The Guardian On The Trade War

Since Mark Carney is a member in good standing of the transatlantic globalist elite, the UK Guardian ran a puff piece on him over the weekend:

Mark Carney stood before a walnut-veneered lectern, his face drawn tight, as he announced that talks with Canada’s biggest trading partner had collapsed. “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” he said. “And I promised: that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise.”

For years, the former central bank governor had worked hard to calm markets. Now, he was asking Canadians to accept uncertainty and confrontation.

Near the end of the press conference last Saturday, a reporter made reference to the sombre, combative tone of the speech: “Why does it feel like today Mark Carney is going to war?”

The prime minister paused.

“We were attacked. You’re at war when you get attacked,” he said. “We got attacked.”

I suppose you could characterize this as an "attack", but it was neither a surprise nor sudden. The "attack" is nothing but tariff uncertainty; Canadian companies, or companies based elsewhere but assembling merchandise in Canada for US export, have been reacting for over a decade to the prospect of increased US tariffs, which raise the price of Canadian-made goods in the US. The Canadian commentators in the video embedded above make the point:

$1 TRILLION+ left between 2014-2025. Now the auto-sector sequel: Honda $#15B suspended, GM CAMI $2B shut down, Umicore, $2.7B paused, Northvolt collapsed, Brampton production shifted south, Oakville EV plan scrapped, Oshawa shifts out. There's not much of an auto industry left in Canada after this.

Just in the past few days, Crown Royal, which still makes its whiskey in Canada, nevertheless moved its export bottling to the US side of the border due to the same tariff uncertainty. Canada's problem is that the prior tariff environment allowed companies to locate manufacturing in Canada for export to the US. The mere possibility that this could change has caused companies to reevaluate manufacturing in Canada. There's little Carney can do to change the economics of the situation; "elbows up" will simply stiffen US resolve -- and the question simply isn't whether the US actually imposes higher tariffs, it's just the possibility that it might.

Nevertheless, the Guardian says Carney's in charge:

One of Carney’s prescriptions – forging deep relations with like-minded “middle powers” and restructuring to lessen reliance on former allies – has already taken shape in Canada, at a speed and degree to which the pollster David Coletto described as a “wartime-footing government without a war”.

“It’s a government organised around an external threat that’s willing to suspend its own party’s orthodoxies, centralise power to move fast, and measure itself in outcomes rather than values,” he wrote.

“The public has hardly blinked,” Coletto said in an interview. “Mark Carney’s approval rating has just sustained itself through this entire period.”

. . . Polling shows that Carney remains the leader Canadians trust most to steer the country through economic uncertainty. But the prime minister has also embraced a role that would once have seemed almost incongruous: asking a country vastly smaller and less powerful than its neighbour to stand its ground.

He said in his recent address: “Canadians don’t submit to the weather – we thrive in it. We don’t wait to see which way the wind is blowing. Or surrender ourselves to the waves to be storm-tossed by events.

“We set our own course. We make our own weather. In Canada, we are masters in our own home, from coast to coast to coast.”

Trump's response has been to troll Carney, starting with renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America -- which Google Maps has confirmed:

Google Maps has officially begun displaying Lake Ontario as “Lake America” to users in the United States.

The move comes days after President Donald Trump ordered the historic lake renamed amid his escalating trade war with Canada.

The change began rolling out over the weekend, making Google the first major online maps provider to implement Trump’s latest geographic rebranding.

Trump continued the trolling over the weekend:

"When I announced that I was running in the 2024 Presidential Election, right at the beginning, Ford was getting ready to close their Big Factory, in Detroit. Then, because I was leading in the Polls, they figured they would leave it open a little longer to see what happened. Now it’s running 24/7, and it’s one of the most profitable Car Plants in the World!" Trump wrote on Truth Social.

"There are many other examples, for both Ford, General Motors, and others. I’ve revived, and indeed saved, the Automobile Business in our America. That’s because of what I’ve done with TARIFFS. One of the Worst Abusers is Canada," he said.

Trump said the U.S. doesn't need Canadian products.

"I don’t want Canadian cars, I don’t want Canadian parts, I don’t want Canadian anything. They’ve been ripping us off for decades, and it’s going to stop. This should have happened long ago with other Presidents, just as stopping Iran should have happened long ago," he wrote.

"They want to be treated like a State, but they aren’t one. I deal with the Leadership of many Countries, but I find Canada to be the worst. They are entitled no longer!" he added.

And now we're back to the question of Canada becoming a state, which Trump is implicitly tying to the tariff question. If Canada becomes a state, there are no tariffs in either direction. If tariff uncertainty remains in any form, companies will just continue to move out of Canada. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse puts this in the context of whether we terminate the USMCA:

I think we have finally figured out President Trump’s long-term strategy here. Essentially, we have been flummoxed over why President Trump has not yet triggered the 6-month USMCA (CUSMA) termination notice yet. However, he appears to be intentionally drawing this out.

. . . with an all-in perspective on termination, the moves President Trump is making now are all just to prolong economic pain and block investment while retaining the termination notice as the hidden ace.

Trump doesn't have to do anything; the economic pain is all on Canada's side, and it's already been having an effect. The Guardian is simply ignoring the reality on the ground.