Mark Carney’s “New World Order” with China and Canada’s Economic Decline | Blendr Report EP149
Canada’s economy is weakening as its leadership signals closer alignment with China. This episode examines whether short-term pragmatism is undermining long-term stability in a fracturing world.
*Paid subscribers can find the extended, ad-free version of the episode at the bottom of this article.*
Canada has reached one of those moments where individual policy decisions stop making sense in isolation and only become legible when viewed as part of a broader trajectory. This episode of The Blendr Report looks at that path.
On the surface, the story is simple enough. Mark Carney speaks in Beijing about a “new world order,” praises the pace of Canada–China relations, and signals a renewed willingness to cooperate economically—and even strategically—with a regime our own institutions have repeatedly identified as Canada’s primary security threat. At the same time, the country is sliding deeper into economic stagnation, productivity collapse, and structural decline. These facts are not controversial. They’re increasingly visible in GDP numbers, labour data, debt levels, and the quiet shuttering of businesses across the country.
What becomes harder to ignore is how neatly these two stories now overlap.
Canada’s economic model was built on a stable trade relationship with the United States, a predictable rules-based system, and a narrow but dependable export base. That model is falling apart. Household debt is among the highest in the developed world. Stagflation has returned. Government spending continues to grow faster than the economy that must sustain it. And the policy response to these pressures has been, at best, improvisational.
Against that backdrop, the turn toward China is framed as pragmatic—diversification, opportunity, realism in a “fracturing world.” But diversification only works when it reduces risk. What we explore in this episode is whether Canada is doing the opposite: trading a difficult relationship with its closest ally for a far more dangerous dependency on a hostile power with a documented history of political interference, economic coercion, and institutional infiltration.
This isn’t about ideology. It’s about incentives and consequences.
Lowering tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles—4,000 pound surveillance machines on wheels. Opening visa channels while acknowledging foreign interference in elections. Talking openly about security cooperation with a state whose surveillance model we claim to reject. Each decision, on its own, can be rationalized. Taken together, they begin to look like a pattern—one shaped less by strategy than by desperation.
The economic side of the conversation matters just as much. Canada is running out of buffers. When unemployment climbs above certain thresholds, downturns tend to accelerate. When small business collapses spread through service sectors, recessions deepen not through a single shock, but through thousands of quiet failures. And when governments lose fiscal flexibility, the temptation to paper over reality with money creation becomes almost irresistible.
We also look ahead—not in terms of predictions, but trajectories. What happens to a country whose middle class is shrinking, whose social mobility is stalling, and whose political leadership seems increasingly comfortable managing decline rather than reversing it? What happens when economic pressure meets a fractured social fabric and a rapidly changing population? History offers some clues, and they are not comforting.
The full conversation goes further—connecting trade, geopolitics, institutional decay, and long-term social consequences in a way that’s difficult to capture in a single essay. If you’re trying to make sense of where Canada is heading, and why recent decisions feel so misaligned with the country’s interests, the episode is worth your time.
The Blendr Report EP149 on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Rumble.
