Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives at his office on Parliament Hill on April 29, in Ottawa.DAVE CHAN/AFP/Getty Images
The global establishment has found its hero. In Europe, Mark Carney’s election victory was celebrated as a repudiation of everything Donald Trump represents. Multilateralists everywhere are hailing Canada’s Prime Minister as their champion and populist slayer.
Mr. Carney is a natural for the role. He is more comfortable working with cerebral European leaders on new alliances than negotiating with the low-information U.S. President. As a CNN reporter wrote this week of Mr. Carney: “You don’t get much more establishment than a Prime Minister who studied at Harvard and Oxford and ran two central banks.”
Yet, the success of his prime ministership will hinge far more on salvaging Canada’s relationship with the United States than on developing new export markets for our resources and manufacturers. Like it or not, Canada’s economic future is still overwhelmingly tied to North America. While doing more business with Europe and Asia will be important, Canada-U.S. trade flows will remain the lifeblood of our economy.
“Canada is ready to take a leadership role in building a coalition of like-minded countries who share our values,” Mr. Carney said in early April. “We believe in international co-operation. We believe in the free and open exchange of goods, services and ideas. And if the United States no longer wants to lead, Canada will.”
The Liberal platform laid it on even thicker: “It was America that once declared itself a shining city on a hill, but today it is casting a shadow. We will step out from behind that shadow to defend our sovereignty and our values around the world.”
Such chutzpah may have played well on the campaign trail. But with the election over, Mr. Carney should avoid creating expectations he cannot meet. Canada’s standing on the world stage is much diminished. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau talked a good game about international engagement, but a lack of follow-through ultimately led the rest of the world to see Canada as an unreliable partner.
When European nations looked to this country to help end their reliance on Russian energy after Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Trudeau’s response was to insist there was no “business case” for shipping liquified natural gas from Canada across the Atlantic. He made it clear he had no intention of encouraging one.
During the campaign, Mr. Carney promised to speed up the construction of east-west pipelines. But resistance from within the Liberal caucus, and opposition from politicians in Quebec, will delay – if not derail – any such projects.
During his first trip abroad as Prime Minister, to France and Britain, Mr. Carney suggested Canada would join European countries to procure military equipment and reduce our dependence on U.S. defence contractors. He also undertook a review of Canada’s contract to buy U.S.-built F-35 fighter jets, beyond the 16 that we have already started paying for.
Yet, the likelihood of European countries actually getting their act together on defence procurement, much less including Canada in the endeavour, is far more remote than Mr. Carney would have us believe. And ditching the plan to purchase F-35s would create far more problems than it solves. The Trump administration is likely to insist on more military spending by Canada and on a faster timeline than Mr. Carney is already promising. That would almost certainly entail an equal or greater reliance on U.S. defence contractors as part of the new economic and security partnership Mr. Carney is seeking to negotiate.
Mr. Carney has obviously been saying the right things to Mr. Trump in private. After a Wednesday call between the two leaders, Mr. Trump described Mr. Carney as a “very nice gentleman.” Now that the election is over, Mr. Carney will need to temper his America-bashing in public.
Critics will seize on any move to appease Mr. Trump as capitulating to a bully. But Canada’s interests overwhelmingly lie in preserving our trade relationship with the United States and joining its efforts to contain China’s geopolitical reach. Mr. Carney should seek to push Mr. Trump toward an off-ramp from his destructive trade war, rather than alienate him by grandstanding on the world stage.
As Brian Mulroney wrote in his 2007 memoir: “When I was in office, I believed it was in our relationship with the United States that the prime minister should play his or her most important and constructive international role, and I still believe that today.”
Mr. Trump has upset everything, but he cannot change the geography of North America. Nor can any Canadian prime minister.
In his victory speech, Mr. Carney insisted that “our old relationship with the United States … is over.” His top priority now must be to build a new and, hopefully, better one.