I’m not a big fan of Canada’s Prime Minister Carney, the guy who blew two housing bubbles: one in Canada then another in the UK. He’s a neoliberal’s neoliberal.
But unlike most he is neither stupid nor a coward.
It was looking like there would be a Canada/US trade deal, and honestly? I was worried what Canada had given away to get it.
But then according to Carney (the US denies, but the when the Trump administration’s lips are moving, they’re lying), they added a bunch of last minute additions.
These are pretty close to annexation without the troops: the US would control Canada’s trade and have first call on all its minterals and would have altered our internal laws to suit them. I’m particularly intrigued by America wanting an end to Quebec’s language sign laws: what the hell does that have to do with the US?
It’s always hard to tell what is going on in the Trump administration, but these demands seem calculated to force Carney to refuse. He’d lose the next election if he agreed, the backlash would be immense. Certainly he would have been crushed in Quebec, and without Quebec he has no route to victory.
Moderately sane and informed American officials would know this. So, normally, one would assume they deliberately spiked the talks.
But this is the Trump administation, full of some of the stupidest and most ignorant people on Earth, ruled by a senile old man with the attention span of a grasshopper on cocaine.
So maybe they really figured “Canada has to do what we tell them to!’
Instead, the vast majority of Canadians support Carney, even prairie westerners who usually hate his guts.
And fortunately it worked out for the best. They pushed a strong hand way too far. The truth is that Canada has a ton of trade with America and is very vulnerable.
But the longer term truth is this: there’s nothing Canada buys from the US it can’t get somewhere else, often for a lot less (hello China) and there’s not much Canada exports that it couldn’t sell to nations other than America. We’re in a bad position because against the opposition of the majority of Canadians a feckless previous Prime Minister signed trade deals with the US which increased integration.
But what was done can be undone, because Canada is not naturally dependent on America.
One argument I keep hearing from Americans is that Canada needs America to defend it. To which the answer is a question: “From whom?”
The truth is that no one but the US is actually an invasion threat to Canada. Second biggest country in the world. Separated by large oceans or thousands of miles of land from every country in the world except America. The only nation America protects us from is America, and that’s what’s known as a protection racket.
Generally I don’t believe in making deals with Trump. No deals at all. He doesn’t keep his deals and if you make any concessions he always assumes that means there’s more to be had and comes back again with more threats.
The task for Canada is, indeed, to diversify away from the US. Trump is doing us a favor. If he’d offered a slightly shitty deal, we’d have accepted it. If he’d asked only for the moon, not the stars, he’d have gotten it. By making demands no Prime Minister could accept without losing the next election, demands which amount to “we control your trade relations with everyone else going foward” Trump made it possible for Carney to tell him no on the entire package.
And while that will suck for Canada; while Canada will be hurt by a trade war: it’s forcing us to do the right thing rather than put it off or do it slowly.
So I’d like to thank Trump.
“Thank you President Trump, for being a complete and utter asshole with the IQ of a squash and no empathy or kindness at all Any President slightly smarter of slightly more able to understand other people could have had Canadian elites giving them cheap everything Canada has an integrating with the US even more. But you keep showing why that’s impossible and stupid.”
Now we just need a strong military deterrent. We have a lot of mountains and Iran has just shown us how to use them.
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Agreed, Trump is making the indoctrinated world see the Empire more clearly.
This is the ultimate confirmation for the entire world that the US is simply not-agreement-capable, when not just countries like Russia, China, Iran, but even its closest and most cooperative (euphemism for obedient) ally (euphemism for vassal) gets shafted.
Trump first tore up the decades-old NAFTA agreement and replaced it with his own USMCA/CUSMA, and now – only a few years later – has gone back on the deal that he himself asked for and signed. And this isn’t just just about Trump: In 2008, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton also threatened to “renegotiate” NAFTA or pull out.
The clear lesson for foolish countries eager to bend over to please the US is that even the country that has bent over the most for the US for years, that has gone out of its way to please the US the most for so many years, will end ultimately up receiving a raw deal from the US.
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The US once again trying to control our trade relations with everyone else going forward. As a reminder:
In 2018, Canada (in the first years under Justin Trudeau) had, commendably, actually been trying to diversify our trade away from just the US, primarily through pursuit of a trade deal with China, an important and growing market.
The US, in Trump’s first term, actively foreign-interfered and foreign-meddled in Canada to stop that democratic and sovereign Canadian choice: first going out of their way to overturn the long-established NAFTA agreement and explicitly insert an unprecedented clause into CUSMA/USMCA to discourage trade deals with so-called “non-market countries” – a naked euphemism for China: that clause was widely recognized and reported as the “anti-China clause”, clearly aimed at very strongly discouraging a Canadian trade deal with China.
Just 8 weeks later, to further ensure that our government would not – could not – resume its prior sovereign decision to pursue increased trade with China, the US then got Canada to detain and arrest the Huawei CFO on a stop-over on her way to Mexico. Justin Trudeau, eager to please Trump and the US – especially after Trump called him weak and two-faced after the 2018 G7 in Quebec – foolishly and eagerly fell for the trap, and that arrest and her subsequent multi-year detainment destroyed the previously good relations between Canada and China, ensuring that Canada would not be able to significantly diversify its trade from the US to China.
In the subsequent years, the US only continued its campaign to influence the Canadian politicians, media, and public against China. The Uighur oppression narrative was pushed, much of it hinging on just one or two highly questionable reports, including one from ASPI, the “Australian Strategic Policy Institute”. ASPI has recently been revealed to have been funded by USAID, a US State Department organization used to fund NGOs, think tanks, and opposition groups in other countries to influence and interfere in those countries. As a result of those concocted and planted narratives, Canada’s sheep-like parliament even voted to officially condemn China of “genocide” in 2021, further destroying the relations and the path that Canada had been pursuing as a sovereign nation up until mid-2018. (But of course, Parliament has stayed silent about the horrific genocide in Gaza.)
This was then conveniently followed by accusations of “foreign interference”/”foreign meddling”, largely associated with China, leading to Canada holding a much publicized commission, further destroying those ties and pathways. Were these accusations also fed by foreign actors seeking to influence Canada’s democracy? We have yet to hear which foreign actors these reports came from or what evidence they gave. Did they ultimately originate from the US, perhaps by way of their many deeply-integrated channels of influence into Canada? The likes of CSIS, ex-CSIS figures, the Privy Council, and our establishment news media, have continued to actively push foreign-seeded narratives designed to hinder Canadian economic, and thus political, independence. Are they really defending Canadian sovereignty or are they in fact serving as unwitting vectors and vehicles to help weaken and dismantle Canadian sovereignty?
Again, the lesson for Canada is that we absolutely must diversify our trade to end this unhealthy and dangerous over-dependence on the US.