Online, I am seeing a ton of reactions to what the current Liberal government in Ottawa is doing. These range from outrage over a perceived non-reaction to Trump’s latest temper tantrum, to anger over cuts to various parts of the civil service.
I get it - a lot of people are thinking “this isn’t what I voted for!”, and to some extent they are right to criticize the government’s actions. There’s a very visceral desire to punch back every time Trump does something so utterly bone-headed, and while doing that hearing Carney talk about tax cuts and cuts to the government seems like we elected Poilievre with a better personality.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time here talking about specific details, or directives given to ministers. What I want to do is tease apart the big picture of what we are facing and highlight how this all fits together.
Make no mistake about it, Canada is very much in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. What exactly their intentions are is hard to say, but it’s clear that the US government has started a trade war with Canada, and in doing so has made it very clear that our current relationship with the US is no longer a thing going forward.
Second, on the world stage, Trump has pulled back from its traditional allies and role. This includes all but walking away from NATO, the G7, and the UN. This makes the world as a whole a lot more unstable, and dangerous for traditional “middle power” nations like Canada.
Canada’s place in the world is now much more precarious than it was before January 20, 2025. The country we traditionally relied upon both as a key customer for our economic activity and as a key partner in defence has turned against us, potentially with territorial ambitions.
In normal circumstances, the negotiations currently going on with the US over trade and defence relationships take place behind the scenes with diplomats and policy specialists doing the heavy lifting. Normally, national leaders don’t say anything much until those efforts are mostly concluded and an agreement is imminent. This time, Trump is routinely making extreme, if not outrageous, statements that likely undermine those negotiations entirely, or make the job of the diplomats exponentially more difficult.
Like it or not, Carney has taken a “I’m not going to react to Trump’s bellicosity in public” approach. In some respects, this is appropriate. Trump is a bully. If you react to his provocations by coming out swinging, you’re playing his game. He’s stated many times, “you hit me, I’ll hit you back twice as hard”. So, yeah, while punching back would feel momentarily satisfying, the escalation it would produce would not be helpful.
Meanwhile, Carney has stated that he is planning to re-orient Canada’s economy in a big way. Not only is he committing to a much bigger military than we have traditionally managed, he is wanting to change procurement so that our military purchases aren’t automatically from the US. That’s no small matter at all - putting our military on track for a spend at 2.5% of GDP, escalating to 5% of GDP over the next decade is an enormous change all by itself. (We’ll come back to this)
Then there is what Carney is clearly doing behind the scenes with other trading partners and allies, in particular the EU. He’s in the process of starting to diversify our trading relationships with the longer term aim of reducing the enmeshment with the US we currently have. This is a huge project in its own right - we can’t just “slam the doors shut” on the US border (nor can they, realistically). Canada’s economy is big enough to make us part of the G7 - you cannot change the direction of something that size “on a dime”. Doing so is a complex and difficult process. I applaud Carney’s approach here where he is reworking trade relationships with Europe first (which is collectively a huge economy as well), while continuing to negotiate “in good faith” with the US.
On top of that, Carney has to do this in the context of a minority parliament, which is almost guaranteed to be fractious once Poilievre returns to the house in a few weeks’ time. He also has to (one way or another) get enough buy-in from the various provincial premiers to be able to move major policy goals forward such as dismantling inter-provincial trade barriers that make it easier to sell to the US than to our neighbouring provinces (and yes, that includes somehow finding ways to keep Danielle Smith from going completely rogue).
I don’t know how many people realize that doing this relatively quietly so as to not immediately anger Trump’s administration is a very careful balancing act. This is “diplomatically threading the needle” stuff. It’s hard to do, and even harder to communicate to the average person on the street who is sick of hearing Trump go off every few days on some incoherent rage-filled tirade.
Trump’s rambling about tariffs and threats to annex Canada united a lot of people behind Carney who made it clear that he wasn’t going to be Trump’s patsy, while the conservatives under Poilievre continued a campaign that basically said “look at me, I’m mini-Trump”. As much as I loathe nationalism, it made Canadians stand up and take notice of what was going on.
We have to put Canada onto a “war footing”, and that’s going to be a monumental task because this isn’t just a bunch of military posturing, like the Cold War, its real impacts and tactics take place in the realms of the economic and diplomatic. I don’t think a lot of people have thought about it in those terms - it will mean decisions that people won’t like for one reason or another, and it will mean that our “comfortable lives” may well get turned upside down.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t criticize Carney and what he’s doing. But it would be worth your time to think about how all of these things fit together and how a given action fits into the picture before going off.
