By Conrad Black
It is difficult for an outsider to get a clear idea of how the Canada-U.S. trade discussions are developing. As frequent readers may recall, I was seriously embarrassed at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s hokey election masquerade as Winston Churchill translating the Scarborough Bluffs into the White Cliffs of Dover and shaking his righteous Canadian fist at the much-maligned U.S. President Donald Trump on the farther shore “trying to break us.” He all but promised to fight in the fields and hills (and wine cellars of Rockcliffe and billiard rooms of Westmount and the indoor swimming pools of Rosedale). My civic disappointment was tempered by my longstanding opinion that in politics, anything that works, no matter how outlandish, is acceptable if it isn’t illegal. The vapid farce of Carney’s “finest hour” narrowly passed that test, even if it reflected no credit on him or his voters.
President Trump’s tariff initiatives have been overwhelmingly successful and were based on his correct view that it was outrageous for the United States to be running a trade deficit of over US$1 trillion (C$1.4 trillion), the byproduct of indulgent Cold War trade practices that were used as bribes to fragile allies and nonaligned countries not to get too close to the Soviet bloc. As I had the honour of saying to President Trump, the United States has no real grievance with Canada. We are a fair-trading country and the United States does not have a trade deficit with us if energy is excluded, and much of the energy that it buys is at a knockdown price, which it then sells to third parties at a sizable profit. The Americans were right to complain about the absurdity of our supply management system and its associated tariffs on certain agricultural products, as the best way to raise farm income would be through specific income supplements to farmers, not overcharging the whole country for food. The prime minister appeared to be encouraging us to think that this anomaly would be addressed but it has not been.
Article 34.6 of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement stipulates that that agreement runs until 2036 unless a party gives six months’ notice of termination, so there should be time to work something out. Mark Carney appears to be confining his Churchillian shtick to domestic audiences while being rather mousy in Washington. President Trump has made comments about a U.S.-Canadian union because it seemed to him that since we were not seriously paying for our own defence and then-prime minister Justin Trudeau said the proposed tariffs would cause the collapse of the Canadian economy, it might be a favour to Canadians to confederate the countries. I had the occasion to say to him that it was very unjust to liken Canada to Mexico, which is not only severely complicit in a quasi-invasion of the United States by swarms of desperate people, but was also engaged in the systematic enticement of American manufacturing to Mexico with the benefit of cheap Mexican labour and subsidized factory construction, to export back into the United States fabricated parts from Chinese companies under the free-trade agreement. Trump said: “You have a point.” It is not impossible to deal with Donald Trump. Canadians are waiting to see if our leader wishes to make love or war — and if, in this case, he is competent enough to do either.
The prime minister has admirably agreed to devote five per cent of GDP to national defence, an area that has been scandalously ignored since the retirement of former prime minister Brian Mulroney more than 30 years ago, even if much of that funding can be spent on projects that are only marginally connected to defence. As I’ve written here and elsewhere ad nauseam for decades, defence is the most economically productive form of public investment as it assists high technology manufacturing and research and the per capita personnel costs are relatively modest, and it is the most efficient adult education opportunity for the members of the Armed Forces. But five per cent of Canadian GDP is over $100 billion in a country overloaded with debt and taxes and running a chronic annual federal deficit.
The prime minister is conducting a rather prudish flirtation with pipelines, trying to reconcile the absolute necessity of increasing Canada’s national income by satisfying some of the world’s raging appetite for our oil and gas with years of his mad green jeremiads and fantasies, producing such inspired nostrums as Carney’s concept of the carbon-neutral pipeline, as if it was proposed to deliver rosewater by pipeline to export markets or eastern Canada. There has been no hint of where the prime minister is leaning in budgetary terms but some hard choices are going to have to be made soon.
The closest he has come to an executive decision so far is his shameful nonsense of threatening to recognize a Palestinian state run by the corrupt, enfeebled, completely inept, mistrusted and totally unrepresentative Palestinian Authority. It’s quavering leader, 89-year-old longtime terrorist supporter Mahmoud Abbas, has made a lot of completely implausible claims of democratizing the bloodstained regime he inherited from Yasser Arafat, which has still not delivered anything of what it promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993, for which Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Hamas invasion, massacre and hostage-taking of Oct. 7, 2023, was intended to be, and was received as, an act of war, and Israel has largely won that war. There can be no peace until the Arab leaders in Gaza and the West Bank are prepared to accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Hamas uses the civilian population as human shields and steals their food, and Israel has achieved a relatively low ratio for urban counter-guerrilla warfare of civilian-to-terrorist casualties. It was an error to have reduced food imports to Gaza between March and May that has now been corrected, but the Hamas terrorist operation must be exterminated to provide any possibility of peace for the Arabs or the Jews. Carney has done us no favours by tagging along behind the impotent posturing of the French and British, who, ever since the British promised the same territory to the Jews and Arabs at the same time in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, have never had any policy in the region except to await American initiatives and then posture as being better disposed to the Arabs.
Mark Carney was elected on a false though imaginatively histrionic premise of imminent national danger from the United States. He took over the government that ran this great and rich country into a ditch of capital outflows, declining relative prosperity, slow growth, an unsustainably large public sector, an almost collapsed health-care system and a state of national defence so anemic we would have trouble fending off an attack from angry Greenlanders. Canada is a treasure house with a talented and motivated population and political institutions that have been generally successful though they’re in need of renovation. Carney has been given a great opportunity and a great challenge, and it’s almost show time. On his thin record, we are entitled to hope, but also to fear the worst.
First published in the National Post
One Response
PM Carney is too conflicted to be trusted to make the required decisions for Canada that Mr. Black describes in his insightful article. Carney’s myriad and convoluted assets in Brookfield Asset Management are mainly invested in US and foreign companies. They include all kinds of green technologies and surprise, surprise modular homes. BAM even owns Royal LePage Real Estate – how convenient to fix our runaway immigration induced housing shortage. I am afraid the Canadian economy is doomed after 10 years of Trudeau’s insane policies and woke idiocies, many probably recommended and approved by Carney as a trusted advisor. If we don’t get our act together quickly we will become a 51st state by default. Oh Canada.