When Mark Carney sat with the New York Times, most of Canada argued about an invasion. Then it argued about immigration. A smaller group heard a different sentence. A system that depends entirely on the U.S. dollar, he said, is unsustainable. Several reserve currencies would, in the Times's rendering, "provide more flexibility." He added a condition. China's currency and markets would have to open up first. He has said versions of this for years. He said this one as prime minister.
That is the idea, and it is the only one. A second reserve currency is not a hedge if you cannot audit it. The dollar is the pipe. It prices Canadian metals, energy, debt, and the exit from all three. Sharing that pipe with a closed market does not give an investor more doors. Sharing it with a state that takes the technology, and keeps the rules, does not either. It gives them a door they cannot see through. This piece is not a recommendation to buy or sell any currency, metal, or share.
The job changed. The sentence did not.
Dennis Molinaro put the point on Brian's program without a warm-up. He teaches security studies and international affairs at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. He is a former Canadian national-security analyst. His book is Under Assault. The subtitle is Interference and Espionage in China's Secret War Against Canada. It is a finalist for the 2026 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. He was not on the show to sell a thriller. A head of government had repeated a monetary idea in a paper the Americans read. That is why he was there.
He said the title matters. A Bank of England governor can muse in a seminar. He can muse in a book. A prime minister of a G7 country is different. Say it to a major outlet, and you are no longer musing. People should hear it as something he is considering. Molinaro's judgment was blunt. Pursuing that line would be a fundamental mistake. A Liberal friend of the host heard the same comments. He called it something like a declaration of war on the United States. Molinaro did not need that phrase. He needed the plumbing.
The plumbing is old. After the Second World War, Bretton Woods tied the system to gold and to the dollar. The gold link broke. The dollar link did not. The United States sits at the centre of the system Canada sells into. The rules run through that centre. So do the clearing, the safe asset, and the sanction. So does the price of a barrel and an ounce. Molinaro noted the irony. The prime minister says he believes in a rules-based order. In the markets, that order is anchored by the currency he now calls unsustainable as a sole reserve. You can want the order and still pull at its anchor. You should not pretend the anchor is decorative.
What flexibility means when the second market is closed
Flexibility is a pleasant word. It suggests a spare tire. One currency wobbles. Another holds the car. That is not what a reserve currency is. A reserve is what central banks hold. It is what contracts are written in. It is what you can sell on a Sunday night when you need cash in a hurry. The dollar fills that role because the market behind it is deep. The law is boring. The asset you buy with it, a Treasury, has a buyer. A currency you cannot freely move is not a spare tire. If you cannot price it or hedge it, it is a picture of a tire.
Carney, as the Times interview was reported, did not skip this. He said China's currency and markets would need to change. They would need to open. That sentence is the whole investment case. It is the sentence the political fight dropped. If opening up is a condition, the multi-polar system is a hope. The hope sits on a reform Beijing has not delivered. If he says it anyway, as prime minister, he is advertising the hope as policy. Investors do not get paid in hopes. They get paid in a unit they can exit.
Molinaro reads the hope as alignment. China has wanted a break in the dollar system. So have other BRICS states. He said India has backed away from that project. Russia has not. China has not. A Canadian prime minister is putting a multi-polar reserve on the table. China sits inside the idea. Molinaro finds that hard to explain, except as a move toward that camp and away from the American one. You do not have to accept his whole reading. You do have to accept a narrower fact. The other reserve he is pointing at is the one Washington will treat as a rival. It is also the one its owner has not opened.
The 1990s bet, and the shops it emptied
Molinaro tied the currency talk to an older faith. In his book, he wrote, Carney puts great trust in more trade with China. He also trusts a multi-polar currency as a better way to organize the world. That faith, Molinaro said, is the liberalism of the 1990s. Trade would make peace. China would join the World Trade Organization. In time it would resemble the club it had joined. China, he said, never believed the second half. It used the markets to acquire technology. It used them to modernize the People's Liberation Army. It still does.
He and the host did not leave this as a mood. They named wrecks. Nortel was once Canada's technology champion. It was riddled with Chinese espionage. A large part of its demise, the host said, came from that theft. Molinaro agreed. The host added a picture that is hard to forget if you have walked the building. Nortel's Ottawa headquarters is now the Department of National Defence. It was so full of bugs, he said, that the military had to strip it to the studs before it could move in. Molinaro's book tells the Nortel story as plunder of intellectual property. It is not a one-off burglary. One campus, stripped, is a metaphor only if you insist on metaphor. It is also a floor plan.
