Mark Carney brushes off insults and threats from Donald Trump: 'I can handle it'

Carney brushed off Trump’s latest tariff threat, issued via a Truth Social post, saying he expected the upcoming negotiation of the Canada-United States-Mexico free trade pact to be “a robust review.”

“The president is a strong negotiator and … I think some of these comments and positioning should be viewed in the broader context of that,” Carney said, as he insisted Ottawa has not and will not pursue a free trade deal with China.

Carney did a slight eye-roll when pressed if he is offended by Trump resurfacing the title “governor,” which the U.S. president had previously used to refer to former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

“I think, in this role you get called a lot of things a lot of the time,” Carney said. ” So I can handle it.”

But Carney noted the “fundamental” offensiveness of slagging NATO troops and the need to respect “our troops, and the contribution that they make.”

Days after several other NATO leaders including the British, Dutch, Danish and Polish heads of government rejected Trump’s dismissal of their contributions in Afghanistan, Carney followed suit, although he did not mention Trump by name and did not respond directly when asked if he would call on Trump to apologize.

Canada, the prime minister said, was first to send support to New York City after the 9/11 terror attacks, dispatched 40,000 Canadian troops over 13 years to serve “on the front lines in Afghanistan,” and lost 158 soldiers and one diplomat who made “the ultimate sacrifice” with their lives there.

“Thousands more were injured. Thirty of our soldiers won the American Bronze Star for service in combat, for courage in combat. It’s an extraordinary contribution for liberty, for freedom, for human rights, defending the United States, defending Canadian values,” Carney said. “Everyone should recognize that.”

Carney reiterated that NATO has the responsibility and capacity to defend Arctic sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Trump’s threats to take control of Greenland, and said Canada will assume its responsibilities for Arctic security, but he sidestepped a direct question about whether Canada would send troops to support European allies in Greenland.

Last week on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, Trump scorned NATO and the contributions of its member countries’ troops during an interview with Fox Business Network.

“We’ve never needed them, we have never really asked anything of them,” Trump said Thursday. “You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that, and they did — they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”

Still there was little doubt the Carney government is doing damage control to address the Trump administration’s perception that Canada is cosying up to Beijing’s ruling Communist Party, viewed by both Republicans and many senior Democrats as an economic rival and possible security threat.

Carney said his cabinet ministers have been clear with their American counterparts what the deal is and what it is not, and said Canada will be pursuing a “deeper free trade agreement” with the U.S. in the upcoming review of the trade deal between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s outgoing ambassador to the U.S., downplayed Carney’s deal with China in an appearance Sunday on the CBS TV show “Face the Nation,” saying it was “a very focused and surgical agreement that was largely, or almost exclusively, designed to de-escalate some tariff escalation that had happened over the past year and a bit.”

Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc echoed those talking points Monday, saying he told U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer that the Canada-China tariff deal is “a very targeted agreement on a couple of sectors of the economy in order to lower tariffs that have been added over the last few years.” 

LeBlanc said he told Greer that Canada has not and will not seek a free trade deal with China, and will abide by the provision of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) that bars any party from signing a free-trade agreement with a non-market economy such as China — a point the prime minister made as well.

However, what constitutes a “non-market” economy is “in the eye of the beholder,” Carney said.

”China is one of 15 or 17 economies that the U.S. views as non-market. I can understand why they say that,” he said. “If we were even considering that — which we are not and never have — we would have given notice” as CUSMA requires.

Asked if he went too far in his widely-praised speech to the World Economic Forum on Jan. 20, Carney said “not at all. We have to be honest.”

The Davos remarks were a recognition of how the world has changed, the prime minister said Monday, doubling down to underscore that “certain great powers are using integration as coercion to change the policies of one country or another.

“Canada understood the scale of the change, the change in U.S. trade policy, what it meant for our economy, we understood that well before other countries,” Carney said.

His speech, hailed by many political and corporate leaders at Davos and beyond, called on middle powers to band together to form new trade alliances. It was met with a rare standing ovation.

On Monday, Carney repeated his premise, that the U.S. trade actions of the past year reinforce the necessity of “building at home and very importantly, diversifying our trade partners abroad,” as he framed the tariff reduction deal with China, which will see 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles imported for sale in Canada this year, in that context.

LeBlanc said the EV import number is “a hard cap” but Carney said the numbers would be allowed to grow, contingent upon Chinese carmakers making investments in EV auto production in Canada.