In his Jan. 20, 2026 speech at the World Economic Forum, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recognized that "multilateral institutions [...] are under threat" and that current crises have "laid bare the risks of extreme global integration."
He recognized that "the story of the international rules-based order was partially false." "You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, " he said, "when integration becomes the source of your subordination."
What should the Government of Canada do? Carney suggested that Canada, as an "intermediate" or "middle power" should "hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture" to "build a new order that encompasses our values."
Canada, he said, should find "different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests." This, he said, "is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It's building coalitions that work – issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together." "We can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just," he said; "This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation."
The intellectual property system is one such system whose mythologies are "partially false." Built through multinational institutions including the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization, international intellectual property institutions are founded on several false mythologies:
Myth 1: The international intellectual property system is working for all. In fact, of the 190+ countries in the world, only 20 or 30 countries see IP money flow in, net. $9 trillion net flowed out of Canada in 2024. Canada certainly gets something for that $9 trillion, including lots of American media....along with dependency on American pharmaceutical companies, technology, software, and platforms. Countries' adhesion to this system has helped to entrench economic inequality, inequitable global access to pharmaceuticals, and global technological dependency on a few global tech companies.
Myth 2: The international intellectual property system must look as it currently does. The history of intellectual property shows that IP can take many different shapes and forms, that various countries have taken different approaches to the term of IP, the rights granted, the limits placed on those rights, whether foreign IP should be recognized via multilateral norms or bilateral or plurilateral arrangements, and even whether to recognize IP at all. (The US refused to join the Berne Convention on copyright, established in 1886, until 1989.)
My book International Copyright and Access to Knowledge discusses many of the ways that countries tried to take diverse approaches to IP in their own national interests--often losing their distinctive values-based approaches as they conceded to the multilateral systems that the great powers increasingly led.
My book The Struggle for Canadian Copyright recounts Canada's limited and failed efforts to establish a coalition of "intermediate countries" who, as net copyright importers, were neither against copyright nor in favour of the strongest form that tended to most see royalties flow south (pp 185-189). These failed efforts showed that coalition building is hard work, takes extensive relationship-building, pre-planning and years of committed institutional support.
The Struggle for Canadian Copyright also notes that the concept of the middle power honest broker advancing democracy and progressive change can be a myth onto itself (pp 9-10). Middle powers like Canada have often acted as legitimators and satellites of the United States and other great powers.
While the United States is retreating from the WTO, it has not exited the World Intellectual Property Organization--an organization in which it has less control than the WTO. At WIPO, Canada is, with the US, a member of Group B. There have been various coalitions of countries advancing visions of intellectual property founded around ideas of global access to medicine and access to knowledge. Canada, as a member of Group B, has rarely joined such coalitions--though it has, at times, shown limited leadership. Will Canadian diplomats and negotiators now put in the elbow grease to form "different coalitions" at WIPO and other IP negotiating venues--possibly joining in on some of the coalitions it has, to date, been hamstrung from joining due to its adherence to Group B norms? Might other members of Group B follow?
What might new coalitions achieve? Might they bolster the work being done at WIPO on innovative limitations and exceptions to benefit libraries, archives, people with disabilities, educational institutions, or provisions on AI? Might they bolster the decades-long work to recognize Indigenous knowledge? (Having for many years facilitated and legitimized the plunder of Indigenous knowledge, WIPO has now failed to fund Indigenous peoples' in-person participation in these discussions.)
A path of new coalitions is not, as Campbell Clark recently observed, going to be easy. Neither will it necessarily lead to a more just system. It will take significant political support, will, resources, and vision. Other countries have done it. Canada has done it too, on occasion. With whom will Canada form these coalitions? What might a bigger, better, stronger, and more just intellectual property system look like?
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