Mark Carney is walking a high-stakes foreign-policy tightrope between Canada's values and interests

Globe and Mail

4 hours ago

Mark Carney leads the first Canadian government in decades to have been elected almost entirely on the basis of a foreign-policy agenda. And the last weeks have been dominated by his urgent efforts to turn that agenda into reality.
But which foreign policy?
On one hand, Mr. Carney has a mandate to pursue a policy of Canadian values and ideals. He owes his party's re-election to the powerful mood of defensive nationalism that swept Canada after Donald Trump began his attacks on Canada's economy and sovereignty.
Voters overwhelmingly wanted the new PM to realign Canada away from the United States and into a new set of alliances with countries that share our democratic and egalitarian principles. The economist who entered politics with a book titled Values seemed ideally positioned to do this. In fact, his campaign platform mentioned Canadian values more than 20 times, and national interests only once.
On the other hand, Mr. Carney was expected to return Canada to the cold hard realism of protecting our core national interests. Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau were both foreign-policy idealists (albeit with different ideals) whose approach to the world often involved the largely symbolic projection of Canadian values. With Mr. Trump's re-election, things got real.
His policies threatened our trade, defence and governance interests, a large part of which are inextricably tied to the United States. Experts observed that in order to prevent economic catastrophe, Mr. Carney would have to hold his nose and make a deal with Mr. Trump – 'a plan that identifies where our national interests converge and where we can deepen the relationship,' as Edward Greenspon, Janice Gross Stein and Drew Fagan wrote in The Globe, even if that meant trading away some of our ideals.
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Those two approaches, on their face, are mutually incompatible. Yet what we've seen, most visibly during the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., is a Prime Minister pretty actively pursuing both of them at once. Mr. Carney is walking along a razor-thin ridge, balanced precariously between one chasm that could destroy our standard of living and another that threatens our fundamental principles.
He is very much pursuing a policy to realign Canada with countries closer to its values. This is most visible in military affairs, where he has made major spending commitments to join the European-led effort to replace lost U.S. support for Ukraine and to forge a new collective-defence alliance in the event of a U.S. departure from, or the collapse of, NATO.
On the trade file, his fast-paced resumption of economic-integration talks with Britain is meant to supplement the successful Canada-European Union agreement. In the diplomatic space, Canada's decision to break with its neutral Mideast policy and join France and Britain in censuring Israel's denial of Gaza aid and their plan to recognize Palestinian statehood was clearly an effort to shift our foreign policy toward countries more aligned to our values.
But Mr. Carney is also pursuing a deal with Mr. Trump that would protect our interests, at almost any cost. This has meant flattering rather than confronting the far-right President, and avoiding the sort of mildly critical remarks that scuppered Mr. Trudeau's previously good relationship with Mr. Trump at the 2018 G7 summit in Quebec.
More substantially, roughly half of Mr. Carney's immigration and border bill consists of policies designed to take a load off federal bureaucracies by shifting migrants into more manageable categories, while the other half is comprised of border-security theatre transparently intended to meet Mr. Trump's absurd demands.
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Likewise, Mr. Carney is discussing the notion of Canadian participation in Mr. Trump's 'golden dome' missile-defence megaproject just as the renegotiation of our crucial free-trade agreement is beginning. There has been little public effort to shift defence procurement away from the U.S., at least not before a trade deal is complete. The potential political and thus economic cost of jeopardizing our trade relationship would be unbearable.
At some point, these twin foreign policies are going to collide. But luckily for Mr. Carney, a number of his policy initiatives involve what the military would call 'dual-use' technology. His big arms-spending commitments satisfy Mr. Trump's obsession with arbitrary NATO targets, but a good chunk serve the more urgent purpose of buying weapons for Ukraine to compensate for Mr. Trump's abandonment.
Mr. Carney can truthfully claim to be cracking down on illegal immigrants, and while Mr. Trump might imagine this is similar to his mass-deportation agenda, Ottawa is actually taking the more sensible and Canadian approach of turning them into legal immigrants.
So far, this Janus-faced statecraft appears to be succeeding. The risk is that this juggling of interests and values could result in damage to both, probably at the hands of Mr. Trump. But it's also quite likely the only way to emerge from this dark era with both somewhat intact.