Canada isn't losing the trade war — yet

National Observer

3 days ago

Mark Carney told Canadians that he knew how to deal with Donald Trump. April's federal election results showed that voters wanted to believe him. But now, more than three months in and with the latest economic data starting to show signs of tariff-driven deterioration, Canadians are starting to wonder whether his handling of our relationship with America is going according to plan — and what that plan actually is.
It's hardly surprising to see Conservative politicians, pundits and online influencers interpreting the developments coming out of Washington and Ottawa through the prism of their reflexive disdain for the Liberal government. There is an almost palpable glee in their mockery of the 'elbows up' catchphrase that helped him win the federal election in April. 'Explain to me about the elbows again,' CPC MP Michelle Rempel-Garner said on social media, citing a list of tariffs that are now higher than they were before Carney became Prime Minister in February (and before Trump officially launched his tariff war on the world on April 2).
But it's not just Conservative partisans who are questioning Carney's ability to deliver. In a piece titled ' Let's Admit It: Donald Trump is Winning the Trade War with Canada,' Paul Wells argues that Carney's countermoves are so far coming up short. His efforts to remove interprovincial trade barriers are still largely symbolic, the president's love affair with tariffs continues apace and Carney's efforts to establish new or strengthened economic ties with other countries have yet to yield anything tangible. 'Replacing a lifetime of ever-closer integration with the vastly larger population next door, in favour of substantial new partnerships with distant lands, is really hard,' Wells writes. 'Actually, it's usually impossible.'
That's the key word here: usually. As Carney has said, if Canada is going to survive the onslaught of economic and political idiocy coming from Trump's White House, it will have to ' do things that we haven't imagined before, at speeds we didn't think possible." That certainly helps explain the rushed passage of Bill C-5, which lays the groundwork for the acceleration of nation-building economic projects like pipelines and electricity grids. The hardest part there may still lie ahead, as Indigenous groups and local communities prepare to push back against the proposed barrage of building.
But for all of his talk about the importance of moving quickly, the prime minister's approach to dealing with Trump seems to be all about doing the exact opposite. Carney, who has made no secret of his fondness for hockey, could be employing a strategy drawn directly from that sport: ragging the puck. As Rolling Stone's Guy Lawson wrote in a recent piece, 'the idea is simple: When you're ahead, don't give the other team any opportunity to win. Hold on to the puck, skate backward away from the play, making it seem like you're still playing the game when you're really playing the clock.'
Carney has been criticized for not striking the sort of deals that Japan and Europe secured with Trump, ones that involve handshake agreements and loose pledges to purchase hundreds of billions worth of American exports. But it's worth remembering that these 'deals,' if you can even call them that, still create tariff structures that are higher than what Canadian exporters have to pay. That's because most of our exports still qualify for an exemption under the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement. As Scotiabank Chief Economist Derek Holt wrote in a recent report, 'because of the exemption that the administration verified last night and because we've long argued that most exports are already CUSMA-compliant, Canada's ETR [effective tariff rate] remains at 4.6 per cent on total goods and services exports to the world and 6.3 per cent on total goods and services exports to the US.'
Those international 'deals,' meanwhile, already look like they're barely worth the napkins they must have been written on. Trump has already suggested that the promised investment coming from Europe amounted to a slush fund that he can personally direct as he pleases. 'The details are $600 billion to invest in anything I want,' he said. 'Anything. I can do anything I want with it.'
Canada's Conservatives seem to want Mark Carney to rush into a deal — any deal — with Donald Trump. Why his strategy of "ragging the puck" might be about to pay dividends, and what will happen to his government (and our country) if it doesn't.
Not quite. The European Union can't tell businesses where or how to invest, as European Commission trade spokesperson Olof Gill told Politico after the deal was announced. "What we have transmitted to the U.S. administration is aggregate intentions as regards energy spending and as regards investment in the U.S. economy by EU companies. Those commitments are in no way binding.' Indeed, as The Atlantic 's Rogé Karma noted, those figures were 'mostly rough numbers based on what European companies were already planning to invest and buy.'
As Karma wrote, the math wasn't any better for Trump on the promised investments coming from South Korea and Japan. 'Shortly after the deal with Japan was announced, the country's top trade negotiator said that he anticipated only one or two per cent of the $550 billion fund would come in the form of direct investment; the rest would mostly consist of loans that would need to be repaid with interest. South Korean officials have made similar statements.' In other words: no Trump-controlled slush fund here either.
The Japanese deal, meanwhile, has been subject to other competing interpretations of the text. As the New York Times reported, the agreed-upon 15 per cent tariff was issued in a way that it 'stacked' on top of existing ones, which meant the effective rate on things like Japanese beef went up from 26.4 per cent to 41.4 per cent. Japan's lead negotiator claims the Trump administration has agreed to correct this 'extremely regrettable' mistake, while local Japanese media is reporting that the Trump administration hasn't actually made any such concession.
Some deal.
In this environment, and with Canada's pre-existing protection under CUSMA, the best way to win this trade war is not to engage. That's especially true if the 'deals' being struck right now can be changed at the whim of a president who seems to have an endless supply of them. As the Globe and Mail 's European correspondent Eric Reguly noted, 'there is a lesson for Canada: Nothing short of a congressionally approved trade deal is worth the paper it is written on.'
That's the prize that Carney has his eyes on right now, and it's where his efforts ought to be judged most carefully. It's why Canada sent senior ministers to Mexico recently in order to discuss deepening the economic partnership between the two countries — and, likely, some game theory for dealing with Trump. And it's why Carney continues to let Trump stick daggers into his own economy's back rather than trying to insert them himself.
Here again, time might be Carney's biggest asset. The closer Trump's allies in Congress get to the midterm elections in 2026, the more his growing unpopularity (and that of his tariff war) will matter to him. The passage of time also gives Carney more room to further develop Canada's economic alternatives: new infrastructure projects and new trade deals with other partners. All of this amounts to meaningful leverage for Canada in the inevitable renegotiation of CUSMA.
Mark Carney may yet lose the trade war with America and Donald Trump. There might not even be a way to win that sort of war, if Trump persists in deliberately tanking his country's economy and taking everyone else's with it. But for now, at least, Carney's strategy appears to be working. One thing is certain: his political fortunes, and maybe even those of the country he now governs, depend on it.