Trying to find meaning in Trump’s actions is often futile since he seems to be driven by irrational impulses. But his antagonism towards Canada is particularly bizarre given that Canada is a neighbor with which the US shares a longer border and the two nations have been allies for so long, sharing so many cultural features that people can easily move back and forth across the border and unless one is very sensitive to linguistic nuances, one cannot tell if one is speaking to an American or Canadian.
And yet Trump seems particularly angry at that nation, periodically blowing up and the latest display came about when trade talks between the two nations ended abruptly. This article describes how the long-running trade talks between the two countries went from showing progress to suddenly collapsing late last Friday night.
A month of intense talks to stave off new U.S. tariffs on Canada and soften the ones previously imposed by the Trump administration had been yielding steady progress. But they collapsed suddenly, setting in motion an all-out trade war between the two nations.
The sticking points were many. In the last few hours, negotiators clashed over Canadian rules promoting French-language movies and shows online, as well as the Trump administration’s demands to dictate Canada’s steel tariffs on other countries. Canada, in turn, insisted on more generous treatment for its autos, electric vehicles and products made with metal — and ultimately backed away from its offer to cooperate on the Keystone XL pipeline that President Trump has long desired, people familiar with the negotiations said.
Trump’s erratic behavior was also a factor, since he refused to not cancel any deal that might have been agreed to.
The Canadians also pressed the United States for a level of certainty that the deal would not be scrapped overnight by the Trump administration. But the United States maintained that it would retain the power to change tariff policy against Canada at any time, irrespective of the agreement, officials said. Mr. Carney would say in his seething Saturday address to Canadians: Sometimes, the United States signature is “written in pencil.”
Trump, of course, immediately went ballistic.
On Monday, after the negotiations collapsed, Mr. Trump vowed to increase tariffs on all cars, trucks, car parts and steel from Canada to 50 percent, starting on Jan. 1. He called Canadian officials “clowns” from “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with.”
“WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” he wrote.
Mr. Carney fired back: “The attitude, at the negotiation table, that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” he said, “that’s not something we’re going to accept.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Carney announced Canada’s retaliation tariffs against the United States.
The White House issued a press release saying that ” President Trump Is Finally Ending Canada’s Free Ride” and “Canada has been ripping off the United States for decades — and President Donald J. Trump is done letting them get away with it.”
The idea that Canada, or any nation for that matter, has been ripping off the US in trade is simply not credible. The US has long been the predator nation when it comes to trade, using the many levers at its disposal such as the size of its economy and market for goods, the US dollar as a reserve currency, and its clout with international organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF, to demand that other nations comply with its demands, and most, especially the poorer nations, have had no option but to comply. The US demands that other nations open up their markets to US companies while unilaterally imposing tariffs and quotas to get its way.
But other nations are getting increasingly fed up with this behavior and those that have sizable economies of their own are no longer rolling over. Canada’s prime minister seems to have decided to take the lead, recently making two speeches that said that nations need to move away from the US-dominated trade world.
The first, at Davos, described a “rupture in the world order”, and “the end of a pleasant fiction”. By that, he meant that the world could no longer depend on the United States to lead the Pax Americana that has largely kept the peace since the end of the second world war.
Carney called for a new “geometry”, allowing nations with shared values to align, and asking middle-sized powers to act together, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”. The United States, traditionally the leader of the west, was not invited to join. Ironically, the speech was delivered on 20 January, the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
The second speech was a 23-minute address, delivered last Saturday, on 22 August, from a drab government interior in Ottawa. The backdrop was unexceptional, a set of eight Canadian flags, behind a wooden lectern (carved with a maple leaf). There were few rhetorical fireworks. He hardly ever raised his voice.
Yet the speech signaled an earthquake. The news, as widely reported, was that Carney was calling off the trade talks that many expected to resolve or reduce the trade frictions that have been in place ever since Trump slapped his first round of tariffs on Canada, shortly after assuming office.
…Carney’s words stung, too. We expect student activists to speak truth to power; it’s a surprise when a former executive of Goldman Sachs and a former governor of the Bank of England takes on the role.
He is no bomb-thrower. But no one can deny that his message reached the world; nothing confirms it so much as Trump’s frenzied counterattack on social media. Reading the flurry of puerile insults posted on Truth Social was like watching a punch-drunk boxer throwing sprawling haymakers at an adversary too nimble to be hit.
In contrast to Carney’s sober tone, Trump has threatened to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America”, called Canadian officials “clowns”, and dismissed Carney as a “governor” instead of a prime minister, as if contemptuous of Canada’s sovereignty. Of course, he laid the groundwork for Canada’s refusal to cave in as soon as he began his second term with a flurry of claims that Canada should become the 51st state.
Unlike the easily-rattled president, the prime minister does not traffic in emotion. His speech was notable for its control of the facts and its unshakable moral authority. This was an economist’s speech, full of accounting.
…Then he announced that Canada would be seeking to diversify its relationships abroad, in what is obviously a new policy, based on a near-total lack of trust in the United States, a nation that blusters so unpredictably on the world stage that it is as if “its signature was written in pencil”.
