“When The Americans Stop Doing Memes. . ."

Remarks from Prime Minister Carney to reporters yesterday suggest things aren't going as he'd expected:

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney still sees a path to a mutually beneficial trade deal with the U.S. — once Washington stops playing games.

Carney said any deal with the U.S. “must” recognize Canadian sovereignty, which includes respecting the French language and Quebec culture.

“When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough and start being serious about having those discussions — we can have those discussions,” Carney said to reporters on Tuesday.

The problem is that last Friday, Carney was the one who ended negotiations, and the US currently sees no reason to try to reopen them.

Negotiations between Canada and the U.S. have stopped completely. Both sides remain far apart after Carney walked away from a deal that he said “asked too much and offered too little.”

Speaking to POLITICO on Monday night, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said “there’s not like a better deal out there available for the Canadians.”

What fascinates me is that there's no shortage of individual Canadians who understand quite clearly the futility of Carney's position, like the commentator in the video embedded above. At 21:59, she replies to a question, "Is Canada getting itself into a fight it cannot win?"

Yes, it is. It goes back to what I aaid earlier, that you can't have a war between two massively unequal partners like this. It's like flick a flea off the arm of the United States to have this going on. He will retaliate, and they should know this. They should be understanding this just by his previous behavior. . . . He would love nothing more than to completely repatriate the auto industry to the United States. So if they think this is smart, then we really have a serious problem in Canada, and Canadian people, the auto worklers and the people that make a living off the auto industry, and I'm talking about the restaurants, the grocery stores, the 7-Elevens, and the Circle Ks, and all the other entities that live because the auto industry is a thriving industry in their area, they should be screaming to the hills not to allow this to happen.

She goes on to say Carney will eventually be forcrd to back down. The thing that puzzles me is that the great majority of Canadian voices I see, at least on YouTube, appear to be sane and recognize that US tariff policy could in fact break the Canadian economy, but there deosn't seem to be any equivalent opinion from the Canadian opposition parties.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre swung through Southwestern Ontario on Saturday, telling supporters here that Canada should continue fighting for tariff-free trade as the U.S. imposed new ones on Canadian goods.

Poilievre spoke at a public event held here by Oxford MP Arpan Khanna, hours after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada walked away from trade talks with the Americans, setting the stage for President Donald Trump to slap an additional 50 per cent tariff on roughly $28 billion in Canadian exports, including electronics, alcohol and dairy.

“Conservatives are determined to put our country first in this trade dispute. We’re fighting every day and every way for tariff-free trade,” Poilievre told supporters at the Woodstock event, the second of four London-area stops planned for the weekend.

I would say that Justin Trudeau's reported remarks to Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the 2024 holidays, that a punitive tariff tweak by the US would be "the end of Canada" were insightfuil aNd correct, and Carney likely understands this just as clearly. But Canada has backed itself into a difficult corner: its military could resist a US invasion for about two days. Carney speaks hopefully of aligning Canada with other "middle powers", mostly in NATO, who have collectively offloaded military preparedness to the US and would be no more capable of military action against the US than Canada itself.

But any attempt by Canada to align itself militarily with either Russia or China would likely provoke economic retaliation from the US even worse than what's now likely. On one hand, Carney is correct: sovereignty is in fact what's ultimately on the line, but the existential question is actually a lot closer than he wants to pretend. Trump's point has been that Canada wants to be treated like a US state, at least as far as having no US tariffs on its exports to the US, but it wants to impose tariffs on imported US goods. Trump says that's no longer possible, and it hasn't been for some time.

Trump is only half-jokingly proposing that Canada become a US state to solve that problem. But there's also the problem of defense: Canada has no serious armed forces, but if it were to pursue an alliance with Russia or China, it would almost immediately be annexed as a territory by the US purely via economic pressure. But that level of pressure is already being applied. I don't think many Canadians are waking up to this reality.