(Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaking today at Davos. Image credit: Harun Ozalp // Anadolu via Getty Images)
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Every January since 1971, thousands of business leaders, politicians, journalists, economists, policy experts, and celebrities have gathered at a mountain resort in Switzerland to discuss the most pressing global issues of the day in hundreds of sessions scheduled over the better part of a week.
The conference, organized by the World Economic Forum, has come to be nicknamed after its Alpine host town: Davos.
The gathering itself has been criticized in many corners over the years for its exclusive nature, which is somewhat fair and somewhat reductive.
Progress does emerge from these sessions among the assembled players, but so, too, does the feeling of window-dressing for what is mostly supercharged networking.
This weekend, while talking with friends who have attended in the past, I asked if they had experienced anything extraordinary during the scheduled sessions, or if Davos is more of an opportunity to meet influential people and kibitz about preferred projects?
Well, today could not have delivered more of an empathetic answer to that question.
Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, gave a magnificently powerful speech before the gathered elites that will be discussed many years from now. Decades, likely.
It was, essentially, an eloquent and poignant announcement that Canada is divorcing the United States. Over sixteen minutes, Prime Minister Carney called upon the world to recognize that the current global framework in which superpowers run the show is stale, destructive, and unnecessary.
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