The Craft of Leadership: Mark Carney’s Rhetoric on Display

One of the talents of a great leader is their capacity to move an audience with an inspiring speech. When Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, took to the stage at Davos on 20 January 2026, his speech (1) was replete with rhetorical devices. In his Davos speech, he framed the current global situation as an era of great power rivalry; he described this era as the end of the rules-based international order; and he called on middle powers to act together. Carney employs a hybrid of philosophical reflection and geopolitical strategy that is intellectually serious, morally framed and structurally disciplined using sophisticated rhetoric.

In this article, Professor Peter Daly , Professor of Management and Leadership at EDHEC Business School outlines 10 different rhetorical devices from Carney’s speech that you can adopt in your next pitch, presentation or speech (2).

1) Tricolon (Rule of 3)

This is the process of grouping ideas in three to help memorability. You will often find tricolons used in advertising to attribute three qualities to a product or service.

The triad structure provides rhythm and rhetorical weight:

• “A country that can't feed itself (1), fuel itself (2), or defend itself (3) has few options”.
• “A world of fortresses will be poorer (1), more fragile (2), and less sustainable (3)”.
• “They'll buy insurance (1), increase options (2), in order to rebuild sovereignty (3)”.
• “But we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger (1), better (2), stronger (3).”

2) Antithesis

From the Greek antitheton, “opposition”, antithesis is the juxtaposition of two contrasting ideas. By making sharp contrasts, the speaker clarifies the stakes and sharpens the message as outlined below:

• “This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
• “The powerful have their power. We have something too.”
• “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”

3) Rhetorical question

A rhetorical question is a question asked for rhetorical and dramatic effect to provoke rather than to solicit an answer. This device provides structure to your speech and guides the audience through the argument. It also arouses audience attention in that it incites the audience to consider the question.

• “So, what are our options?”
• “What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?”
• “How did the communist system sustain itself?”

4) Classical Allusion

This involves the referencing of historical or literary works to frame contemporary issues. Carney does this by invoking Thucydides’ aphorism about the strong and the weak (3), hence grounding the argument in ancient geopolitical realism, and signaling that today’s tensions resemble enduring patterns of power politics:

• “The strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must.”

He also invokes Václav Havel’s (dissident and last President of Czechoslovakia) essay - The Power of the Powerless (4), which provides moral and philosophical authority to his argument about “living within a lie”. This is a very powerful analogy between communist Czechoslovakia and our contemporary era.

5) Extended Metaphor

A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by stating that one is the other, highlighting similarities for emphasis or symbolism. An extended metaphor implies sustaining a single metaphor throughout the speech. This is in line with the quoting of Havel’s essay, which tells the story of shopkeepers, who placed Marxist mantras in their shop windows that they did not believe in. This “sign in the window” metaphor is central throughout the speech:

• “So, we placed the sign in the window.”
• “It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
• “We are taking the sign out of the window.”

The sign represents performative belief in a fading rules-based order. This metaphor structures the entire speech and gives it emotional coherence, hence, creating a strong link with communism, coercion and the Cold War.

Carney also uses the metaphor of ‘fortresses’ as a visual image to illustrate geopolitical fragmentation. The image of the fortress conveys isolationism and defensive retrenchment in a vivid way. 

• “A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable”
• “… everyone building their own fortresses”
• “The countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.”

Indeed, the most powerful metaphor used by Carney is the ‘restaurant’ metaphor: which was picked up and relayed by the international media (5) :

• ‘If we are not at the table, we are on the menu’.

Metaphor is a powerful rhetorical device as it can convey abstract or complex ideas in concrete terms, hence offering the audience a richer understanding of a complex subject matter.

6) Anaphora (Repetition at the Beginning of Clauses)

This means repeating the word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses for greater emphasis. This repetition builds rhythm in your speech and hammers home key ideas

• “We joined its institutions. We praised its principles. We benefited from its predictability.”
• “It means naming reality…
• It means acting consistently…
• It means building what we claim to believe in…”
• “We have capital. We have talent.”

7) Parallelism

This involves structuring your speech by using parallel grammatical forms (noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.) to improve clarity and provide force. Here for example, the structure reinforces the idea that economic tools are being weaponized:

• “Tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”

Parallel verbs can also be used to create momentum towards a major conclusion in your speech

• “To stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together.”

8) Inclusive Language (collective pronouns – we/you instead of I)

Carney uses ‘we’ to unify speaker and audience to build shared responsibility and solidarity. The speech consistently uses “we,” even when describing national strategy:

• “We are building that strength at home.”
• “We are no longer just relying on the strength of our values…”

Carney uses the plural ‘you’ to appeal to his audience to act, react and take a stand:

• “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration”
• “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.”

9) Moral Framing

Carney elevates policy choices into ethical terms. By framing geopolitical strategy as a moral choice between truth and self-deception, he increases the emotional and ethical resonance of his speech. Some examples in his pithy phrases are:

• “It means naming reality.”
• “Living within a lie.”
• “Honesty about the world as it is.”

10) Climax

The climatic structure in a speech implies a gradual escalation that builds towards a culminating call to action. Carney uses this crescendo effect to give the speech forward momentum and a strong close.

• “The capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together.”

While I have separated these 10 rhetorical devices out for illustrative purposes, good speech writers and presenters often use three or four devices in one sentence or phrase. If we examine the phrase: “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”, you will see that this rhetorical anchor, a memorable, quotable phrase, an aphorism, uses metaphor, inclusive language ‘we’ to build shared responsibility, and grammatical parallelism via a pronoun and prepositional phrase (use of ‘we’ and at the table, on the menu).

Carney’s speech is rhetorically sophisticated, and indeed, he uses many more subtle rhetorical devices such as antimetabole, asyndeton, polyptoton, hyperbole, rhyme, anadiplosis, simplification, signposting, etc. Now, while you are not expected to master all the rhetorical devices available to you, to master the 10 devices outlined above will already prepare you to give a very convincing, persuasive and provoking speech, presentation or pitch. I suggest that you start with your next presentation and integrate two or three techniques to establish greater credibility, provide reasoned arguments and ignite audience emotion.

I hope this brief analysis will help you refine your public speaking skills to better convey your ideas. As is often the case, the best thing to do is to just bite the bullet and get started!

References

(1) Access Mark Carney’s speech on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqHDhO4h10

(2) For more information on how to structure a pitch both linguistically and rhetorically, see:

- Daly, P., & Davy, D. (2016). Crafting the investor pitch using insights from rhetoric and linguistics. In The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research: Reflections on Interacting with the Workplace (pp. 182-203). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304983643_Crafting_the_Investor_Pitch_Using_Insights_from_Rhetoric_and_Linguistics

- Daly, P., & Davy, D. (2016). Structural, linguistic and rhetorical features of the entrepreneurial pitch: Lessons from Dragons’ Den. Journal of Management Development, 35(1), 120-132 - https://www.emerald.com/jmd/article-abstract/35/1/120/242775/Structural-linguistic-and-rhetorical-features-of?redirectedFrom=fulltext

(3) Thucydides (c. 460–400 B.C.E.) was an Athenian historian and general who wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, earning recognition as the father of scientific history and political realism for his evidence-based, analytical approach to historical events.

(4) Havel, V. (2009). The Power of the Powerless (Routledge Revivals): Citizens against the state in Central-Eastern Europe. UK Routledge. Accessible from: 
https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/1979/01/the-power-of-the-powerless.pdf

(5) Matina  Stevis-Gridneff, and Ian Austen (20 January 2026). Canada Flexes on Global Stage With an Eye to Its Own Survival. New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/world/canada/carney-speech-davos-trump.html

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