The sombre mien—that’s what stayed with me. On Saturday, Mark Carney looked less like a prime minister briefing media on trade negotiations than a wartime leader telling his country a feared turn had finally arrived and preparing them for a long ordeal. The intense, all-out effort to stop crushing new tariffs had failed, with Carney grimly explaining that the United States insists on “short-term transactions” rather than “long-term partnerships” and that its commitments could no longer be assumed to hold.
American demands reportedly went well beyond tariffs, market access, and sectoral protections. They targeted Canada’s freedom to set domestic cultural policy, interpret agreements it had already signed, and conduct trade relations with third countries. The loss of our sovereignty was too high a price for preserving economic integration. What prime minister would accept Canada becoming a vassal state on his watch? With the collapse of talks, and Carney describing the country as being “attacked,” it’s hard not to feel like we have crossed into a different moment—that we are living in a slightly darker reality.
Throughout the weekend, The Walrus spoke to economists, policy experts, and political observers about what exactly has changed and what this new period might demand of Canada.
FYI, petroleum products alone are $120 billion, out of $400 billion total exports to them. That’s ~1/5 of all their oil. Although, to be fair, we get a lot of our refined fuel back from them.
Potash would be really hard for them to replace, and they were still buying our aluminum regardless of the 25% tax. Lots of their the other top imports are commodities, since that’s what we produce, and most commodities can’t just be made anywhere.
Obviously, they have the advantage of size. But if you look past that, at all, they suddenly don’t look so unstoppable.
So a 5% export tax on oil would return $12 billion? That pays for a LOT of the new tariffs Trump wants to levy/ The exporters drop their price by 50%, and the government pays the difference from the oil export tax. China actually did something like this when Trump tried to tariff them out of the market. Some of it was currency manipulation as well, but unfortunately the Canadian dollar is holding up, everything considered.