Carney Keeps Thinking He And Trump Are On The Same Ballot
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Friday that if his government could not successfully negotiate a suitable trade pact with the Trump administration, he was prepared to wait for a new American president to close the deal.
In an interview with POLITICO in Montreal, Carney also said Canadians were fed up with diplomatic provocations from the United States and described President Donald Trump’s wavering policy toward the Russia-Ukraine war as “unhelpful.”
I asked Chrome AI mode to help me parse out Carney's use of the word "unhelpful" as he applied it to Trump. It replied,
When spoken by someone in a position of authority (a manager, a teacher, or a judge), calling an employee's or subordinate's input "unhelpful" can reinforce a power gap.
The person with higher status acts as the sole arbiter of value.
It can function as a polite way to shut down dissent, dismiss a lower-status person's perspective, or police their tone without having to engage with the substance of their argument.
Except, of course, that in the actual power dynamic, Carney is the lower-status individual. He reinforces this himself later in his remarks:
Carney, who recently received four Brooks Brothers shirts as a gift from Trump, said he had not yet worn any of them but was prepared to do so in the event the countries reach terms.
“I haven’t had occasion to put on the shirts, because we don’t have a mutually advantageous trade deal,” he said.
For the moment, Carney added, “They’re sitting in my closet.”
Now, there's a threat! If we can't negotiate a trade deal, I'm not gonna wear the shirts you sent me! Take that, you big bully! This reinforces the impression I had yesterday that the two B-listers, Carney and Leyen, got together in Montreal and convinced each other they're world leaders, except it's maybe not that simple: Leyen is playing Carney. She's dangling "associate member" of the EU at him, and he's jumping at it, primarily as a way to get even with Trump:
He also brushed off Trump’s threats to retaliate if Canada and the EU forge a new diplomatic bond that would be disadvantageous to the United States. Asked if he had handled the summit differently out of sensitivity to Trump, Carney rejected the idea out of hand.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “That way lies madness.”
Carney is in a position to give Leyen whatever she wants; he has a parliamentary majority, and parliament is supreme. If she wants Canada to be greener, for instance, Canada will be greener -- anything to annoy Trump at tnis point. She's probably fully aware that key members of the EC will never allow "associate member" for Canada, but she can extract whatever conditions from "Dear Mark" she wants anyhow, because they'll annoy Trump.This continues to suggest to me that Carney is living in some sort of fantasy -- he's a major world leader, he's gonna make history.
Without mentioning Elon Musk by name, the prime minister alluded to the recent slowdown in Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — reportedly ordered by Musk himself — as an example of the vulnerability derived from excessive dependence on technology belonging to other countries or a single private company.
“If you’re connected to a satellite system that a billionaire, almost trillionaire, decides to turn off at one moment or not, that’s not a good idea,” Carney said.
Carney acknowledged that there was no quick way to displace Canadian and European reliance on American technology, but argued that “pooling our space assets” with Europe could help build Canadian independence more quickly.
With the accelerating global race for AI development as a backdrop, Carney and his European counterparts have been grappling with the comparatively limited resources of their homegrown tech companies.
But this misses the much bigger point that Sundance makes at Conservative Treehouse:
Canada, the U.K and Europe are all facing the same problem…. MONEY! Where are they going to come up with the funds to pay for a military investment they have declined to make for the past 50+ years?
It’s not just an issue of finding funds for a standing military, hardware, ships, submarines, aircraft, tanks, heavy and light artillery, missiles and drones etc., they also have to fund the technological capabilities to use and deploy modern weapons.
They also need advanced manufacturing, steel works, technological guidance systems, large numbers of strategically placed satellites, a space program that includes rockets to put them into orbit, and much, much more.
At scale this is multiple trillions, and that doesn’t include the baseline manufacturing systems needed to create all this independent infrastructure.
The photo above is from one of Carney's political missteps, an appearance at a pride parade in Vancouver in August 2025 where he embraced a man in a thong, to the amusement of much of the country. This is Carney the politican, who somehow imagines he's on a par with Trump -- or even a bit above him.