By Howie Silbiger
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney went to Davos and did something Canadian leaders rarely do in public, he told the truth about the world. Not the comforting fiction of a “rules-based international order,” not the polite language of multilateral harmony, but a blunt admission that power now operates without constraint, that great powers do what they want, and that middle powers like Canada either adapt or get swallowed. For a Jewish audience, that framing mirrors what Jews have experienced for centuries and what Canadian Jews have been experiencing again in real time; Silence does not buy safety, compliance does not prevent targeting and pretending a system works, when it doesn’t, only benefit those who exploit it.
Carney leaned heavily on Václav Havel’s idea of “living within a lie,” the notion that systems survive not because people believe in them, but because they create the illusion of belief to avoid trouble. That metaphor may as well have been written for the Jewish experience in 2026. Jewish institutions have been told to lower their profile. Jewish parents have been advised to accept hostility as the cost of pluralism. Jewish students have been encouraged to be patient while threats and intimidation are reframed as political expression. We have been expected to relax, to signal compliance, and to trust that someone else will step in if things get worse. We have, they didn’t.
Where Carney’s speech begins to fracture, however, is where honesty collides with convenience. He speaks about values-based realism, about applying standards consistently, about naming reality instead of hiding behind rituals. And yet, almost casually, he announces new strategic partnerships with Qatar.
Jewish Canadians understand that Qatar is not a neutral actor caught in a difficult neighborhood, it has housed Hamas leadership. It has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas over the years. It has been repeatedly cited in open-source intelligence and government reporting as a hub for terror financing networks tied not only to Hamas but to other extremist groups as well. So, when Canada embraces Qatar as a strategic partner while speaking the language of moral clarity, Jewish Canadians are right to ask what exactly “values-based” means in practice.
If terrorism against Jews is financed, legitimized, or politically insulated by a partner state, does realism require looking away? Is this what living in truth looks like now? Carney argues that neutrality and appeasement are illusions, that pretending compliance will buy safety is a lie. But there is a contradiction when Canada simultaneously deepens ties with actors whose money and political cover have helped sustain terror movements that openly target Jews.
The dissonance becomes sharper when contrasted with Canada’s posture toward Israel. Canada has shown increasing comfort in publicly scrutinizing Israeli self-defence while maintaining transactional relationships with regimes that bankroll terror groups. For Jews, that inversion is impossible to ignore. It suggests a moral framework where democratic allies are judged harshly and violently repressive or complicit actors are engaged pragmatically, as long as the economics line up.
Carney is right about one thing that Jews understand instinctively: when rules stop protecting you, you protect yourself. His emphasis on strategic autonomy, domestic strength, and resilience echoes Jewish communal thinking more than most Canadian political rhetoric ever has. Jewish schools do not rely on nostalgia. Synagogues do not outsource security to good intentions. Communities harden infrastructure not because they want to, but because they have learned what happens when they don’t. That realism is not cynicism, it’s survival.
Canada likes to describe itself as a pluralistic society that works, and Carney repeats that claim with confidence. But pluralism that works cannot require Jews to absorb hostility quietly for the sake of social cohesion. It cannot mean asking one community to live in fear so others can live comfortably while chanting slogans calling for the latter’s death. A pluralism worth defending is one that draws moral lines, not one that dissolves them whenever they become inconvenient.
Carney says nostalgia is not a strategy, and he’s right, but neither is moral flexibility disguised as realism. If Canada is truly evolving, then honesty cannot stop at diagnosing the global order. It must extend to the partners we choose, the money we accept, and the violence we are willing to indirectly tolerate. Living in truth means acknowledging that terrorism is not an abstract geopolitical tool. It has real victims.
This speech could mark a turning point for Canadian foreign policy, one grounded in clarity, but for Jewish Canadians, clarity must include consistency. Values cannot be invoked selectively. Terror cannot be contextualized, and partnerships cannot be value-neutral when Jewish lives are part of the ledger. The world may be fractured, but truth still demands very hard choices.
Canada now must decide whether it will actually rise to the honesty its prime minister so eloquently preached, or continue to descend into the morally decayed abyss it has become.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on Truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on Israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
Well developed idea and clearly articulated