Article by Robert Asselin, CEO, U15 Canada | Published January 27, 2026 in the Hub
Strengthening our country requires abandoning poor economic policies
“We are taking the sign out of the window.”
That was the most consequential sentence in Prime Minister Carney’s deservedly lauded speech in Davos this week. In a single phrase, he signalled a break—intellectual, strategic, and moral—with a way of navigating the global order that has shaped Canada’s choices since the Washington Consensus took hold in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The reference, of course, was to Václav Havel’s famous essay on life under communism, in which a shopkeeper places a regime-approved slogan in his window not because he believes it, but because compliance has become the path of least resistance. The sign is not persuasion; it is submission disguised as normalcy. Systems endure, Havel argued, not merely through coercion, but through the quiet acceptance of arrangements that hollow out agency and responsibility….
Carney is right about Canada’s place in the world—but words are not enough – The Hub