Conrad Black: Mark Carney puts it all on the line

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks to journalists outside his office the day after the Liberal's won three byelections, in Ottawa September 1, 2026. Photo by Blair Gable/Postmedia Photo by Blair Gable /Photo by Blair Gable / Postmedia

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Prime Minister Mark Carney continues to benefit from the Canadian resentment of overbearing American trade policy and its dislike of President Trump, and Trump has been widely criticized in the United States for escalating this absurd trade war. Canada is rightly seen as a friendly country against which the United States has no significant grievances, now that Canada is addressing its defence budget. But there is a sharp disagreement between the two governments over whether the Carney account of the United States changing the terms of the agreement at the last minute is accurate.

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If the United States acted deviously and layered in new material conditions just before the agreement was to be signed, domestic American opinion would condemn that. The Canadian prime minister was, in that event, clearly justified in ending the negotiations and withdrawing his negotiators. If as the Americans claim, no such event occurred, then Carney‘s popularity, based on the righteousness of fair dealing and the naturally refreshing pleasure of punching Uncle Sam on the nose as he apparently deserves, will be severely undermined. As the official Canadian opposition has recognized, it would be dispositive to make public the final offers. It is a clear point and both sides cannot be right: either the Americans tried to pull a fast one at five minutes to midnight, or Carney saw a chance for a political win and decided to reject the American offer, claim American bad faith, and instead of continuing to negotiate, took such umbrage that he went straight to (trade) war.

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Canadians are right to give their leader the benefit of the doubt, but the prime minister has a heavy duty to remove the doubt. As long as his word is disputed, the issue has not been resolved. The very capable Wall Street Journal expert for all of the U.S.A.’s neighbours in the Americas, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who knows Canada well and worked here for a time, has on this issue been critical of Trump, to whom she is often well disposed. Even though she dismissed the present government of Canada as “sniveling lefties,” a rather harsh wigging, though not entirely undeserved, she held that Trump had done the Canadian government a great favour and that Carney should be grateful for Trump’s boost in Carney’s tribal popularity in the face of perceived American bullying. More unambiguous Trump media supporters such as Laura Ingraham of Fox News, who also knows and likes Canada, told her viewers that “Canada is imploding” and that Carney is solely responsible for this dispute. The Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has made a number of bitchy comments about Canada’s GDP one thirteenth of that of the U.S., “going to war with a submarine from the Edmonton Mall.” This, like Ontario premier Doug Ford’s invitation to President Trump to ”kiss” his fundament, is gratuitous. But it is not obvious why Carney chose to end the negotiations rather than simply saying the current terms were unacceptable, but that the discussions should continue.

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The Canadian government has said that it will focus its retaliatory sanctions on politically vulnerable areas for the Republicans in the November American midterm election and has written some (Democratic) governors about this. This is an unusually hostile stance that could only be justified if Carney’s account is exactly correct. It is not clear if the impact of these tariffs on September 8 will penetrate through existing inventories and affect voting intentions in swing Senate states such as Maine and Michigan, and a substantial number of congressional districts across the country. But it is a brinkmanship move. If the tariffs do not affect the elections, Carney will seem a devious blowhard. If they do negatively affect the election results, the president will be there for another two years and the vehement hostility of Donald Trump to the Canadian government could become very onerous.

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If Carney’s version of events cannot be sustained, his position will become untenable. it would lead to an even greater flame-out than that of John Diefenbaker in 1963. when he announced that NATO was downgrading its interest in nuclear weapons, (which was false), and that he had had what amounted to religious revelations of the evil of such weapons and in consequence had decided not to fulfill Canada’s undertaking to NATO to deploy nuclear tipped antiaircraft missiles over northern Canada. His government fell and he was defeated in 1963 election.