SNOBELEN: Elbows down, heads up

Our challenge is overcoming the lost Trudeau decade.

Published Sep 18, 2026  •  Last updated 42 minutes ago  •  3 minute read

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney during a work lunch as part of the G7 summit, in Evian, France, on June 16, 2026. Photo by EVELYN HOCKSTEIN /POOL/AFP via Getty Images

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By now it is abundantly clear that the time for elbows up is over. Most of us have a schoolyard sense of justice, and we desperately want a bully to get his due. But those feelings have a time and place. Now is the time for more serious responses.

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The bully is certainly a pest, but he is not our responsibility, and we will not influence whatever justice awaits him. The challenges we can and will meet are of our own creation. It’s time to put the elbows down and get our heads up.

A little history is useful here. Canada was born in a trade dispute. In 1866, the U.S. Congress ripped up the reciprocity agreement that had allowed free trade between what was about to become Canada and the United States. The era of free trade was over. For a while.

A hundred years later, the Auto Pact was negotiated, allowing the manufacturing sector in both nations to flourish. Four decades ago, two great free-traders, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, negotiated the Canada United States Free Trade Agreement, making both countries more competitive.

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But that was then, this is now. Once again, the United States is in a protectionist mood, and trade agreements are being ripped apart. Here we go again.

No one questions America’s right to control its markets. Obviously, the U.S. government can impose tariffs on its citizens. We may not think these things wise, but they are hardly unprecedented. Come to think of it, starting wars it can’t end (and driving up the price of diesel) is pretty much business as usual in America.

That America is serving up the latest round of tariffs and global war with a healthy serving of venomous rhetoric is disappointing but, sadly, predictable. Whatever outrage we might have felt initially is dissipating, replaced with the certainty that the bully and his cronies are ultimately America’s problem.

And so, its heads-up time. Time to take stock and reimagine Canada’s place in the world. Turns out there are lots of places that need the things we have if we can just find the discipline to see opportunities clearly and get out of our own way.

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Fools and wise men agree that change requires a useful crisis. It’s important to get the crisis part right. There is an ancient caution that suggests before you climb the ladder of success, make sure it’s leaning on the right wall. That sage wisdom applies here.

While it is easy to lay the cause of Canada’s current challenges at the feet of the current U.S. administration, there is no usefulness in that assumption. Americans will choose the leadership that reflects their intentions without our help.

Our challenge is overcoming the lost Trudeau decade, and we have no one to blame for it but ourselves. We carry the burden of a federal debt that doubled during the Trudeau government. We are paying for a decade when we turned our back on our resource industries. We are recovering from COVID-era mistakes that damaged our productivity.

It’s a massive challenge to undo this legacy and position Canada to be more able to compete as our traditional trade is disrupted. We can do this, but it is going to take a huge effort to pull cost out of government, slash regulatory overburden, and make real progress on building infrastructure.

This isn’t elbows up work. It’s harder than that.

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