Conrad Black: The Carney honeymoon is ending in shambles

United States President Donald Trump looks towards Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as they raise their glasses during a toast at a working dinner in Gyeongju, South Korea on Wednesday, Oct 29, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

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The emerging facts about the imbroglio between the Carney government and the Trump administration over tariffs and related issues are a distressing revelation of how not to conduct such very important negotiations. The Canadian government’s version of events was that President Trump had suspended discussions abruptly and angrily over an advertisement taken by the government of Ontario in which the late Republican President Ronald Reagan attacked tariffs in general. It was presented by Mark Carney’s government as illustrative, although the public was allowed to reach this conclusion for itself, of the churlish nature of the U.S. president and an absurd overreaction to a minor pinprick from a Canadian provincial premier (Doug Ford). The implication was that our sober and seasoned new prime minister would, if the roles were reversed, effortlessly rise above a minor barb from, let us say the governor of Tennessee or of Pennsylvania. President Trump’s initial reaction was good-natured and it was only 24 hours later that the Reagan ad was informally cited as the reason for suspending negotiations.

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A very different, and for Canadians, very worrisome version of events has subsequently heaved into public view. Premier Ford has firmly stated that Prime Minister Carney was well aware of the contents of the advertisement prior to it being aired. Neither Carney, nor Dominic LeBlanc, who speaks for him in his absence in Parliament and this week Carney was overseas at international conferences in East Asia, have denied Ford’s assertion, and we may safely assume that it is truthful. Seen in this light, the advertisement was not a somewhat witty provincial interjection in a vital Canada-U.S. economic negotiation. Suddenly, it was a deliberate attempt supported and sponsored by the government of Canada to influence American opinion in a manner adverse to U.S. administration policy, and even to incite a negative response from the Supreme Court of the United States, which will be judging constitutionality of Trump’s tariff policy. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute also commented that the excerpt from the former president’s remarks was used without required authorization and was spliced and edited misleadingly.

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Canadians might wish to consider for a moment what the reaction would be if the president of the United States authorized the governor of one of the large states in that country to take out advertisements inciting Canadian viewers to disagree with federal government policy in a vitally important area of Canada-U.S. relations. If instead of a minor dart conceived and aimed by a provincial premier, we have a deliberate negotiating tactic of the prime minister and the federal government, the implications are appalling.

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This sort of attempt to inflame or at least redirect public opinion in a country on matters of urgent national interest under negotiation is conduct that is absolutely never practiced by governments that abide by international law. It is a provocation on the scale of the so-called Genet Affair of 1793-4 in which the French minister to the United States commissioned American privateers to attack British commerce and criticized the neutral U.S. policy of President George Washington in the French Revolutionary Wars. It bears comparison with the hugely indiscreet release of private diplomatic exchanges in 1870 of the Prussian chief minister Bismarck, the Ems Dispatch, disparaging the French government of Emperor Napoleon III. This led to the Franco-Prussian War, the collapse of the French Second Empire, the bloodbath of the Paris Commune, the founding of the United German Empire and of the French Third Republic, and the occupation by Germany for nearly 50 years of the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. (In the Genet Affair, Washington expelled the ambassador while the French simultaneously recalled him on a charge of misconduct so severe that he would undoubtedly have been executed on the guillotine. Genet appealed personally to Washington for asylum as a fugitive which was generously granted, and he married the daughter of the future vice president General George Clinton, and spent the balance of his days, forty years, as a Hudson River Valley gentleman with the old Dutch patriciate, such as the Van Rensselaers, Vanderbilts, and Roosevelts.)