Decline or Renewal? The Carney Doctrine and the Prospects for Canadian Middlepowerism

Abstract

This article examines whether the emergence of the Carney government represents a genuine renewal of Canadian middlepowerism or merely its latest reformulation amid continued structural decline. Tracing the erosion of Canada's post-war middle-power role across two decades of retrenchment, we develop a five-part framework, ordering intent, institution-building, domestic capacity, coalition breadth, and issue-area consistency, to assess the substance of the Carney doctrine articulated at Davos in 2026. We find real, if partial, evidence of renewal: a more coherent theory of world-ordering, concrete coalition-building initiatives with partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, and a pivot away from Canada's historical overreliance on the United States. Yet the doctrine's ambitions remain constrained by a hollowed-out foreign policy apparatus, an unresolved legitimacy deficit in the Global South, and fragile domestic political consensus. We conclude that the Carney doctrine represents the most substantive attempt to reconstitute Canadian middlepowerism in a generation, though its ultimate success remains uncertain.