And if no one invests, businesses and jobs don’t get created.
If I’m investing I am no longer limited to my location. If my return across the border is higher then that is where my money goes.
Carney has to make people to want to invest in Canada.
What people, investing in what, for what purposes, at what cost (externalities) to Canada for what appropriate returns for Canada are the questions, and none of Trump’s answers will do Canadians any good. I agree, private capital will tend to seek the highest return, so let it move and let’s do it ourselves.
So your solution would be to accept the last minute terms the Americans were proposing?
Give the US exclusive rights to our minerals, and restrict any trade deals we can make with other countries?
Put higher tariffs on medium and heavy trucks that are made in Canada, after agreement had already been reached?
Eliminate the requirement for US products to be labelled in French?
Just what is the plan here? 51st state? Is that what you want?
Give Americans everything they want, and then everything they want tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?
Give SPECIFICS of what you think our trade negotiators should have given up.
Teddy Roosevelt had a “bully pulpit”. But pulpits can be made of other things too.
Yes, and this annoys me too when Canadian governments decide they are good at picking winners despite ample historical evidence.
The Economist summarizes things in a giftlink.
Who is “let’s do it ourselves?”
Because he put the laws in place, and didn’t do his governments duty to consult with FN, that caused the private company to throw up their hands and leave. So he took your tax dollars to buy it or had to admit to his incompetence.
Wow. Trillions. That kinda sounds like snake oil. You are saying that Canada could be benefiting in the Trillions except Canadian polices are killing this.
RBC report
Look at the time lines. What caused this?
These are empty slogans. What would you have Carney do?
Don’t know how many times I have to say this. Remove the artificial constraints placed on Canada due to the liberals anti investment regulations.
Stop gushing about Trudeau bailing out private investor doubt on the expansion of resource development.
Clearly he is awful for not simply listening to local opposition (and the lack of outside investment) and he should’ve just abandoned the project instead of
- shoring it up under a Crown corporation,
- approving its expansion (in the face of real environment damage to marine life),
- tripled oil pipeline capacity from Alberta to the Pacific coast,
- defending it from court challenges/appeals, and
- ultimately using its revenue (half a billion annually in taxes alone) for other non-specified clean energy initiatives.
You might love him for what he did (and his nice hair), but this was clearly riding roughshod over the wishes of local peoples and environmentalists. That will stand as a mark on him.
Walk me through your thought process here. What am I looking at? And why?
What is Carney not doing? Honestly.
100% a trade war hurts us. Its going to slow our growth, it will scare off investment, industries will suffer and jobs will be lost. The US will suffer too, but they are large enough that their suffering can be absorbed MUCH easily.
So why is Canada even in this trade war? Well, no Canadian wants to be. As Carney put it, “You’re at war when you get attacked”
Canada didn’t start fighting the US, it was Trump who levied tariff after tariff against us (under thin excuses of cross border drugs, slavery, etc.) under increasingly illegal means. Carney’s team tried their best to avoid the tariffs and a war. But if we are attacked, the best defence is to protect your suffering industries.
This means targeted retaliatory tariffs to provide your own weaken industries with a local market advantage (small potatoes but still) and to maximise the affect of your local market’s purchase power absence towards strategic pain points for the Americans. We can’t mass devastate, but we can target the bridges and rails.
Ultimately Canadians understand that our politicians acted in the most prudent manner in trying to avoid getting into this war. So the population is more willing to suffer under a (trade) war economy, then the Americans who are here by the whim of fascists and rule by fiat.
This seems like a bad article to me. It mentions Carney pulling out of the deal, but ignores that Trump had just changed it considerably. Trump tried to take advantage of the deadline to force agreement. Or he wanted a poison pill.
The opinions I’m seeing online suggest that this was always the intent. Get Canada ready to agree, then throw in last minute changes hoping to strongarm Canada into signing.
An article that ignores the actual impetus for why Carney dropped out while repeatedly quoting Trump’s deceptive rhetoric seems too biased to trust for any of its other claims.
Yes, 100% Canada is hurt in a trade war.
But there is no real alternative. Legal maneuvers may reverse the changes, likely will, but take time and do nothing to boost goodwill. There is enormous support for the Canadian position in many American sectors and states and this will be more persuasive than any official. And Trump seems likely to lose power in upcoming elections though no one can make Congress do their job at current numbers.
