OTTAWA—Prime Minister Mark Carney and his team are so over it.
From scampering in search of meetings with President Donald Trump and top U.S. aides all spring, summer and early fall — including the PM travelling twice to Washington and overseas to Egypt where he hailed Trump’s dealmaking — to now shrugging off the current suspension of trade talks, Carney is taking a different tack to Trump. And to the politics of a minority Parliament.
Not negotiating is the new black.
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order to exempt a wide range of food imports, including beef, tomatoes, coffee and bananas, from sweeping tariffs imposed earlier this year on nearly every country, the White House said.
The order is part of a major push by Trump and his top officials to address Americans’ growing concerns about persistently high grocery prices.
Prime Minister Mark Carney on Thursday announced another six major infrastructure projects as part of his ambitious plan to reduce Canada’s economic reliance on the United States after President Trump set off a trade war with its neighbor.
Mr. Trump last month abruptly suspended trade negotiations with Canada, which sends an overwhelming majority of its exports to the United States, after a Canadian province ran a commercial on American television that featured President Ronald Reagan speaking out against tariffs.
Since becoming prime minister in the spring, Mr. Carney has focused much of his efforts on expanding trade beyond the United States and starting major domestic projects to boost the country’s economy.
Canadians are keeping up their efforts to boycott travel to the United States, with air travel from the country dropping last month by nearly 24 percent, and car travel by more than 30 percent compared with the same time last year, according to data released Wednesday by Canada’s statistics office.
The decline, which has lasted 10 consecutive months, is part of a broader shift in Canadians’ attitudes toward the United States, amid tensions over President Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods and the rhetoric that many Canadians feel is condescending.
It is an image that just a year ago would have seemed unfathomable: the Canadian and Chinese leaders standing side by side, shaking hands and grinning.
Ties between the two countries cratered in 2018 when Canadian police arrested Chinese technology executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver on US fraud charges. Days later, Beijing locked up two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, on spying charges that Canada slammed as bogus. (Kovrig and Spavor were released nearly three years later after the US dropped the extradition request for Meng).
The diplomatic tussle soured the relationship and engendered a deep mistrust between Ottawa and Beijing. But as President Donald Trump escalates his trade war with one of the US’s closest allies, Canada has looked to a longtime foe for some common ground.
Carney wants this.
Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that his administration was directing the Department of Justice to investigate major meat-packing companies for allegedly driving up beef prices through collusion and price manipulation. The move — unsurprisingly — generated headlines, applause from ranchers, and skepticism from economists. Still, it raises an uncomfortable question north of the border: why hasn’t Canada done the same?
Many Canadians continue to boycott travel to the United States, and the U.S. economy is paying the price.
A U.S. Travel Association report forecasts a 3.2 per cent decline in international tourism spending in the country for 2025, a loss of $5.7 billion US compared to the previous year.
The association largely attributes the loss to a decline in the number of Canadian visitors — a trend that has persisted since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office in January, sparked a trade war with Canada and began referring to the country as the 51st state.
Lots of reasons to be angry with Trump & his policies but your anger should not be exclusive to the US.
Canada’s corporate and political class have beat us like a pinata for so long we’ve come to enjoy it.
Reserve a large dose of vitriol for the “ruling class”.
Canadians are cutting back sharply on trips to the United States this year, citing new border rules, safety concerns, and political tensions as reasons to stay closer to home.
New research from the Angus Reid Institute finds that only about one-in-10 Canadians have made multiple trips south in the past 12 months, down from 19% in 2023 and 21% in 2017.
Doug Ford, the Ontario Premier, was moments from taking the stage at a trade conference in Toronto when organisers announced an unexpected guest.
Beaming in from Washington, DC, Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, had joined to speak on the escalating trade rift between the US and Canada.
Mr Lutnick’s tone, those present say, was aggressive and his message clear; automotive manufacturing, the pride of Ontario, was coming back to America.
Countless surveys have told us that Canadians want to buy Canadian.
They say they want to support local farmers and processors, keep dollars at home, and protect jobs. But when standing in front of the grocery shelf, good intentions often gave way to convenience and price.
WASHINGTON – Most Americans — including Republicans — continue to view Canada positively in economic and trade matters even as U.S. President Donald Trump directs anger at their northern neighbour.
That finding comes from new polling by Leger, Maintenant Media and Canada 338 that also says Americans trust that Canada is negotiating in good faith as the countries face an uncertain trade relationship.
“In the American general public, there’s still some general goodwill towards Canada,” said Andrew Enns, Leger’s executive vice-president for Central Canada.
Who says the bromance is dead?
Premier Doug Ford insists his relationship with Prime Minister Mark Carney is as strong ever despite the flap with President Donald Trump over the Ontario government’s anti-tariff advertising blitz.
Asked if his rapport with Carney had been strained over the matter, Ford told reporters Tuesday: “Not at all. We get along extremely well.”
I bet.
So it turns out we really are those people, the ones who say “sorry” when someone steps on our foot, the ones who can’t stop apologizing when we’ve done something wrong or even — especially, really — when we haven’t.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said over the weekend that he apologized to Donald Trump for those Ontario TV ads that used the words of Ronald Reagan to highlight the fact that the U.S. tariff war against Canada will leave both sides worse off.
Amid the tempest over the tariff ads, including U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra’s indignant response, there’s something else the Ambassador said last week that should worry Canadians more, as well as Americans who are concerned about their country’s direction: His accusation that the ads quoting Ronald Reagan on tariffs amounted to “interfering in the political affairs of a sovereign nation.”
U.S. exceptionalism takes many forms, and one is political openness, including in the way foreign governments are able to wheel and deal throughout the U.S. largely in the same ways as American business entities. This has remained true throughout the years, even though other countries don’t like U.S. diplomats walking their halls of power in the same way. Other nations are sensitive to American authority and influence – Canada among them.
Canada is being pushed into a hard choice between an unwelcome union with the USA or being virtually frozen out economically states the author.
The problem as I see it is that there is very little left of “Canada” to defend.
Canada’s elites have turned our cities into 3rd World Migrant Dumpsters destroying the economic hopes and dreams of a generation of young citizens while benefiting handsomely themselves.
Our heritage has been trashed by the Marxist-thugs allowed to flourish within public institutions enabled by complicit governments and their corporate crony’s.
How many of you voted to rob your children or grand children of their fair shot at a decent life, of owning a home, of having a job and raising a family?
They haven’t just broken the social contract they’ve smashed it to pieces and shoved the shards down your throat.
Make no mistake the mass immigration of incompatible cultures is a deliberate effort to erase the old Canada and replace it with an exploitable underclass.
Anti-Trump ‘Elbows up’ pseudo-patriotism is the codswallop our contemptuous elites dole out to the very people they have been exploiting.
Trump threatens their place at the trough so now you’re their BFF “in this together” ally until you’re not.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he has a different recollection of his conversation with Prime Minister Mark Carney, who said he advised the Premier not to run an anti-tariff advertisement that angered U.S. President Donald Trump.
Mr. Ford also said the Prime Minister called him from his recent trip to Asia asking him to pull the ad, which featured a pro-free trade address from former president Ronald Reagan, but the Premier did not do so until days later.
The Premier added he would “never apologize” to Mr. Trump, as Mr. Carney did during his recent trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea.