…Carney’s final words left little doubt about the path Canada has chosen. The words are beautiful, if tragic:
“Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started. Canadians don’t submit to the weather – we thrive in it. We don’t wait to see which way the wind is blowing. Or surrender ourselves to the waves to be storm-tossed by events. We set our own course. We make our own weather.”
Starting a fight with Canada over trade is yet another Trump blow to long-standing alliances, like Trump’s bluster about taking over Greenland. Trump’s only way of doing things is to act like a bully and demand that others roll over. But that can only take you so far and a Guardian editorial argues that it can backfire spectacularly if the opponent is not as intimidated as you think they are.
Three moves in the last week have exposed the limits of Donald Trump’s economic bullying. The US slapped 50% tariffs on another $20bn of Canadian goods – then threatened the same rate on the cars, trucks, parts and steel that America Inc depends on. On Monday, the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, menaced Iran’s trading partners with exclusion from the US financial network, hoping that coercion can deliver what months of war have not. And as the costs of war, tariffs and pro-billionaire tax cuts helped send US bond yields higher, the Treasury stepped in to tame long-term rates. These are not contradictory policies but a gamble: that US economic power can be repeatedly weaponised without reducing others’ willingness to depend on it.
…The trade war with Canada is economically stupid and legally dubious. In 2025, the Trump tariffs amounted to an average tax increase of $1,000 per US household. More than a quarter of Canadian exports to the US are now subject to significant tariffs or threatened with tougher ones. Ottawa’s retaliation will start in September. North American production has been organised around such trade flows and tariffs will make US manufacturing more expensive, not less.
Why Canada? Washington has largely given up trying to change China’s economic model. Canada is seen as a soft target. The Guardian columnist Robert Reich is surely right: Mr Trump picks on a friendly neighbour because that is what bullies do. This cannot go on. American economic power depends on other countries wanting to remain in a system the US dominates. Mr Trump thinks their dependence is his weapon. The more often he uses it against them, the harder they should look for the exit.
I don’t know that I agree with Reich’s argument that Trump picks on Canada because it is asoft target. I think he does so because it is so similar to the US and so close and yet, by many measures, is a country that seems to be doing much better than the US, with high standards of living, less violence and crime, and better health care and other social services. He must think that the only way they could do this is by taking advantage of the US because he cannot conceive that government policies by themselves could achieve this. So he has to bring Canada down.
But that gamble to target Canada may be a mistake. The thing with threats is that they are sometimes more effective if they are not actually used. Trump seems to be steadily burning all the bridges to long-time US allies. Like Canada, they may start to think that closeness to the US is simply not worth the trouble and look for alternative nations to increase trade with. Countries within economic blocs like the EU and the BRICS nations are already doing that. Canada does not meet the geographic requirement to join the EU but could apply to become part of BRICS.
I saw something saying Canada was considering an export tax. There would be no point in a tariff, since, as others realize, that is paid by the importing country. The export tax would make sure that the US paid the tax. And this would be for such goods as oil (Canada ships us a lot of what goes into our gasoline) and paper/wood products (e.g., toilet paper). If they make it hurt enough, Trump may back down.
Honestly as for ‘Why does Trump hate Canada’, I can think of a few issues, but two rise to the top.
One is that Trump is an idiot who seems to believe that a ‘trade deficit’ means ‘they’re ripping us off’. This isn’t just a Canada thing; this seems to be a general belief that has gone at least back to all of his first attempts at doing massive waves of tariffs. This is an incredible showing of economical ignorance but Trump has always been better with self-promotion than money. (His father new how to handle money; Donald Trump used bankruptcies as part of how his father funneled money to him without either having to pay taxes on it. Trump never even really learned how to run a successful business.)
The second, and in the long run more important one: Trump is a petty little <redacted%gt; who never forgets a slight and whose response to being proven wrong is often to double-down and try to undermine his opponent. Canada has committed the unforgivable sin of standing up to him and making him look foolish and powerless, and generally neither giving in nor rising to the bait. Canadians have been the adults in the room and made his tantrums look even more childish. This blow to his ego must be avenged, as soon as he can figure out how to get away with doing it.
Good point.
Ask Iran how that works.
We and the world were doing well in containing Iran, which is after all a repressive theocratic dictatorship.
Until Trump and Israel actually started bombing them and then started a war.
A war in which we took a lot of damage to our middle east bases and ended up losing.
Iran isn’t even bothering to negotiate a cease fire agreement with us.
They are just moving on.
re raven@3:If The Orange Turd (TOT) had not been so stupid as to pull out of the JCPOA just because it was accomplished by a whole bunch of countries along with the Obama administration, this Iran mess would not have occurred. But TOT is a racist, jealous idiot who couldn’t stand that a BLACK man could do something better than him. And win a Nobel prize. That really stuck in his craw.
Also, TOT hates Canada because the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, due to time restraints, cut out his seven seconds in Home Alone 2.