The American example on the tape was American Superconductor and Sinovel. Sinovel is the Chinese wind-turbine company. The partnership was sold, in the early 2000s, as green energy. China was going to lead a green revolution. What moved, Molinaro said, was technology. It was stolen. The U.S. Department of Justice indicted. There was a conviction. The American firm nearly went under. It survived, smaller. Molinaro called this the Western graveyard. Companies go to China to get rich. The technology leaves. The graveyard is not a reason never to sell a tonne of potash to a Chinese buyer. It is not a reason never to sell a pound of copper. It is a reason not to confuse a purchase order with a partnership. It is a reason not to confuse a partnership with a monetary system.
A mine is not Nortel. The ore does not fit on a server. The lesson still transfers. The lesson is about who writes the contract once the technology is inside their fence. The same question applies to the offtake and the financing. A reserve currency is a contract everyone has already signed. Putting a closed system on the signature line does not make the ore safer. It makes the unit of account a political favour. Favours get revised.
The war that does not look like a war
The host asked a fair question. If this is a secret war, why do Canadians not seem to know they are in it. He cited a poll from that week. More than half of respondents, he said, saw the United States as an enemy or an adversary. About 32 percent said that of China. He listed the two Michaels. He listed repeated tariffs. He listed industrial espionage. If the host had the poll right, the danger was pointed the other way. Molinaro did not treat the ignorance as proof the conflict is hidden. He said it has been open for decades. What China does well is influence. Lately it has done it well enough that a poll can flip.
He dated the flip. From roughly 2022 into 2023, after the Michaels, views of China were far harsher. The reversal since then, he said, is not explained by saying Trump forever. That explanation gets tired. What filled the air, in his account, was access. Since 2023, PRC ambassadors have had op-eds. They have had Globe and Mail interviews. They have had CTV appearances. He says he had not seen a run of airtime like it. CBC, he said, has carried glowing coverage. Reporters have filed from Beijing. Around the electric-vehicle arrangement, that access had a subject. Friendly coverage, kept up for a long time, is not neutral weather. It is a campaign, whether or not every reporter intends one.
He went further. The further part should be labeled as his bet, not as a document in this piece. He said he would bet that Beijing is running the influence methods it has used for years. He said it is using Canada's fight with Trump as the opening. The host added a concrete claim from X. The company, he said, had suspended about 200,000 accounts. Those accounts pushed a story about data centres across North America. The centres would take the water. They would raise the power bill. They would harm health. The push, he said, was Chinese. China wants to win the AI contest. Molinaro's point was simpler than the platform detail. China does not have to invent Canadian anger at Trump. It only has to help the sentence people already repeat. Trump is driving Canada into China's arms. If that sentence becomes policy, the currency comment is not a side remark. It is the monetary chapter of the same walk.
The car deal that arrived before the negotiation
Molinaro put a date on the walk. Before the summer talks of 2026, he said, Ottawa arranged to bring Chinese electric vehicles into Canada. He recalled earlier talk, in 2023, of partnering with China on defence training. Then came the first EV discussions in 2025. The 2026 deal, in his telling, was done before the bargaining with Washington. That bargaining was bound to sour. The United States has been plain. It does not want Chinese goods entering its market through a neighbour's back door. A government in Ottawa would have known that. Molinaro would not say the provocation was intentional. He said nobody outside the room can know. He also said the government was in the best seat to know what Washington would hate.
The host did not linger on intent. He said Doug Ford had called the cars spy cars. More evidence, he said, had surfaced in the past week. He also said the tariff fight over those cars is not a Trump hobby. The original push for a 100 percent tariff, he said, came from Democrats. They did not want the vehicles in. They still do not. A Canadian voter can enjoy a politician who pokes Washington. The poke, on this file, hits both parties. Plants in auto states are bipartisan property. A senator does not vote to wipe them out because a Canadian prime minister is annoyed at one president.
That is the sentence Molinaro wanted on the currency, too. Sharing the reserve system with China would draw opposition from both parties. It would challenge the American position itself. The United States is not one man in the middle of one term. There is a country. There is a security apparatus. There is a government that will still be there when the desk changes. Tariffs, in his view, are probably not going away. The block on Chinese EVs is probably not going away. The push to protect supply chains is a preparation for a possible war with China. So is the push to bring factories home. Neither depends on a party label. Europe, he said, is already speaking this way. France and Germany are protecting industries against Chinese goods that eat their supply chains. Canada is still talking up a strategic partnership with Beijing. To him, that looks backward. The key words are the last two. Not more trade. A strategic partnership. Trade is a shipment. A partnership is a side.
