{"id":202771,"date":"2026-09-09T23:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T23:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/202771\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T23:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T23:20:09","slug":"donald-trumps-trade-war-for-canadians-it-is-forever-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/202771\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump\u2019s Trade War: For Canadians, It Is Forever 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following story is co-published with\u00a0Luke Savage\u2019s Substack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the early months of 2025, Canadian politics\u00a0looked to be in moment of unprecedented flux<\/a>. Facing unprovoked belligerence from their southern neighbor, the longstanding continental trade consensus (and much else) was on the verge of collapse. Canada was going to have to radically rethink its relationship with the United States and, with it, the very foundations of its economy and its place in the world. As a sudden wave of civic nationalism swept across the country, even Canada\u2019s more cautious and conservative politicians seemed to take note, contemplating a suite of retaliatory measures that would have previously been unthinkable.<\/p>\n

The chief political beneficiary of this moment was Prime Minister Mark Carney, who in his election night\u00a0address<\/a>\u00a0warned that \u201cAmerica wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. \u2026 President Trump<\/a> is trying to break us so that America can own us.\u201d In terms of what needed to come next, Carney sounded unequivocal: \u201cOur old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. \u2026 We have to look out for ourselves and above all we have to take care of each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the election\u2019s aftermath, Carney quickly shifted gears, trading the language of defiance for the rhetoric of conciliation in an effort to secure a new trade deal with the White House. Carney\u2019s skills as a negotiator had been central to his campaign pitch \u2014 though, importantly, the exact nature of the deal he was ultimately seeking was never really specified.<\/p>\n

Regardless, the past 18 months have seen Carney\u2019s government adopt an astonishingly deferential posture toward the Trump<\/a> administration. As I\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0earlier this summer for the Star:<\/p>\n

Since last year\u2019s election, however, the Carney government has repeatedly assumed a far more deferential and obsequious posture in its dealings with Washington. In trade negotiations, it capitulated to U.S. tech giants by\u00a0abandoning plans<\/a>\u00a0for a Digital Services Tax,\u00a0dropped<\/a>\u00a0retaliatory tariffs and introduced draconian border legislation that has been justly\u00a0criticized<\/a>\u00a0by human rights groups. More worryingly, the prime minister\u2019s efforts at cajoling the Trump White House have seen him go beyond these kinds of policy concessions and align quite explicitly with some of its most abhorrent behaviour.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Carney\u00a0offered swift backing<\/a>\u00a0for the illegal U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (even as that war\u2019s earliest casualties included nearly 200 children killed in the bombing of a school.) He has similarly\u00a0backed<\/a>\u00a0the administration\u2019s Orwellian \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d plans in Gaza,\u00a0indicated a willingness<\/a>\u00a0to sign on to its proposed \u201cGolden Dome\u201d defence initiative, refrained from criticizing Marco Rubio\u2019s attempts to\u00a0dismantle the International Criminal Court through coercion<\/a>\u00a0and sought to reassure American investors by\u00a0pledging<\/a>\u00a0to help \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d Last fall, the government also\u00a0invited<\/a>\u00a0Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts \u2014 a key Trump ally and architect of the far-right blueprint Project 2025 \u2014 to attend a closed-door meeting with members of cabinet (the visit was ultimately cancelled, almost certainly thanks to the ensuing backlash.)<\/p>\n

This approach was clearly a far cry from the days of Elbows Up, but its defenders argued it was the necessary path to any new trade pact.<\/p>\n

For my part, I don\u2019t believe any deal negotiated with the Trump White House was ever going to be one worth signing. But, putting the desirability of any such deal aside for a moment, the recent collapse of trade talks suggests it was never really in the cards to begin with. A would-be negotiating partner who openly muses about annexing you was never going to deal in good faith and offering concessions of any kind to Donald Trump was only ever going to result in him demanding more.<\/p>\n