Being part of an economic bloc created by Russia is a non-starter for Canada. Canada will continue to increase cooperation with the EU and while it may never be an actual member, it is getting closer with every Trump action against Canada to becoming pretty much a virtual member. This is a natural progression due to the shared values between many EU countries and Canada.
And it is increasing partnership and collaboration with many countries on the Pacific side.
TOT doesn’t care two hoots about Canada, he just wants the US hegemony to expand. Russia has plenty of targets, China has plenty of targets, but what options does the poor US have that aren’t already packed full of those nasty Hispanics? Short of committing an own goal and being forced to assimilate them, it’s Canada or nothing! Canada is white, baby, it should be a US state, and when climate change makes it habitable* then, like Greenland, there will be a lot of new mining opportunities. And he’s seen a map, look how big Canada is! Mercator problem, what’s that? Grab ‘em by the pussy, that’s what he understands.
*Tot doesn’t understand that bit about climate change and hurricanes and making the world uninhabitable, his little knowledge thinks that global warming will turn everything into some kind of Mediterranean paradise. He should reread Origin of the Species and be careful what he wishes for: what colour skins does he think would be fitter for a hotter world? Oops… but denial is easy when there are no consequences until you’re well dead and gone.
“In chess, the threat is stronger than the execution.” —Aron Nimzowitsch
Of course, this aphorism applies to more than chess.
As for renaming Lake Ontario: It occurs to me that the classic mnemonic for the Great Lakes is “HOMES” (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.) If the proposed renaming took place, the only possible one-word mnemonic would be “SHAME.”
We, the rest of the world, will ignore Trump and call it Lake Ontario. Just as we call the Gulf of Mexico just that.
I cannot be less interested in why he hates Canada.
What I do want to know is why the USA doesn’t yet hate him enough to oust him.
I think Trump is just a bungling moron who’s convinced he’s secretly a genius. Very, very secretly from what the rest of us can tell. Canada had to react to the trumponomic disasters that have affected it because Trump’s missteps have caused damage around the world. They chose to ignore Trump’s attempt to recreate the world as it stood in the 1820’s because he didn’t have anything to offer them. He was going to be a bully no matter what they did or didn’t sign.
Remember the “Donroe” Doctrine? Aside from plaigarizing history and for some reason picking the worst possible ideas to copy, this is also very clearly the Trump regime’s foreign policy working as intended. Does the US have any sort of relationship with another country? Let’s exploit that! Do they go along with it? Hit them harder! Do they not go along with it? Still hit them harder! Trump’s “art of the deal” is bullying. He either plays the bully or the victim, there doesn’t seem to be any other role he understands. I am honestly thankful I don’t personally know anyone as broken as this messed up guy.
I suspect it boils down to Canada being America without the cultural insanities… or most of them, at least.
As to Canada being ineligible for the EU… there have been indications, in interviews with heads of government, that this might not be insurmountable actually.
@nomenexrecto
Obvs….see Turkiye and Georgia (no, not the one in the Estados Unidas, the other one, whose flag is tattooed onto Kegsbreath’s chest for some unfathomable reasons). There were reasons other than geography that negotiations to join did not get further.
Canada is basically England without Andrew, but with an embarassing history of treating the first nations badly. Also, they have at least one singing lumberjack.
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I don’t think it is written into the rules that an EU nation has to be on the European continent. The matter of keeping the Canadian dollar might be more problematic for membership negotiations.
Interesting question! I don’t know, but if we can let Australia into Eurovision…
Well, yeah, technically new members have to commit to moving to the Euro, but there’s no actual timetable or enforcement mechanism. For example, Sweden is legally committed to joining the Euro, but “has intentionally avoided fulfilling the adoption requirements by not joining ERM II, which is voluntary”: Eurozone: Future enlargement [wiki].
If there’s one thing the EU is good at, it’s bending the rules when they really want to. Whether that is a good thing or a bad this is up to you.
For what it’s worth, I think the idea of Canada becoming a full EU member is extremely unlikely, but I could definitely see a very wide-ranging trade and co-operation agreement happening at some point.
I also wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the formation of some kind of NATO 2.0, where all the existing NATO members do that Whatsapp thing of forming a new group containing all of the members of the old group bar one. I don’t currently believe that the USA would honour its commitments under Article V in the event of a Russian attack on a NATO member in Eastern Europe, and I’d bet good money that this view is not entirely unheard-of amongst senior military planners.
Canada might also join the Schenghen agreement nations, making travel much easier.
And while C is not a member of *the* customs union, it might make *a* customs union with EU nations.
There are many levels of cooperation without full EU membership, which both Norway and Switzerland can show.
Canada could join the European Economic Area (EEA), which has economic agreements with the EU without the heavier legal obligations. Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland are already there. Some former EEA countries (e.g. Finland and Sweden) have joined the EU, but at least Norway is not in a hurry.
EEA could be developed to a stepping stone to EU. Besides Canada there are also Turkey, Morocco, and even Ukraine that might use the route. Or stay in EEA without joining EU.