To discern how Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government sees Canada’s place in a radically changed world, the federal budget tabled this week won’t help you as much as you might think. There’s a lot there — the budget’s $78.3-billion deficit is the third highest in Canadian history — but what’s not there may give you a better idea. How Canada is seen in the big, weird outside world — that too has utterly changed.

We’ve got enough of a sense of what Carney says about the historic upheaval in Canada’s trade relations with the United States, and the budget document describes the dramatically changed circumstances as an “age of disorder.” There has been a “rupture” in Canada-U.S. relations specifically and in the global economic order generally. “The old world,” Carney told Asian leaders in Ko

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