Political news and analysis for Canadians
In stark contrast to most other world leaders who continue trying to find ways to appease the authoritarian in the White House, the Canadian Prime Minister treated Trump as a naked emperor leading a government of total amateurs, writes Simon Marks at The i Paper.
“They asked too much and offered too little”, he told reporters on Saturday. “You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked”, he claimed, adding: “We cannot accept what they’ve offered and will not give what they demand.”
The US imposed 50% tariffs on C$28billion (£14.6bn) worth of Canadian goods, while Mark Carney, the country’s prime minister, has vowed to match them “dollar for dollar,” reports Lauren Almeida at The Guardian.
New York governor Kathy Hochul posted on X: “Needlessly picking fights with our allies and raising prices here at home. That’s Trump’s economic policy in a nutshell.”
Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, said the new tariffs meant “higher costs for small businesses, farmers, and all Minnesota families.”
She wrote on X: “Canada is Minnesota’s #1 trading partner. Minnesotans are paying for Trump’s chaos.”
Ottawa’s negotiators rejected an 11th-hour demand from the Trump administration to ditch requirements that U.S. streaming platforms, including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, promote Canadian film, TV and music to their users in Canada.
On Friday evening, the U.S. negotiating team introduced an unexpected demand that Canada provide exemptions to its laws requiring U.S. streamers to boost the discoverability of Canadian content, including French-language content, in this country, reports Marie Woolf at The Globe and Mail.
Last week U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance made headlines when he told a closed-door fundraiser that Prime Minister Mark Carney had tried to “out-tough” Trump in negotiations. He also praised Conservative Party MP Jamil Jivani as a helpful advocate for trade and dismissed Official Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre as a “non-entity,” writes Stephanie Carvin in the Toronto Star.
Another of Vance’s points received less attention but was arguably more ominous: “the whole point of this is to change Canada’s behaviour,” he said, and shift the country “in a Trumpian direction.”
Statement follows:
“The breakdown of the Canada-U.S. trade negotiations was not the news any of us wanted to hear. I know this was a difficult decision for Prime Minister Carney, but I want to be very clear: it was absolutely the right one for our country.
Canada went to the table looking for a fair deal. But there are some things we should never be willing to trade away simply for the sake of reaching an agreement. We will never accept terms that undermine Canadian industry, Canadian workers or our national sovereignty.
After Canada-U.S. trade talks broke down, Trump hit Canada with 50% tariffs on various items. Analysis from economist Trevor Tombe indicates that if the tariffs last, Canada would shed tens of thousands of jobs, report Karina Roman and David Common at CBC News.
Mark Wiseman, Canada’s ambassador to the US, said in a Bloomberg interview on August 23 that there was no one issue that led talks to collapse late on Aug 21, a development that triggered new tariffs and a potentially escalating trade fight.
“As we drilled down, what we discovered was that what our understanding of what had been agreed to was quite different from what was showing up in the documents,” he said.
“When that kind of happens once or twice, it’s kind of understandable, but when it happens consistently, and every interpretation is the most negative interpretation” then it “got to a point” where they walked away.
“This isn’t the end of anything,” said Christopher Ragan, the emeritus McGill University economist and author of Canada’s most widely used postsecondary economics textbook. “It’s the beginning of another policy tantrum from Donald Trump. He wanted a political win and didn’t get it. And the question now may be: If he can’t deal with little Canada, what can he do? But this shows we’re not prepared to cave to American pressure.”
Prof. Ragan said this episode may be a symbolic turn to a world in which countries everywhere grow more protectionist.
Three-in-four Canadians are endorsing the Carney government’s decision to walk away from trade negotiations with the United States late Friday night, confirming that long-expressed national resolve and desire to see Canadian negotiators take a “hard line” with Washington was more than theoretical.
New data from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute finds that support for Ottawa’s stance is at majority levels in every province in the country, bottoming out at 65 per cent in Saskatchewan and 67 per cent in Alberta.
The calamitous collapse of trade negotiations between Canada and the U.S. is a warning to nations worldwide that pursuing any kind of dialogue with the current US administration is doomed at the outset, according to observers who say this recent episode indicates seeking a fair deal is futile, writes Olivia Bowden at The Guardian.
Andrea Lawlor, an associate professor of political science at McMaster University in Ontario, said: “No matter the closeness of the historical relationship, the American administration has signalled that it now priorities its interests above those of some sort of global economic coordination or harmony.
“It feels like these talks ‘failed’. However, I’m not sure there was really a success to be had.”
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