U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office on Oct. 7.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
It’s been nearly six months since election day, a federal campaign the Liberals won in large part on Mark Carney’s vow to take an aggressive approach in dealing with U.S. President Donald Trump and his annexationist talk.
Elbows up was the slogan and offence was the play. Ever since the Liberal win, however, those elbows have been drooping lower and lower.
First, there was Prime Minister Carney’s visit to the White House in May in which he praised Mr. Trump as a “transformational president.”
The next month, the Carney Liberals scrapped the digital services tax – a measure that the Trudeau government had argued was essential in ensuring equitable taxation of big tech firms (for the most part, U.S.-based).
The cancellation of the DST was ostensibly made to smooth the way for the negotiation of a comprehensive security and trade deal by July 21. That didn’t happen.
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Then there was the Aug. 1 deadline for reaching a deal. Without a deal, the Carney government warned, Canada would impose new retaliatory tariffs. The deadline sailed by, without a deal.
And then by late August, the tough talk stopped. The government instead rolled back tariffs on U.S. exports compliant with the continental trade agreement, again in pursuit of a trade deal that has not yet gelled. On Oct. 8, Mr. Carney was back in the White House, once again lauding Mr. Trump, as a “transformative president.”
So much for elbows. In fairness, it must be said that there’s not that much Mr. Carney could have done differently. Retaliatory tariffs were always going to be a short-term strategy, particularly after it became clear that other major U.S. trading partners in the West were not going to follow suit.
Deference to Mr. Trump, however galling, is preferable to deliberately setting out to antagonize the thin-skinned president (as Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland seemed determined to do).
As this space said repeatedly during the election campaign, any prime minister (be it Mr. Carney or Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre) would have had the same basic approach to the U.S. President. Mr. Trump is gonna Trump. So Mr. Carney’s elbows-invisible approach does not come as much as a shock to us.
But there is a standard that Mr. Carney is failing to live up to: his own. He was the one who insisted that Mr. Poilievre would kowtow to Mr. Trump, while Mr. Carney would stand strong. And he was the one who intoned on election night that “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over,” a theme he again sounded on Wednesday night in a prebudget speech.
Square that sentiment with the Liberals’ apparent willingness to resurrect the Keystone XL pipeline, which would run from Alberta to the refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma.
Such a move would increase the dependence of Canada’s economy on the United States – the very opposite of what is needed in the face of Mr. Trump’s provocations. Such a move would inevitably mean that Alberta oil production would be sold at a steeper discount to U.S. refiners, and unwind (at least in part) the benefit from the Trans Mountain pipeline.
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Significantly, a revived Keystone XL project would almost certainly fatally undermine the economics of an additional pipeline – such as the route to the West Coast being promoted by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. That may be a feature, not a bug, as far as the federal Liberals are concerned.
As we wrote in this space last week, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson floated the argument, in a Senate appearance, that Albertan oil could make its way on to tankers from the Gulf Coast. In that analysis, a pipeline to the Pacific is unnecessary, and unnecessarily provocative.
But that mindset ignores the reality that differentials would be sure to rise in the short term. Even if a revived Keystone XL was eventually connected to the Gulf Coast, there would still remain the central problem: Canada would be more dependent on the United States for energy exports. More vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s threats and blackmail. Less strong and free.
If Mr. Carney is contemplating such a deal, he needs to lay it before Canadians, and make the case as to why elbows down, all the way down, is the best the country can expect.