Just a few commentaries tonight, mainly about how well Carney is dealing with Trump and the tariffs, as the American economy begins to collapse.
Guy Lawson / Rolling Stone
Why Canada Isn’t Sweating Trump’s Mob Tactics
The Gang That Couldn’t Govern Straight: Under Trump, Canada’s most-favored-nation status endures, suckers
Keeping a straight face has been perhaps the greatest achievement of Mark Carney's brief tenure as the prime minister of Canada. For months, Donald Trump has railed against Canada, threatening to turn America’s ungrateful northern neighbor into the 51st state, come what may, an achievement worthy of his visage gracing Mount Rushmore — in the same way Trump will annex Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, free Brazil’s corrupt former President Jair Bolsonaro, repeal the laws of climate change and gravity, and then impose tariffs on all of America’s nefarious trading partners, like the evil-doer Canada.
The only hitch, as the canny Carney has known all along: America has a thing called a “treaty” with Canada. Not one of Trump’s “deals,” the chaotic, almost certainly worthless and delusional transactions that involve the president imagining himself astride the world, TV remote in hand, a colossus of reactionary stupidity and cruelty finally delivering his promised revenge.
...The pervasive terror displayed by American institutions has disguised the fact that it is actually possible to stand up to a bully — as unassuming Canada just proved with its support for a Palestinian state. The truth is that under the terms of the USMCA, 95 percent of the goods and services that Canada exports to the United States arrive duty free, leaving a relatively small five percent subject to Trump’s imperial 35 percent tariff. But even that doesn’t capture the absurd reality. While Trump imposes across-the-board tariffs on countless countries, for reasons that escape any rational economic explanation, Canada is now perhaps the single most favored trading nation on earth. While scores of countries face Trump’s punitive tariffs, Canada largely trades tariff free with the United States because it doesn’t need a “deal” — it has a treaty.
Canada's prime minister Carney possesses degrees in economics from Harvard and Oxford, and they likely provided him with sufficient education to see the truth behind Trump’s nonsense — and ensure he has the social graces and political intelligence to not laugh out loud when the president imposes symbolic tariffs like a carnival barker. Leading the Bank of Canada during the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Bank of England through the Brexit catastrophe of 2016 certainly have endowed Carney with the fortitude to quietly keep an eye on the larger prize and persist through times of economic lunacy.
In recent months, Canada has come to occupy a unique place in the world. Sent as a canary into the coal mine of Donald Trump’s addled mind, Canada has emerged from the toxic subterranean atmosphere alive and with the urgent news that it is possible to survive the craziness that has besieged the American body politic. Lay low and say as little as possible is Canada’s message, denying Carney the cheap political thrill of telling Canadians how incredibly fortunate they are that Trump is so stupid — and risk riling the vengeful and easily humiliated Trump.
