The Gordie Howe International Bridge, under construction to link Detroit, Michigan, with Windsor, Ontario, as seen in a drone image in February.Dax Melmer/Reuters
“Nice bridge you got there,” the thugs said. “It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
That’s not a verbatim transcript of what U.S. President Donald Trump’s operatives told Prime Minister Mark Carney about the Gordie Howe International Bridge, but it might as well have been.
The U.S. President just shook down this country, refusing to allow the opening of a new Windsor-Detroit bridge that Canada paid for until our government agreed to handover more of the toll proceeds to a Michigan fund and provide guarantees that the new bridge won’t compete too hard with the existing Ambassador Bridge owned by a Republican donor.
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And so Mr. Carney accepted a bad deal, because the benefits of a new cross-border span on the busiest international trade corridor in the world outweigh the lost cash. “Elbows up” isn’t much of a strategy given the choice was between an open bridge and a closed one.
The demeaning concession was a bit of realpolitik. Mr. Carney took one on the nose.
For Canada it was another teachable moment in an ongoing cautionary tale. Mr. Trump didn’t just use leverage to get a good deal. He ripped up the old one. As if tearing up an agreement means nothing.
It’s a rough-and-tumble world for Canada now. So, perhaps it would be good to cast back to last Thursday, when Mr. Carney defended meeting Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman without saying much about human rights.
Standing next to MBS, as the Crown Prince is known, would never be a public relations boon for any Canadian prime minister.
Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman speak as they walk to a welcome ceremony at the Royal Palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 9.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
He was fingered by the U.S. intelligence community for dispatching a crew that killed and dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. That same year, he blew up relations with Canada over a tweet posted by then-foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland calling for the release of dissidents.
Mr. Carney went to Saudi Arabia last week to turn the page on all of that, and seek new investment and trade – without talking about rights.
“Lecturing countries from afar is an ineffective strategy,” Mr. Carney said during a press conference. “It’s satisfying, but it’s ineffective.”
And he’s right.
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Let’s skip over the fact that Mr. Carney was not, in fact, “afar,” but in Jeddah, where he could have lectured in person.
The Prime Minister’s broad approach is a needed corrective from decades of preachy Canadian foreign policy. Conservatives said they wouldn’t go along to get along, then Liberals mistook values statements for progress.
Former prime minister Joe Clark, who served seven years as foreign minister, complained in 2013 that Canada “lectures and leaves.”
That used to be a luxury we could afford. Now, it’s a rougher world.
There is still a need to press values, of course.
One has to worry that Mr. Carney’s silence on whether India was involved in the 2023 assassination of Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar might encourage impunity.
It’s best to do more than talk: Canada joined European nations in pressing Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and seeks to isolate President Vladimir Putin despite U.S. reticence.
Mr. Trump’s bridge shakedown illustrates why Canada needs to open lines to more countries: Not to replace the U.S., but to provide more alternatives. When we can only build a bridge to the U.S., the Americans will demand we pay.
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Maybe we should have seen it coming. In 2012, Stephen Harper’s government agreed to pay the whole $6.4-billion cost of the Gordie Howe bridge because the U.S. Congress wouldn’t fund half. The father of the current owner of the Ambassador Bridge, the late Matty Moroun, was a big Republican donor and he didn’t want the competition.
Now, Mr. Trump had disregarded the lopsided deal that was struck then. And you won’t see a lot of Americans complaining their own government is a shameless bully that shook down its neighbour.
Americans, maybe more than citizens of any other country, have trouble empathizing about such things, perhaps because they rarely happen to a superpower. Many Canadians have bristled when the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, says he doesn’t understand why Canadians are mad at things Mr. Trump has done. He’s not acting. He really doesn’t get it.
MBS probably wouldn’t get it, either. But he wants alternatives for trade, too, and he would have reasons to stick to a deal he makes. At any rate, he leads a country that Canada doesn’t have to depend on. And Canada needs a lot of partners like that.