Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks with media on Parliament Hill following a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Canada-U.S. Relations and National Security, in Ottawa, on March 27.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
From the moment of his ascension to the highest office in the land, Mark Carney has been telling Canadians that he entered politics for one reason: Canada, he says, needs “big changes.”
“We will have to build things we never imagined, at a pace we never thought possible‚" he said when he won the Liberal Party leadership and was vaulted into the prime minister’s office.
When he led the Liberals to a strong minority government last month, he said in his victory speech that “the coming days and months will be challenging, and they will call for some sacrifices.”
Fine rhetorical stuff, that, but untested in the real world. Until, that is, Mr. Carney met with Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday and it became clear that hoping for an armistice in the President’s ruinous trade war would be an error.
He instead needs to produce a Throne Speech on May 27 laying out how his government will wean Canada from its dependence on a flaky neighbour (while still trading with it where possible), and what exactly sacrifices that will entail.
The White House meeting reinforced three critical points: that Mr. Trump is an unreliable negotiating partner who bullies with lies and threats; that he has no intention of letting go of his insulting claim that Canada should become the 51st state; and the era of continental free trade is over.
Mr. Carney survived Mr. Trump’s Oval Office hazing ritual as well as a foreign leader can, and better than most. But voters should remember two things: one, babysitting Mr. Trump is the Prime Minister’s job, the very one he told the electorate he was the best person for; and two, it’s irrelevant to the broader issue.
The only thing Mr. Carney should take away from the meeting is the confirmation that he was absolutely right when he said on election night that Canada’s “relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over.”
Now we need to know how far he will actually go to rebuild Canada to new specifications, and what he meant when he said sacrifices will be required.
All that is known at this point is that his government has promised to lower income taxes, preserve benefits such as subsidized child care and dental care, protect agricultural supply management, spend billions of dollars more on defence, protect auto workers’ jobs, put more money into the CBC, and eliminate internal trade barriers erected by the federal government.
That is not a transformation vision of Canada. It is a garden-variety Canadian election platform filled with the usual goodies and pieties. It’s all spending and no sacrificing.
It doesn’t dare raise the question of whether the parts of the economy that rely on a wide-open U.S. border, such as the auto industry and its 125,000 manufacturing jobs, can survive untouched, with as many workers.
The Liberals would rather give a modest income-tax break to the middle class than ask for a sacrifice, even though that is as unproductive a move as a government can make at a time when the country must become more productive than it has ever been. And Mr. Carney has talked about using every dollar of tariff revenue to support affected workers, instead of speeding an economic transition.
But Canada’s economy needs to be remade in a dramatic and unapologetic way. Its parochialism, best expressed by interprovincial trade barriers and supply management, needs to be replaced by a more daring and international vision. Its natural resources need to be weaponized as a source of economic strength and security.
Ottawa itself needs to get out of the way of the economy. It needs to dare to lower corporate taxes and eliminate over-regulation, while also ending corporate subsidies, unproductive tax breaks and statist price-fixing for farmers.
Mr. Carney has tried to walk a line between ominously telling Canadians that sacrifices will be required as they enter a new economic era and saying, hey, here are some nice benefits and tax cuts, and your jobs are safe.
If he had hoped that perhaps he might not have to go as far as his rhetoric implied, his meeting with Mr. Trump this week is proof that any such optimism would be misplaced. He needs now to deliver a Throne speech that is as historic and transformational as the hinge moment he keeps telling Canadians they are in.