Politics

Canada’s soft-power flex

Published

2 hours ago

June 20, 2026

OTTAWA — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s rousing Davos speech, where he called on middle powers to not become losers to the world’s “hegemons,” delivered a message that positioned Canada as an influential convening power.

Now, with billions watching — including during this afternoon’s match between Germany and Côte d’Ivoire in Toronto — the World Cup is giving Canada an unprecedented opportunity to thirst-trap a global audience to take America’s neighbor a little more seriously.

“The international brand of Canada is important for our economy, for our place in the world, diplomatically, but also commercially,” Canada’s Secretary of State for Sport and Olympic gold medalist Adam van Koeverden told Blue Light News.

“We just want to emphasize that Canada is open for business,” he said. “We’re taking advantage of the reality that all eyes will be on Canada for the next couple of weeks throughout the FIFA tournament … and we want to continue to reinforce relationships, make new friends [and] meet new corporate partners.”

Canada needs foreign investors to get the Carney government’s dreams of building oil pipelines, new rail and port expansions to unlock new wealth for a country that continues to be the target of tariffs and casual annexation threats from its closest ally. And a bellicose U.S. President Donald Trump has only helped Carney in his trips around the world to lure more foreign investment, selling Canada as a reliable destination to an unreliable United States.

A goal for senior Canadian government officials is to use the World Cup to bait deep-pocketed viewers to attend the inaugural Canada Investment Summit that Carney is organizing in September. The idea is to attract “the world’s largest investors” to raise C$1 trillion over the next five years to charge the economy — Carney’s message of adapting to the global “rupture” by wresting economic control of the future put into practice.

That could mean more cash to expand sport infrastructure, such as stadiums, to host more global sporting events. The Toronto Stadium is notably the World Cup’s smallest among the 16 host cities with a 43,000-seat capacity. But organizers don’t want people to fixate on that.

Sharon Bollenbach, executive director of the FIFA World Cup 2026 Toronto Secretariat, told Forecast the city is leaning in hard on its “world in a city” theme — a nod to a city widely recognized as the most multicultural in the world.

“We speak 250 languages in our city,” she said. “Our cultural diversity is very extensive and vibrant … in all of our neighborhoods, in food, in the culture.” Asked what’s different about Toronto compared to Los Angeles, another city that could claim the same characteristics, Bollenbach suggested it’s the general optimism in the air that sets the Canadian city apart. “I think we just live that every day in such a positive and energetic way that that’s something we really want to showcase,” she said.

There’s hope the waterfront images of Toronto’s CN Tower and Vancouver’s North Shore mountains in the backdrop of World Cup stadium shots will generate an eventual tourism boom that hasn’t yet happened for the tournament itself.

Sara Anghel, president and CEO of the Greater Toronto Hotel Association, said one factor in lower-than-expected demand is that half the game tickets sold in Toronto are “local-ish” from the city area and province. The trend isn’t unique to Toronto after FIFA canceled blocks of thousands of hotel rooms in host cities this spring in response to fizzled out expectations.

“June is already a really, really busy month for Toronto, and so when we’re bringing this World Cup that’s never happened in our city ever, we’ve displaced all of the meetings and conferences that would usually come into the city,” Anghel said.

“They’re staying away because of the FIFA games.”

Politics

The happiest World Cup game

Published

26 minutes ago

June 20, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.

In today’s item, we’re looking at countries sorted by their FIFA rank against their citizens’ assessment of how close they are to living their best possible life.

Turns out, the happiest game of the World Cup will be Sweden vs. the Netherlands today (that’s also the only group-stage game taking place between two EU members) — while the upcoming game between Haiti and Morocco on June 25 may well be interrupted by floods of tears and bouts of introspection.

Politics

In the World Cup’s missing country, failure sparks bitter political battle

Published

26 minutes ago

June 20, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

ROME — Donald Trump isn’t the only problem on Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s mind.

Failure to qualify for the FIFA men’s World Cup for the third consecutive time triggered a major political and public outcry in the football-obsessed country that has now morphed into a bitter fight over who controls the sport.

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party leaped to propose curtailing the power of the country’s football association — the Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio (FIGC) — after its president, the 72-year-old Gabriele Gravina, resigned in April under heavy pressure following a World Cup playoff defeat to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

With new elections to run the FIGC slated for June 22, Meloni’s allies are pushing to call off the vote and place the body under special administration — an emergency procedure used in the past for the sport to overcome major corruption scandals.

In a country where football carries outsized cultural weight, Italy’s World Cup embarrassment has become a proxy battle over governance, reforms, investment and the Meloni administration’s willingness to extend political influence into independent institutions.

“The first concern should not be new elections; it is not through elections that you create the conditions for a rebound,” Italian Sports Minister Andrea Abodi said in an interview with Blue Light News.

Football officials have denounced the government intervention as a power play to block the heavy favorite, Giovanni Malagò, a former president of the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) who is disliked by Meloni’s party.

“The idea of placing it [the FIGC] under administration, to me, only suggests an occupation [by the government]; it offers no kind of perspective for the future,” Gravina told Blue Light News from his Rome office, adorned by two twinkling World Cup trophies and other relics from a bygone era of glory. “The idea of taking over the football world has been circulating for far too long now,” he added.

Opposition parties have accused Meloni of centralizing control, stifling dissent and putting acolytes in positions of power, a pattern they observe in Italy’s state-owned television network, financial markets supervisor and judicial system.

But the government rejects that it wants to extend its reach to the FIGC. “It is a pathetic and baseless claim. There is no element that could be seen as an attempt by politics to take over this domain,” Abodi said.

Read the full story from Gregorio Sorgi here.