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According to the Angus Reid Institute, Canadians have “widespread detestation” of U.S. President Donald Trump: 79 per cent viewed him unfavourably as of Aug. 5, and that was before trade talks collapsed and Trump decreed a new name for Lake Ontario.
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For Prime Minister Mark Carney’s political prospects, however, Trump is the gift that keeps on giving — leading Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady to ask in a recent piece: “Is President Trump secretly working for Canada’s Liberal party?”
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The prime minister’s partisan interests are bound up with the public’s visceral impulse to confront Trump’s bullying, putting him in a conflict of interest when his elbows-up policy risks undermining the national interest.
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To end 18 months of economic uncertainty, Canada needs a trade deal. But getting one means making compromises with a president who loves tariffs, views trade negotiation as a zero-sum game and mistakenly believes Canada is ripping him off. So any agreement will be challenging to sell politically. Fifteen-per-cent auto tariffs and possibly a 25 per cent tariff on heavy trucks were clearly a bridge too far for Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
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Most observers agree that Mark Carney owes his election victory to the surge in patriotism generated by Trump’s threats — even though Trump said during the campaign that the Liberal leader was “very nice” and they “agreed on many things.” The ballot question was which leader could best deal with Trump and voters evidently believed Carney was. Public opinion has since gradually shifted to the view that no one can deal with Trump, who now refers to our “nasty leadership.”
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As Carney tells it, he withdrew from the trade talks because of last-minute demands from the U.S. But John Ivison has disclosed on these pages that the real reason Carney scuppered the deal was Ford’s opposition. Unfortunately, our government stubbornly refuses to divulge details to Canadians, so questions linger.
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Carney says American demands jeopardized French-language rights, which was a red line for Canada. But U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer quickly defused that issue, referring to it as a “funny, fake story.” Overnight, French-language labelling and online discoverability were off the table.
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Carney also claimed that the Americans tried at the last minute “to restrict our ability to have other trade deals” and require us to match certain American tariffs against third countries. But he conceded that common external tariffs could make sense in integrated sectors such as steel, though only if Canadian products received preferential access to the United States. He didn’t add that in 2018 Canada accepted the CUSMA “China clause,” under which entering into a free-trade agreement with a “non-market country” would permit the U.S. and Mexico to terminate CUSMA with Canada. Because the detailed notes have not been disclosed, we don’t know how extensively Washington sought to restrict Canada’s trade or which countries were targeted.