Prime Minister Mark Carney realizes there is too much to lose in a trade war with an opponent more than 10 times bigger and a leader who is trigger-happy.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Watching that circus with Donald Trump and Mark Carney in the Oval Office, didn’t you feel a pit in your stomach?
Peter Donolo, the former adviser to Jean Chrétien, did.
How humiliating, the longtime Liberal told the CBC, to see our Prime Minister “buttering him up” to try and get relief on tariffs. And then sitting there “like a potted plant” while “Trump ranted and raved for half an hour.”
Of course this wasn’t any ordinary President. This, noted Mr. Donolo, was the one “holding a knife to our throats,” while turning his country more and more “authoritarian, sending police after political opponents.”
Is this a United States, he wondered, that we want to integrate with? Where is our pride? Our principles? Is it all about dollars and cents?
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In a trade war with an opponent more than 10 times bigger and a leader who is trigger-happy, Mr. Carney realizes there is too much to lose by confrontation. So he chose to kowtow, to pour on the praise, to tell Mr. Trump, who has treated Canada worse than any other President, that he was doing a great job.
In all the meetings between presidents and prime ministers I’ve researched going back to the 1800s, one of the only ones that could top Tuesday’s schmoozefest was the Shamrock summit in 1985, when Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney co-sang When Irish Eyes are Smiling.
That was when relations were harmonious. This week’s hand-holding gallingly came when we are at, as former ambassador to the U.S. Frank McKenna noted, “the lowest point in relations that I can recall.”
“What I can’t abide,” observed Mr. Donolo in an e-mail, “is this normalization of Trump and Trumpism.”
That’s well said. But if there’s a good deal on trade and defence with Washington on the way – and it does seem possible – all will be forgiven.
Mr. Carney told Mr. Trump he was “a transformative president” who had achieved economic successes, and unprecedented peace deals with several countries.
Many of the tariffs applied by Mr. Trump have been ruled illegal by lower courts and could well be thrown out in a Supreme Court verdict coming next month. Our side never even mentions this. In the Oval Office, Mr. Carney gave the President a pass on basing his punitive tariffs on a trickle of fentanyl crossing our border into his country.
Having had his ring kissed, the President returned the favour. “He’s a great Prime Minister,” he said of Mr. Carney. “He is a world-class leader, he’s a man that knows what he wants.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney told Mr. Trump that Canada would make an estimated $1-trillion worth of investments in the United States in the next five years, if Canada gets the 'deal we expect to get' from the U.S.
Mr. Carney, who realizes that good personal relations with this President are critically important given the extent of his narcissism, is working two tracks. One is to make Canada more independent by diversifying trade abroad and pursuing nationalist economic initiatives at home. He sounds an overly optimistic game on this, saying recently, “We can give ourselves far more than the United States can take away.”
But he very much wants to secure the trade access to the United States that has been built up over the decades by getting Mr. Trump to go easy on his tariffs. And if he has to turn a blind eye to all of Mr. Trump’s outrages on other fronts, he seems prepared to do so.
On Tuesday, Mr. Carney appeared to catch the President in fine humour. Mr. Trump’s Gaza peace initiative was winning him much praise. He made it sound like Canadians would get a deal on trade they would be happy with. “I think the people of Canada, they will love us again,” Mr. Trump said. “A lot of them, I think they love us.”
He’s not entirely incorrect on that. Large numbers in Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party support Mr. Trump; a June EKOS poll found that 36 per cent of Conservative voters approved of the President. Mr. Poilievre isn’t about to challenge them. He needs their backing.
But while Mr. Trump sounded positive on this day, he is so mercurial there is no telling what he’ll be thinking next. He recently followed a second glorious state visit to Britain with brutal swipes at Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who had been so sycophantic to him, for his environment and immigration policies.
Though Mr. Carney hasn’t scored wins on the trade front, his maintenance of a good rapport with Mr. Trump, in contrast to Justin Trudeau’s efforts, has kept the President defanged.
While many will share Mr. Donolo’s anger about the Prime Minister’s deference, most realize he doesn’t have much choice. Were he to speak truths about Mr. Trump’s governance, it would be comforting for our national pride – but we can only imagine the repercussions.