law and the necessity of liberty. The liberal international order based on the already-formed United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions born in 1944 that Canada helped refine and forge over the next 60 years was precisely what St. Laurent was endorsing in 1947.

The five principles articulated in the Gray Lecture of Canada’s middle power status within this new international order were as follows:

1. National Unity: Foreign policy must not divide Canadians.
2. Political Liberty: The protection of freedom and democratic values.
3. Rule of Law: Both within Canada and in international affairs.
4. Human Values: Foreign policy should be based on a conception of human values.
5. Acceptance of International Responsibility: Canada must contribute to international organizations such as the UN.

To thrive in this new world, Canada had to reject its traditional isolationism, famously expressed by Raoul Dandurand, Mackenzie King’s delegate to the League of Nations, who told the Assembly that Canada was “a fireproof house, far from inflammable materials.” St. Laurent’s fifth principle of a “willingness to accept international responsibilities,” including our “readiness to accept our responsibility as a North American nation” was no platitude; it marked a genuine break from past practice.

If St. Laurent’s purpose in 1947 was to educate the Canadian public (and perhaps his own government) on the necessity of building a rules-based international order, Mark Carney’s mission at Davos nearly 80 years later was to tell the world that the assumptions and preconditions of that order were eroding and that it was illusory to pretend otherwise.

Carney bluntly began: “I’ll talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality where geopolitics — where the large, main power — is subject to no limits, no constraints.”

As St. Laurent refrained from naming the Soviet Union in 1947, Carney refrained from naming the United States in 2026. But his meaning was clear. Under Donald Trump, the United States has shifted from being protector to predator.

Carney told the world to stop living a lie and to see reality as it is: “a system of intensifying great-power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.” Canada and like-minded states must reduce the leverage that allows coercion and, above all, cooperate in facing the hegemons. “Middle powers must act together,” Carney said starkly, “because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”

Implementation

The Gray Lecture still matters not only for what St. Laurent said, but for what he did.

He walked the talk. In November 1947, St. Laurent agreed that Canada should accept a seat on a United Nations commission to oversee elections in Korea. Mackenzie King balked and ordered the Canadian delegation to withdraw. Knowing that his credibility was at stake, St. Laurent threatened to resign. King backed down, and the new internationalism won a decisive victory over the old isolationism.

When he became prime minister in 1948, St. Laurent, in partnership with Minister of External Affairs Lester Pearson, developed the most impressive peacetime foreign and defence posture in Canadian history. Canada helped form NATO; Pearson created the modern concept of peacekeeping in 1956; a foreign aid program was launched; and St. Laurent broadened foreign policy beyond its traditional Europe–U.S. focus with his around-the-world tour in 1954, notably cultivating ties with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India.

Canada’s peacetime military reached unprecedented strength. By 1957, with a population of over 16 million, Canada maintained armed forces of 120,000 and spent 5.5% of GNP on defence. Radar lines were built in the North; the navy operated 62 commissioned ships, including an aircraft carrier; and No. 1 Air Division in NATO flew modern F-86 Sabre fighters. Canadian industry produced the CF-100 and Avro Arrow interceptors for North American defence.

The Gray Lecture set principles. A sustained national effort followed.

Mark Carney has been prime minister for only one year, so implementation of the Davos priorities remains aspirational. But he has begun decisively. Justin Trudeau had announced that Canada would not meet the 2% of GNP NATO target until 2032, but one of Carney’s first acts as prime minister was to inject billions into the defence budget so that the target would be met in 2026.

The Defence Industrial Strategy Carney unveiled this week added more meat to the bones of the vision articulated in Davos; that there are perilous gaps to fill in Canada’s sovereignty for reasons no-one could have anticipated, but they will be filled.

Carney’s infrastructure, energy and economic policy reflect the same ambitious, pragmatic nationalism. Targets, however, are not capacity. Infrastructure and industrial renewal take time. The St. Lawrence Seaway, announced in 1951, was completed in 1959. The Trans-Canada Highway Act was passed in 1949; the highway opened in 1962. It took a decade to rebuild the military after the Second World war. The question is whether public support will endure long enough this time for implementation to succeed.

Public Support

Adam Chapnick’s chapter, “St. Laurent’s Gray Lecture and Canadian Citizenship in History,” in The Unexpected Louis St. Laurent (edited by Patrice Dutil), shows how carefully St. Laurent cultivated public opinion for his internationalist agenda.

Isolationism and appeasement had once been popular, until their cost became horrifying. John Dafoe began his September 30, 1938, Winnipeg Free Press editorial on Munich with the haunting question, “What’s the cheering about?” In 1947, fear and pessimism were still prevalent among Canadians two years after the war’s end.

Gallup reported that 51% of respondents thought the UN could not prevent a third world war; 74% worried the USSR was aiming to dominate Europe; and when asked what they could do individually for peace, 48% said “nothing” and 19% said “pray”.

As the Gray Lecture was being drafted, St. Laurent personally instructed that the section on national unity be expanded. He was wise to do so. Conscription crises had fractured Canada in 1917 and 1944, and St. Laurent knew how critical it was to avoid reopening that chasm.

The first third of the speech was devoted to unity. He drew on the origins of the lecture series — established by George Gray to promote good relations between English and French Canada and to honour his two deceased sons — and used that bridge to argue that the Gray brothers had high ideals, as did the thousands who served in the war, and that now “we must consider what role in world affairs they would wish us to play.”

Paying close attention to persuasion and public support paid dividends: by 1948, 65 percent of Canadians favoured joining a peacetime mutual defence pact with Europe.

Carney likewise emphasizes unity as he faces the erratic but formidable power of Donald Trump to inflict economic harm. He has met frequently with the premiers and has projects from every region in his build agenda. His personal support has risen from around 45% upon becoming prime minister to over 60% after his Davos speech.

But Mark Carney faces a harder road than Louis St. Laurent did. In 1947, the threats were distant. Today, economic coercion directly affects Canadian livelihoods.

“We are in the rapids,” Bob Rae told the Massey conference on January 26th.

Prime Minister Carney has set a new direction. But navigating the rapids will require many skilled voyageurs, stronger canoes, and, above all, public patience as we head into the unknown.

Policy Contributing Writer Thomas S. Axworthy is Public Policy Chair at Massey College.