U.S. President Donald Trump looks towards Prime Minister Mark Carney as they raise their glasses during a toast at a working dinner in South Korea in 2025.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The question is not whether the government of Canada should have walked away from the negotiating table with the United States. The question is why it was ever at the table in the first place.
The talks were aimed at averting the imposition of 50-per-cent U.S. tariffs on a range of Canadian goods; in addition, the Canadian side hoped to persuade the Donald Trump administration to reduce, if not eliminate, its previous tariffs on autos, aluminum, steel and lumber.
As the details have emerged on how much the U.S. side was demanding in return – and how little it was offering – opinion in Canada has hardened against a deal; the government’s decision to end the talks has enjoyed strong support.
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And rightly so. A deal that left in place punitive tariffs on important Canadian industries – tariffs to which we would now have formally agreed – would be bad enough. A deal that also limited our ability to strike trade agreements with other countries was obviously unacceptable.
But if that’s the case, why were we even talking? The Carney government frames the issue in terms of last-minute additions to the American position. But the agreement that was being talked about publicly before then was already unacceptable in its own right. And it prepared the ground for even worse deals to come.
Understand: this was not the USMCA renegotiation. That process still awaits us. This was merely the prelude to that, the admission fee if you will. So take all the concessions the Trudeau government yielded just to get USMCA signed in 2018. Add the concessions the Carney government has made, from scrapping the digital services tax to dismantling our retaliatory tariffs to the Gordie Howe Bridge debacle, to keep hopes of renegotiating USMCA alive. Then add whatever concessions they were prepared to make in the latest, abortive round.
Where does that leave us? At the starting line of the next round of negotiations. And should we get a deal, by means of whatever further concessions were required? That would set us up for the next round of talks, and the next round of concessions.
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That is why we were having these talks in the first place: the tariffs Mr. Trump has just imposed – and the further tariffs he has just announced, to take effect Jan. 1, 2027 – are explicitly prohibited by the free trade deal Mr. Trump himself signed in 2018. If Mr. Trump could abrogate a deal he negotiated once, he could do it again. And again. And again.
This is not a negotiation in any meaningful sense of the word. It is an extortion racket. A negotiation involves an exchange of offers. But there is no offer on the American side. There is only a threat: Give us what we want or we will hurt you. The demands, what is more, as often as not have nothing to do with tariffs, or trade, or the economy.
To say the Trump administration are not free traders is not just understatement: it’s beside the point. They’re not even protectionists, really. Their objective is not to replace free trade with managed trade. It is to use tariffs as a weapon to advance their broader foreign policy objectives – namely, hemispheric domination.
They have no interest in getting a deal, ever. They want rather to perpetually hold out the threat of trade war to hammer us into submission. Either we agree to their demands – to align our external trade policy with theirs, to give the U.S. privileged access to our resources, to buy only from American defence contractors – and accept being reduced to a vassal state. Or they bomb us into the stone age, economically speaking.
But in fact that is not the choice. Because even if we accept their terms, there is nothing to stop Mr. Trump from bombing us anyway, or threatening to. Indeed, accepting his demands may simply persuade him to make further threats and further demands, since we would have proven that threats work.
At the moment there is much concern that retaliation on our part might lead Mr. Trump to escalate (indeed, he already has). But returning to the bargaining table may as easily do the same. Mr. Trump, in short, will do what he will do. He plainly wishes us ill, for whatever reason, and there is nothing much we can do to alter his behaviour.
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What we can do is refuse to ratify it. What we can do is refuse to reward it. What we can do is preserve our freedom, our independence, and our dignity – to show Mr. Trump that whatever he throws at us, we cannot be coerced. Walking out of the negotiations was the easy part. Staying out is the test.