In the quiet, carpeted corridors of Montreal this week, two of the world’s most comfortable trading partners are leaning across the mahogany to see how much closer they can stand. Mark Carney, the globe-trotting central banker turned political compass, has arrived to help steer the conversation between Canadian and European Union officials. They will speak of shared values, of friendshoring, of securing supply chains and stitching together their defence architectures against an increasingly unruly world. Whether Canada ends up designated as an associate member of anything or merely a very dear cousin matters very little to the bureaucrats drafting the text. What matters is the instinct behind the gathering: the wealthy world is drawing its wagons into a circle.
To understand what a summit in Montreal truly means, however, you have to travel several thousand miles south, away from the autumn chill of Quebec and into places like the arid plains of the Catamarca in Argentina, or the copper belt of Zambia. There, women like Maria—who watches the water tables drop beneath her community’s grazing lands every time another foreign-owned brine extraction well opens—do not receive copies of the communiqué. Yet every single line negotiated by men in tailored suits in Montreal depends entirely on what is dug out from under Maria’s feet. When the North Atlantic speaks of securing economic ties and accelerating the energy transition, it is speaking, in the polite language of trade policy, about securing the minerals of others without sharing the wealth or the technology that turns rock into power.
The North Atlantic alliance has always operated on an unspoken covenant: wealth and security are retained within the family, while risk and ecological debt are quietly exported across the equator. Over the past decade, that bargain has grown more urgent and less polite. Panicked by shifting geopolitics and the rise of alternative poles of power across Asia and Latin America, Europe and North America are racing to construct what they term critical mineral alliances. It is an enterprise framed as green stewardship, but to the communities living on the extraction frontiers, it looks remarkably like the same mercantilism their grandparents fought to throw off. The rich world wants clean air in its capitals and electric vehicles on its highways, but it demands that the South remain a warehouse of unrefined dirt.
Carney’s presence in these rooms is telling. For years, he has stood as the quintessential architect of market-driven climate finance, preaching a gospel in which private capital, properly nudged by technocrats, will voluntarily rescue the planet. But those of us who watch this from Nairobi, Jakarta, or Santiago know how that gospel plays out in practice. In the developing world, climate finance rarely arrives as debt-free grants or genuine technology transfer. Instead, it arrives as loans that swell already crushing sovereign debt burdens, paired with demands that fragile economies de-risk the balance sheets of Western institutional investors. The profits return north; the debt and the polluted tailings ponds remain firmly in the South.
There is a cruel irony in watching Canada and Europe discuss deeper defence and economic integration at a moment when the multilateral system is cracking under the weight of their own double standards. Across Africa and Latin America, governments are being lectured on the sanctity of the rules-based international order by the very powers that created exceptions for themselves whenever domestic interests required it. When European capitals establish carbon border taxes that penalize developing manufacturers, or when North America subsidies its own industries while demanding fiscal austerity from debtors, the message is unmistakable. There is one set of rules for the club, and another for the supplier states outside its gates.
What is being quietly fortified in Montreal is a fortress economy. By seeking to coordinate procurement, streamline trade, and harmonize their strategic postures, Canada and the European Union are attempting to insulate themselves from the tremors of a rebalancing world. They want the stability of an empire without the moral responsibility of governing one. They want African lithium and Latin American copper, but they do not want to reform the global financial architecture that forces those same nations to choose between servicing high-interest foreign debt and funding primary schools for their children.
It does not have to be this way. A truly forward-looking partnership between nations would not focus merely on how rich democracies can protect each other’s balance sheets and military arsenals. It would begin with a reckoning over who bears the cost of the global economy’s appetites. It would ask why value addition is still denied to the countries where resources originate, and why the institutions managing global trade continue to treat two-thirds of humanity as an afterthought. Until the delegates in Montreal are willing to invite the people who actually dig their green future out of the earth into the room as equals, their communiqués will remain what they have always been: polished pacts between comfortable neighbors, written on paper that someone else had to bleed to buy.