By taunting Mark Carney, Donald Trump's trade team is only helping Canada

“There’s not a grown up in Canada in charge there,” Switzer said on Wednesday. “You don’t go out of your way to antagonize the leader of the country that you are absolutely existentially tied to. It’s just political malpractice.”

Switzer blamed Carney for making the negotiations over the USMCA (or CUSMA, as Canadians call the tripartite free trade agreement with the United States and Mexico) “personal” — choosing to ignore Trump’s taunts of making Canada the 51st state or referring to the current and former prime minister as “governor” — and suggested Canada should just recognize its geographical location makes it “dependent upon the U.S. economy.”

“That’s not hubris. That’s not something that Canada needs to be concerned about. It’s not something Canada can change,” he said. “They can have a weak economy that is underperforming and not doing well, and Carney can feel superior, or … Carney could … come like (Mexico’s) President (Claudia) Sheinbaum and decide that the United States and Canada will have a positive economic relationship. (That) it’s my job as a person who’s supposed to protect Canadian jobs, Canadian citizens, and the Canadian economy to not let my ego, and my feelings dictate what’s best for my own economy.”

Perhaps, it’s not surprising that an administration that is so spectacularly bungling the conflict with Iran, and weakening its own bargaining position there, would do the same here.

Carney won last spring’s election because voters selected him to stand up to Trump, and do what needed to be done to address the economic and territorial threats posed by the president.

Trump and his advisers know this. They should also know that Carney has an even stronger hand than he did last year — with a majority in the House of Commons and opinion polls suggesting that if he called an election now that majority would get larger.

So calling Carney names and suggesting he can’t win by going against the continent’s bully is a surefire way for Americans to get few public concessions.

And yet concessions are what they say they are after. 

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told members of the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means committee — worried about access to Canadian potash and the lack of American liquor on Canadian shelves — that the administration wants Canada to address “right now” items that they feel aren’t compliant with the current trade deal. “It’s hard to move on to a broader conversation about how to improve the agreement when we don’t feel like we have compliance with the initial one,” he said.

But Carney has made concessions before — and been burned before.

Last June, when it seemed the prime minister and Trump were close to an agreement, the president suddenly called off negotiations and threatened new tariffs over the digital services tax which he called “a direct and blatant attack.” Carney gave in. The three-per-cent surtax on digital giants was scrapped. What he got in return, we don’t know.

Then, in August, Carney dropped more retaliatory tariffs against the U.S., and, again, had little to show for it.

What Canada could win by pre-emptively negotiating away positions publicly — before formal talks begin — was difficult to fathom before Switzer comments. But now, it’s political suicide, not just bad policy.

Thursday, Carney lashed out: “We’re not sitting here taking notes, OK? And taking instructions from the United States.”

“You know what’s an irritant?,” the prime minister added. “Fifty per cent tariff on steel, 50 per cent tariff on aluminum, 25 per cent tariff on automobiles, all the tariffs on forest products. Those are more than irritants. Those are violations of our trade deal.”

The Canadian government is fond of reminding the public that the current agreement works, that 85 per cent of our trade with the U.S. is tariff free, and, more recently, that if no agreement is reached by July 1, it isn’t the end of the world, the agreement remains in place until 2036 with annual reviews. “July 1 … is kind of a check point, it’s not a cliff,” Canada’s trade negotiator, Janice Charette, said this week. 

The Carney government is buying time, hoping U.S. domestic pressure steps up, and calculating that it’s better off having trade uncertainty than having to explain the loss of market access.

What may eventually lead Canada to the negotiating table under Trump’s terms aren’t his threats, but whether Canadians who feel the brunt of the president’s actions — job losses and business drying up — continue to feel Carney has their back.