What this does to a price
Investors in mines, energy, and the Canadian dollar live inside the pipe. They live there whether they follow monetary speeches or not. Copper, gold, oil, uranium, and potash are priced in dollars. The customer may be in Asia. The invoice is usually not in yuan. A royalty is written in the unit the banks will still take on a bad day. So is a streaming deal. So is a project loan. So is a hedge book. If your own government contests that unit, you have not gained a second market. You have added a political risk to the unit you already use.
Gold is the trap in this argument. It should be faced. A weaker dollar, over time, has often been kind to the gold price. A holder of bullion can hear "end the dollar's monopoly" and feel richer. The kindness is not the same thing as a Canadian mine becoming safer. The mine pays wages, power, and royalties in a local system. It sells into a dollar price. It raises capital from funds that measure risk in Washington's rate. They do not measure it off a speech at the United Nations. Ottawa can pick a monetary fight with the centre of that system. The gold price can rise. The Canadian paper can still be treated as a problem. A higher ounce does not refund a financing that a lender will not roll. If you own the metal and the miner, know which one you actually hold.
There is a second trap. It runs the other way. Some readers will take Molinaro's warning as a reason to dump every firm that sells to China. That is not what the tape supports. China buys real tonnes. A potash mine with a Chinese customer has a commercial exposure. A copper mine does too. That exposure can be sized. It can be disclosed. Sometimes it can be replaced. The exposure Molinaro is describing is different. A prime minister is proposing to change the monetary architecture. He wants China's currency nearer the centre. The same state is still running the influence and the theft he documents. You can sell them concentrate. You can still refuse them the reserve. The speech blurs those two acts into one idea of flexibility. The blur is the risk.
A partnership is not an offtake
Say the distinction in operating language. An offtake is a contract for tonnes. It has a price. It has a term. It has a buyer who can pay. The buyer can be Chinese. The risk is credit. The risk is politics. The risk is that the metal ends up in a supply chain your other customers will not touch. That risk belongs in a model. A strategic partnership, in the sense that worried the host, is a different act. It treats that buyer as a co-author of the rules. Reserve status is a rule. It says whose liabilities are the world's savings. Giving a share of that status to a system that still needs to "open up" later is signing the co-author line before the edit.
Molinaro's graveyard is what the edit has looked like in industry. The partner takes the process. The Western firm keeps the lawsuit. Nortel did not fail because Canadians were rude to a customer. American Superconductor did not stagger because wind power was a bad idea. The pattern is a partner who wants the capability and does not want a peer. A currency partner of that type does not become a peer because a Canadian prime minister says multipolar. Multipolar describes a map. It does not describe a court that will enforce your contract when the map moves.
The host's poll, if it holds, says the public mood is ready for the blur. Half see the ally as the enemy. A third see the rival that way. Mood is not a reserve. Reserve assets are chosen in a panic. They are chosen by people who want the thing that clears. In the panics of recent decades, that thing has been the dollar. It has been the dollar even for governments that spend the good years complaining about it. A policy that bets Canada's monetary future on the exception should show the exception working first. Open Chinese markets. Open in a crisis. A foreign holder able to leave. Carney said that change is required. It is not a description of the present.
What you can underwrite, and what you cannot
You cannot underwrite flexibility. It is not a yield. It is not a spread. It is not a reserve number in the next IMF table. It is a direction. It comes from a prime minister who used to say it as a central banker. He now says it as the client of the alliance he is revising. Directions move speeches. They do not, by themselves, move the bid for a Treasury. They do not move the bid for a copper cathode.
You can underwrite the condition he already stated. If China's markets are not open, the yuan is not a reserve in the sense an investor means. Treat any Canadian policy that assumes it is, or soon will be, as a political position. It is not a market fact. Someone may tell you a multi-polar system makes your Canadian gold stock safer. Ask what you are paid in. Ask who clears it. Ask what happens to the clearing if Washington decides the Canadian door is a Chinese door. If they cannot answer, they are selling the speech.
