Imagine, if you will, a prime minister first installed and then elected, because Canadians believed he was uniquely equipped to deal with Donald Trump. Our hypothetical prime minister has impeccable credentials, international connections, central banking experience, serious suits, and the reassuring manner of a man who appears to know exactly which fork to use while the dining room burns down around him.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, his political identity rests on one enormously useful proposition: Only he can handle Trump.<\/p>\n
Now imagine the negotiations aren’t going particularly well. Not outright disastrous, at least not yet. Just difficult. Canada makes concessions. Ottawa drops the Digital Services Tax, removes most retaliatory tariffs, and American alcohol and supply management are on the table.<\/p>\n
Still, negotiations continue, but then something changes.<\/p>\n
On August 18, Trump postpones the new 50 per cent tariffs for three days after the two sides report “substantial progress”. By August 20, Canada’s trade minister says they’re “very close” to a deal. Reporting suggests the agreement under discussion could halve steel and aluminum tariffs and reduce tariffs on Canadian-built vehicles from 25 to 15 per cent.<\/p>\n
And then … poof!<\/p>\n
No deal. Do not pass go, consider this farce terminated.<\/p>\n
The 50 per cent tariffs take effect. Carney suspends negotiations, the Canadian negotiators come home, and Ottawa announces retaliation. Washington says Canada backed away from commitments while Ottawa resolutely asserts Washington changed the terms at the last minute.<\/p>\n
Well, that’s pretty fricking interesting, isn’t it?<\/p>\n
So naturally our hypothetical prime minister takes to the airwaves and explains exactly what happened. Except he doesn’t, not with any actual clarity.<\/p>\n
He speaks for more than twenty minutes, probably moistly, wandering from storms and changing climates to sovereignty and resilience, then through infrastructure, LNG, nuclear power, housing, defence, diversification and investment. By the time he finishes, we’ve practically navigated the entire federal government, several industries and the weather forecast.<\/p>\n
Canada, we learn, is “master in our own home”. Well, isn’t that just terrific! What happened to the bloody trade deal?! Carney says the Americans introduced new terms that were “uneconomic” and “unfair”. They “asked too much and offered too little”. Who is going to draw the short straw and tell Carney those are adjectives and conclusions, and not terms?<\/p>\n
Then comes a particularly curious bit. Carney says Washington also sought restrictions affecting Canada’s future trade relationships with other countries.<\/p>\n
Other … countries.<\/p>\n
But he never actually tells us which countries Washington was talking about, exactly what restrictions were being demanded, or which “certain sectors” he meant when he admitted the Americans wanted Canada to coordinate tariffs against other countries. Stranger still, Carney conceded that Canada could actually see merit in some of it as part of the right deal.<\/p>\n
So which countries? Which sectors? And which parts of this supposedly unacceptable assault on Canadian sovereignty did you actually find reasonable? Suddenly the man who just spent twenty minutes talking develops an acute shortage of proper nouns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I mentioned the other day, I don’t believe Prime Minister Mark Carney ever intended to reach a trade agreement with the United States, because it was far better for his domestic political situation to have the US — and especially Donald Trump — as a focal point for retired Canadian boomers to trigger a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,25,84,28,53,13],"tags":[432,1037,1583,1185],"class_list":["post-104371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-government","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-diplomacy","tag-donaldtrump","tag-markcarney","tag-tariffs"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-r9p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104371"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104375,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104371\/revisions\/104375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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