Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney has consistently outplayed Trump.
In Trump’s latest trade tariff tantrum, he announced a deal with Canada that did not exist, delayed his own tariffs for three days waiting for a deal to exist, watched Carney’s negotiators fly home, put 50 percent tariffs on 554 categories of Canadian goods, and then posted that he will double the tariff on Canadian cars, trucks, and car parts to 50 percent on 1 January 2027, and raise steel to 50 percent. Steel is already at 50 percent. He signed nothing. It was a post.
Carney has been laying plans for a year and a half in anticipation of this: twenty trade and security agreements across five continents, 1.5 billion customers tariff-free, $25 billion paid out to Canadian workers and businesses, twenty-seven major projects cleared, carrying $500 billion in private investment behind them.
The question is, what’s next?
That is best answered by understanding what drives the two men, because that is what makes this predictable.