You can underwrite a commercial exposure without underwriting the architecture. A firm that sells a disclosed share of output to China is a credit risk. It is a jurisdiction risk. Read the offtake. Read the prepay. Read whether the equipment, the process, or the data also travels. The Nortel case is the warning for that second list. The Sinovel case is the same warning. Neither is a hex on a plain sales contract. A mine that ships ore and keeps its process at home is not a technology shop. A technology shop that moved the process into the partner's plant is a different firm. Do not punish them with the same multiple. Do not excuse them with the same speech.
You can underwrite the bipartisan constraint. Molinaro's useful line for a portfolio is that the United States is not the president. Auto states have constituencies in both parties. So do supply-chain rules. So does the reserve itself. A Canadian strategy that needs those to soften is a strategy with one scenario. It needs a new face in the White House to do the softening. The EV tariffs did not start as a one-party idea, on the host's account. The reserve will not become a one-party souvenir. Price the country, not the man. The man changes. The incentive to keep the centre of the system does not.
You cannot underwrite the poll. A survey that calls the United States an enemy is a fact about opinion, if the numbers are real. It is not a fact about who buys the metal. It is not a fact about who keeps open the sea lane the metal moves on. A portfolio that follows the poll into a strategic partnership is following a mood into a contract. A contract with a closed financial system is harder to leave than a mood. The exit is the entire point of a reserve. If you cannot leave, it is not a reserve. It is a relationship.
What would make this reading wrong
The reading is wrong, on the money, if China actually opens the currency and the market in a way a foreign holder can test. Not a quota. Not a window that shuts in a crisis. A market where a Canadian pension can buy, sell, and leave. A miner's customer should be able to do the same. So should a central bank. The rules should not change when the politics do. Carney said that opening is required. If it happens, the spare tire starts to look like a tire. Until it happens, the sentence is an invitation. It is not a market.
The reading is wrong, on the politics, if Washington treats a Canadian push for several reserve currencies as a technical debate. Molinaro does not expect that. He thinks both parties would hear a threat to the American position. If the next administration shrugs, of either party, his bipartisan claim fails. The shrug would be the evidence. A sharp reaction would confirm the part of his case that does not depend on liking or hating any one president.
The reading is wrong, on the graveyard, if the next decade of partnership looks different. Shared technology would have to stay shared. Canadian firms would not have to strip their own buildings to find the microphones. One Nortel is a history. A pattern that stops is a change. Molinaro's book argues the pattern has run for decades. Canadian leaders, he argues, keep seeing a market where there is also an operation. A change in that pattern would be news. A new speech is not the change.
The idea, once
Mark Carney told the New York Times that a system wholly tied to the U.S. dollar is unsustainable. Several reserve currencies, he said, would provide more flexibility. He also said China's currency and markets would need to open. Dennis Molinaro, on Brian's program, said a prime minister floating this is not a central banker thinking aloud. He called it a mistake. He tied it to a 1990s faith in trade with China. Nortel has already tested that faith. So has Sinovel. So has a long influence campaign. The host's worry was two words. Strategic partnership. More trade is a shipment. A partnership is a side. A reserve currency is a side.
The dollar is the pipe Canadian assets are priced in. A second reserve that is still closed is not a hedge. It is a landlord you cannot audit. Flexibility is a speech. The exit is the investment.
A note on sources and limits
Molinaro's comments are from his appearance on Brian's program, in the transcript used here. That includes his remarks on the prime minister's role, Bretton Woods, and BRICS. It includes India, the 1990s trade bet, Nortel, and American Superconductor. It includes Sinovel, media access, the EV timeline, and the bipartisan nature of U.S. opposition. The host's poll is the host's. So is the X account figure. So is the spy-car remark. So is the history of the 100 percent EV tariff. They are attributed that way. Carney's wording is as reported from his New York Times interview. A system wholly tied to the dollar is unsustainable. Several reserve currencies would "provide more flexibility." China's currency and markets would need to liberalize. The book title, Molinaro's post, and the Balsillie finalist listing are from the publisher's record. Names the raw transcript garbled are corrected here. That includes Molinaro and Sinovel. Claims about bugs in a former Nortel building are allegations as spoken. So is any claim about intent behind the EV deal. So is the claim about Chinese accounts on X. They are not findings of this article.
Nothing here is investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any security, currency, or commodity. Reserve regimes change slowly. Speeches are not regimes. Commodity prices can dominate a monetary headline for years. So can permit risk. So can offtake credit. Readers should read the interview, the book, and the company filings. They should speak with a licensed adviser before any decision.