By Conrad Black
Not since Lester Pearson, still in Opposition, heaped praise on the crisis management talents of U.S. President John F. Kennedy after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 has any Canadian political leader showered such a torrent of compliments upon an American president as Prime Minister Mark Carney did on U.S. President Donald Trump on Oct. 7. (Admittedly, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau would have been a strong contestant if he had not become almost tongue-tied in complementing U.S. President Richard Nixon on his triangulation of great power relations with his diplomatic overture to China, a field in which Trudeau fancied himself something of a pioneer.)
There is nothing wrong with this, and it is almost certainly an astute diplomatic gambit as President Trump’s threshold for considering praise of himself excessive and questionably motivated is relatively high. The prime minister’s compliments were nothing but the truth: ending illegal immigration, pressuring allies to increase defence spending, generating economic growth, advancing the Middle East peace process and terminating Iran’s nuclear program. And Trump responded with gracious compliments for Carney.
Of course, it is much better to have good relations with the occupant of the Oval Office. But we are past the time of prime ministers W.L. Mackenzie King and Brian Mulroney when the only sure route to greater importance in the world for Canada was for our prime minister to be perceived as having considerable influence with the president of the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt never really knew what to make of King, although he found him a reliable and co-operative political survivor. Mulroney fared better with presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and was so highly valued by them that they posthumously invited him to be eulogists at their state funerals, a very rare honour for a foreigner.
Where Carney is particularly to be congratulated is on his boffo performance as the Churchillian defender of destiny in the last election, accusing Trump of trying to “break” Canada and pledging to stop him by keeping his own “elbows up,” a hockey expression that Carney was well-qualified to invoke as a veteran of the Harvard University hockey team. (Although he was a goaltender and such a posture in that position is generally counterproductive). I wrote at the time and subsequently that the entire election issue of protecting this country from the nasty aggressions of Trump was utter nonsense. I knew from talking to the president that he was aggrieved at what he correctly regarded as the cheeky treatment he had received from former prime minister Justin Trudeau, and that he liked Canada and wished it well. However, since Trudeau told him that the Canadian economy would “collapse” if the tariffs that Trump proposed were actually applied to imports from Canada, and he had noted Canada’s egregious failure to pay anything remotely close to it’s commitment to support NATO in the three decades since the retirement of Brian Mulroney, he wondered if Canada really had the will and means to be a serious country. It was a legitimate question.
Even though I knew that Carney’s anti-Trump campaign was just histrionics for gullible voters, I told Trump that it was preposterous to put us in the same category with Mexico, which had been systematically attracting American factories to shut down in their home country and reopen just inside the Mexican border with heavy subsidies, tax holidays and cheap Mexican labour, often to fabricate Chinese parts for duty-free import into the United States, all the while complicit in the flow illegal immigrants, including many violent criminals, into the U.S. Trump acknowledged that it had been unfair to put Canada in the dock with Mexico. I was a partisan of Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s “Captain Canada” campaign to cut off electricity and oil to the United States to enable as many Americans as possible to enjoy the invigorating experience of refreshing winter temperatures, and I saw in it a great opportunity to gain much popularity and respect in the world by standing up to this abusive conduct by showing that we are fundamentally a strong country, which could not be so easily bullied. (Ford’s latest wheeze of not exporting critical minerals to the U.S is an over-reach — it’s time to negotiate and stop posturing.)
When I was invited to visit President Trump last month, he asked me what the state of Canada-U.S. trade negotiations was, and I said I was hoping he would tell me. He said that he had intended his suggestion of a federal union between the two countries as something that would flatter Canadians, as it was based on the theory that English-speaking Canadians, at least, were not easily distinguishable from Americans from northern states, and further, he did not see how Canada could retain its steel and automobile industries and survive commercially as a country without them. Wearing my old hat from my days in the iron ore business, I told him that we could keep the steel industry going and certainly handle our own needs, and that if we could not sell automobile parts and components into the United States, we could take over foreign automobile factories at minimal prices, make arrangements with other countries, supply our own market and ensure that no American automobile was ever sold in Canada again. Not really knowing what I was talking about, although I suspect it to be true, I jauntily said that if the Swedes can do it, we can, too.
It appears that some reasonable compromise will emerge from these tariff discussions and, to me, it is reassuring that Mark Carney could put on such a masquerade of nationalist fervour and do such a crisp about-face after the election; a cynical political strategist is almost always preferable to a naive political posturer. But this extended political honeymoon of the new prime minister’s will be six months along when he brings down his new budget in early November. That is the time that elapsed between the Japanese onslaught at Pearl Harbor and the Americans turning the tide of battle at Midway. It is nearly twice as long as Roosevelt’s famous 100 days, which profoundly changed America and reversed the depression, or Napoleon’s 100 days between Elba and Waterloo.
First published in the National Post
