Mark Carney wasn’t the first Canadian central banker to get an offer to join the Premier League of global finance. 

More than six decades before Carney was recruited to lead the Bank of England in 2013, U.S. president Harry Truman asked prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to talk to Bank of Canada governor Graham Towers about becoming the first head of the International Monetary Fund. 

“They liked the way we did things in Canada and the way the government was managing,” King wrote in his diary on April 10, 1946. “[Truman] said they were very anxious to have one or the other of these men for this all-important work. He said something about the secretary of the treasury being most anxious.”

The other man was King’s finance minister, James Ilsley. The Canadian delegation at the negotiations that created the IMF and the World Bank had helped the U.S. and the U.K. bridge their differences on how to structure the postwar financial system. The institutions that would anchor the new world order needed leaders, and the Americans wanted either Towers to lead the IMF or Ilsley to lead the World Bank. 

I’ve been thinking about this bit of trivia while watching Carney try to build support for his contention that the future needn’t belong entirely to the U.S., China and Russia. Meta forces might determine history’s direction, but contingencies decide the details. That’s why Carney’s Davos speech and his follow-up trips to India, Australia and Japan are significant. The great powers will decide the general direction of where civilization is headed, but the “middle powers,” as Carney calls them, often are presented with opportunities to adjust the trajectory. They just have to be willing to try. 

Canada was not willing in 1946, in part because the work looked too daunting. “Later when I got Towers on the phone he told me that [U.S. Treasury official] Harry White was one of the directors,” King wrote in his diary the following day. Towers relayed that White was “pleasant as long as you agreed with him, but could be very obnoxious” and that Towers “did not feel that he… could stay any time with him.” Towers told the prime minister that he “felt that there was too much in American control all through.”  

Indeed there was. Belgium’s Camille Gutt got the job at the IMF instead, and a European has led the fund ever since, while everyone appointed to lead the World Bank since its founding has been American. The U.S. set itself up with an effective veto at both institutions. But what might have happened if Towers or Ilsley had gone to Washington, D.C., and given it a try?

Maybe Canada could have helped establish a convention that prevented these global institutions from becoming the playthings of the U.S. government and European colonizers. Maybe countries such as China would have been more respectful of the rules of globalization if they felt like they had a say in how those rules were set. The point is that you don’t know if you don’t try. If you are Canada, you have to try, because you are better off in a global system based on rules and institutions than on the whims of a handful of superpowers. If you serve Canada, you do what you can to create such a system, no matter the odds—or how disagreeable you find members of the U.S. administration. 

Carney’s Davos speech continues to make waves. “We are all Canadians now,” a book reviewer wrote in the Financial Times last week. Waves by their nature are bumpy.

At home, some members of the business community think it was a mistake to risk upsetting the Trump administration with the speech, and that Carney’s analysis of the situation might even be wrong. “I don’t share the thesis of permanent rupture,” Thomas D’Aquino, the longtime business lobbyist who helped create the political conditions for the original Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement, told an audience in Ottawa on March 2. “Our deep economic integration, and with it the network of family relationships, of business, education and institutional relationship, of defense collaboration, all this is a reality that cannot, I would argue, be fundamentally reversed.” Meanwhile, Carney’s quick endorsement of the decision of the U.S. and Israel to start a war with Iran was condemned by those who thought the Canadian prime minister had nominated himself to lead a rebel alliance against hegemony. 

I want to offer another way to think about the Davos speech and what Carney is doing. It would be easier to stay out of it. That is what King, Towers and Ilsley decided when it came time to make the new postwar order a reality. As a result, they became back-seat drivers. 

“Rupture” isn’t about running away from America. Carney’s position on Iran is proof of that. Rather, it’s a recognition that internal politics have changed the U.S. government into something else—something that can’t be trusted to the degree it once was. 

Canada’s best interests will always be served in a global system that respects human rights and the relatively free movement of people, capital and goods. 

For much of our history, that meant supporting America. Now, it means trying to stitch a new system together. By daring to go against the U.S. on occasion, Carney is showing potential allies that Canada might finally be willing to take a turn at the wheel. 

Kevin Carmichael is The Logic’s economics columnist and editor-at-large. He has spent more than two decades covering economics, business and finance for outlets including Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post, where he also served as editor-in-chief.