This, in fact, is exactly what happened. And, as Alan Beattie\u00a0notes<\/a>\u00a0in the Financial Times, Trump\u2019s penchant for making outrageous demands very likely saved Canada from accepting a bad deal that Mark Carney would have tried to spin as a victory.<\/p>\n

\n frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share” referrerpolicy=”strict-origin-when-cross-origin” allowfullscreen>\n<\/p>\n

So, here we are. Eighteen months on from the dizzying days of Elbows Up and right back where we were in the first place. The trade war is back on,\u00a0counter-tariffs<\/a>\u00a0are on the way, Donald Trump has reverted to 51st state talk and is trying to\u00a0rename things<\/a>, and\u00a0Doug Ford<\/a>\u00a0is busy performing the kinds of empty gestures that shouldn\u2019t get him a bump in the polls but probably will.<\/p>\n

This outcome wasn\u2019t inevitable in January 2025, but the conservative direction taken by Canada\u2019s Liberal government after last year\u2019s election made it very likely. Under different leadership, Canada could have seized the moment to reverse the decades-long experiment that brought us here in the first place.<\/p>\n

As I\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0The Walrus\u00a0in February 2025:<\/p>\n

In the wake of Trump\u2019s threats, there\u2019s a much more ambitious vision of nation building to be pursued and plenty of older questions that are worth asking again.<\/p>\n

Do Canadians really want their country\u2019s economic destiny so closely tied to the boardrooms of American multinationals and the shifting whims of Washington? Do they really want the power of their elected governments to protect Canadian workers and industries to be constrained by anti-democratic trade agreements? Do they want to live in a permanently stratified society or in one bound together by an ethic of solidarity, community, and social co-operation?<\/p>\n

Substantively speaking, the only satisfactory answers to any of these questions will all involve rebuilding the capacity of the democratic state and wielding that capacity to intervene in the public interest. In the short term, this means we should be looking beyond retaliatory tariffs and consumer boycotts to more ambitious industrial policies that create good jobs and high-quality manufacturing. Instead of building pipelines and financing privately owned infrastructure, we should be exploring green options like the creation of an east\u2013west electricity grid and fully national, fully public high-speed rail that will both fight climate change and consolidate our energy independence around clean and renewable resources.<\/p>\n

Beyond those things, however, Canadians should be looking at the current trade war as an opportunity to think more profoundly about the nature of our institutions and the structure of our society. In this spirit, a renewed sense of national solidarity in the face of external threats can be made concrete through policies that begin to reverse the long march of social and economic inequality. The tens of billions some hope to see invested in new military equipment \u2014 at least some of which is ironically bound to end up in the hands of American arms contractors \u2014 could instead be used to end food insecurity, wipe out homelessness, and lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.<\/p>\n

Since I wrote those words, the spirit of democratic ambition they describe has been largely absent from the Carney government\u2019s agenda. Over the past year and a half, the crisis prompted by Trump\u2019s trade war has been\u00a0transformed<\/a>\u00a0into an excuse for lacerating public sector cuts and the embrace of military Keynesianism. The promise of renewed \u201ceconomic sovereignty,\u201d meanwhile, is now synonymous with the steamrolling of environmental regulations and the creation of a more favorable investment climate; billions in handouts to profitable corporations with progressively coded phrases like\u00a0\u201csovereign wealth fund\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and \u201cindustrial strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a final indignity, the very government elected on the heels of Elbows Up quite literally bent over backward to secure a new trade agreement with the Trump White House and was only pulled back from the brink by the president\u2019s impulsiveness. Eighteen months later, things are right back where they were.<\/p>\n

A long and circuitous voyage, it would seem, only to reach a very familiar shore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The following story is co-published with\u00a0Luke Savage\u2019s Substack. In the early months of 2025, Canadian politics\u00a0looked to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[17,162,111,437,5971],"class_list":["post-202771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-carney","tag-canada","tag-donald-trump","tag-mark-carney","tag-trade-war","tag-trump-tariffs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}