U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office on Tuesday.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
It’s hard to say why Donald Trump likes Mark Carney so much but there was no doubt that the Oval Office was full of goodwill on Tuesday.
Mr. Trump even predicted Canadians would be very happy by the end of the day. It just still isn’t clear that Mr. Trump’s ideas about trade allow for a deal that would make Canadians happy. The U.S. President clearly likes Mr. Carney, but he also wants car companies, a.k.a. Canada’s auto industry and its Canadian jobs.
Still, something is cooking.
Canadians have heard that before, of course. There have been months of suggestions that a deal, or mini-deals, could be close. Deadlines floated past.
But there are clearly new things in the talks now. For the first time, Mr. Carney suggested Canadians could invest US$1-trillion in the United States over the next five years – the kind of promise Mr. Trump has demanded for tariff deals. Officials from both countries were tasked with striking a first deal on steel and aluminum to get the ball rolling.
Mr. Carney told Mr. Trump that Canada would make an estimated $1-trillion worth of investments in the United States in the next five years, if Canada gets the 'deal we expect to get' from the U.S.
The Prime Minister’s second visit to the White House certainly had a very different atmosphere than the first, back in May. Then, Mr. Trump’s famous unpredictability made fear of a relationship-killing ambush as much a part of the Oval Office backdrop as the garish gold ornaments.
This time, the U.S. President was going out of his way to help out Mr. Carney, calling him a world-class leader, and talking up his toughness as a negotiator. He even stepped in front of a reporter’s question for Mr. Carney, fielding a query about why the Canadian Prime Minister had failed to make a trade deal when other leaders had managed to do so – insisting it’s a lot harder when the two countries are right next to each other.
That was striking. Usually Mr. Trump likes a question that presses his foreign interlocutor to cave. This time he said he also wants Canada to do well in any deal.
Mr. Carney spent some time fluffing up the President in the Oval Office, praising his Middle East peace proposals, again calling him a “transformative” president, and apparently agreeing that it is good that the U.S. has “closed” its border with Mexico. But unlike British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, he didn’t uncork the whole bottle of cringe.
If the Prime Minister was there to unblock the path to some kind of deal to alleviate tariffs, there were positive signs.
Officials to continue trade talks into the night after Carney, Trump meet
Dominic LeBlanc, the minister responsible for Canada-U.S. trade, said both leaders instructed their officials to work to strike deals in specific areas quickly, starting with steel and aluminum.
He confirmed that Mr. Carney had suggested that Canadian firms and institutional investors could increase investments in the U.S. from a half-trillion to a trillion dollars over the next five years.
Mr. Trump has demanded similar promises from other trading partners and has claimed he has brought US$17-trillion in investment to his country.
That’s a wild exaggeration of a series of non-binding promises. The European Union, for example, said it would muster US$600-billion in investment when it struck a tariff deal but the two sides differ on what that actually meant.
Mr. LeBlanc appeared to link Canada’s potential investment pledge to deepening this country’s role in U.S. energy security. What could that possibly be? A revival of the long-dead Keystone XL oil pipeline project?
Four key moments from Carney’s meeting with Trump in Washington
At the moment it’s not at all clear what’s on the table in Canada’s highly important trade negotiations with its largest trading partner.
It appears that Mr. Carney’s government is working on an interim agreement to alleviate tariffs on targeted sectors – ahead of eventual review of the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement – but Mr. LeBlanc said Tuesday’s discussions also entailed broad security talks.
But there is still the big-picture problem. Whatever Mr. Trump’s feelings of goodwill, he still seems to look at much of Canada-U.S. trade as a zero-sum game, where Canada’s losses are his gains.
The Canadian government argues the U.S. auto sector is so deeply intertwined with Canada’s that the ecosystem can only be disentangled at enormous cost to both sides. Mr. Trump still wants Canadian auto plants to move to the U.S. – he said as much Tuesday.
That suggests there could still be a long distance between Mr. Trump’s goodwill in the Oval Office and a deal that Mr. Carney can accept.