By M Dowling
Canada is at war with the United States, but it’s unlikely to work out well for them. The reporters covering Prime Minister Mark Carney are noticing a shift—the Prime Minister is really not negotiating. The left-wing Guardian noticed Carney isn’t really negotiating. That’s because Carney is now at war and on a war footing.
Reporters have noticed what Trade Representative Greer noticed. Prime Minister Carney is not negotiating, and responded,
“We were attacked. You’re at war when you get attacked,” he said. “We got attacked.”
Carney, in walking away from the proposed deal, is daring Trump and the US to test his nation’s resolve. The midterms are coming up, and everyone is very aware of that.
“We cannot accept what they have offered, and we will not give what they have asked,” he said.
The Cause of the Breakdown: The Cause No One Will Mention
According to U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer, the only deal Canada will accept is one with everything they demand. They are operating politically. Some blame Howard Lutnick’s last-minute intervention in the deal for the failure of negotiations. Lutnick was leery of Canadian proposals to lower the tariff on autos to a level below what he wanted, according to The New York Times.
The breakdown of the U.S.-Canada trade talks is due to one factor that hasn’t been publicly named by both sides—China. That’s according to analysts who spoke to Terri Wu. They said that the United States is concerned that Canada could be used as a backdoor for Chinese overcapacity to flood the U.S. market, despite tariffs on Chinese imports. For Canada, China is also part of the calculus for offsetting U.S. pressure. But analysts say that could bring long-term damage to Canadians.
Yeh Yao-yuan is a professor of international studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. He said he sees Beijing’s hand in Ottawa’s hardline approach to Washington.
He told The Epoch Times that it’s “very likely” Beijing is involved behind the scenes. His reasoning is that Ottawa is taking an “unnecessarily hardline position” against Washington. It may harm the Canadian economy.
Joseph Steinberg, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto, said that while during the Brexit debate, Carney “did not shy away from trying to tell kind of the hard economic truths”, he had not spoken much about the economics of the current US trade war.
“In public, he is leaning pretty heavily on the sovereignty angle. It is clear that he privately is probably thinking about the cold, hard economics of an incredibly tenuous situation.”
In other words, the economics will be much harder for Carney and Canada than for Trump and the U.S.
Carney’s at War
Carney might be betting on President Trump losing Congress.
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 organized around an external threat that’s willing to suspend its own party’s orthodoxies, centralize power to move fast, and measure itself in outcomes rather than values,” he wrote.