Pulling 50% from your rump than comparing offers to that is bad faith. Threatening sovereignty isn’t going to go anywhere. And Carney would be much worse politically accepting peanuts rather than fighting for fairness and stability.
Canadians tried to avoid this with, you know, a treaty Trump signed through many years before the tantrums.
I agree, the article doesn’t give any indication of the unacceptable terms, except some vagueness about French.
My understanding of the last-minute conditions that were found unacceptable:
- Canada was to align its own tariff policy with that of the U.S. So if Trump decided on a random Tuesday to enact a new tariff on the Netherlands or France, Canada would have had to follow suit, essentially renouncing its free-trade agreement with Europe.
- Similarly, Canada could not sign any new free-trade agreements with other entities without Washington’s approval.
- Something about no longer requiring French in some contexts (not clear if this was about product labeling, company names, user manuals or what). Note that this particular subject had already been discussed as an irritant at the Commerce dept. in 2024, under Biden, when Québec bill 96 came into effect.
- Super-duty trucks, such as Ford F350, made in Canada would still be subject to the then-current tariff of 25% after all, so not much was gained.
Carney also made references to the U.S. signature being done “in pencil”, which I interpret as “in a few months they’ll just invent more tariffs and demand more concessions”.
The article does not give every detail, and avoids rumours, but covers the waterfront and is factually correct. Carney is well regarded by The Economist, you know, as former head of the Bank of England.
But you might prefer this limited excerpt from today’s WaPo:
U.S.-Canada breakdown shows limits of Trump’s aggressive trade strategy
“It’s a big setback,” one analyst said, noting that other countries unhappy with the
president’s trade deals are probably watching closely….
…After all, the U.S. and Canada, along with Mexico, already have a trade deal: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) of 2020, which Trump hailed at the time as “the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved.”
But this year, the president threatened to quit the deal and demanded sweeping changes to it, aimed at promoting more U.S. manufacturing. He also imposed tariffs on Canadian goods starting last year, a breach of the accord. On Saturday, speaking in Ottawa, Carney alluded to the difficulty of negotiating with a mercurial president.
“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” Carney said. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”
Negotiating with the U.S. is also complicated by divisions within the administration. All top officials share Trump’s goal of spurring domestic manufacturing. But as Greer haggled with the Canadians this past week, a split emerged over the U.S. trade representative’s willingness to reduce an existing 50 percent tariff on aluminum derivatives to 25 percent in return for Canadian concessions.
At a White House meeting, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department administers the national security tariffs, clashed with Greer, representing industry views that the higher aluminum tariffs were needed to encourage domestic manufacturing. “Navarro and Lutnick were both yelling at Greer saying: ‘What are you doing? This is stupid. You know, we’re not giving these things away,’” said one industry representative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential talks.
Late in the talks, the U.S. sought to exclude from tariff reductions heavy trucks produced in Ontario, such as the Ford F-350 and F-450, and the GM Silverado. Over time, that would have made it “more uneconomic” for the automakers to keep making the vehicles in Canada, Carney said. The administration also sought to restrict Canada’s right to sign trade deals with other countries, a key part of Carney’s strategy to reduce dependence on its increasingly unreliable southern neighbor.
The White House did not respond Saturday to a request for comment. On Sunday, after this story was published, the administration disputed portions of Carney’s account. “There was no language that would prevent Canada from making trade agreements with other countries,” said a USTR official, speaking on the condition of anonymity per department policy to discuss negotiations. “We did express concerns verbally regarding trade agreements that would allow a flood of subsidized or dumped steel or aluminum from other countries, and flagged this as an area for continued dialogue.”
Moderating:
This post is nothing but the topic I described as a hijack upthread. As is this later post:
I would issue a Warning, in light of my prior note, but I persuade myself to not do so, as so many others have continued posting on this as well, despite my request in the prior note. I understand that general economic principles DO affect the position of the Canadian economy, but this thread is explicitly about how Trump and the USA apparently torpedoed the recent deal.
I am asking all in this thread to keep that in mind going forward, because this is the second time I’ve had to note the thread, and while @uzi is definitely a large part of it, they are NOT the only one.
For those who want to argue about the ideal economic focus for Canada, please spin off a New Thread. You may of course refer back to this one. But please stay on topic in this thread.
How to Reply as a linked Topic
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
I can’t read the article without registering, but the title alone is highly misleading. Yes, Canada is incurring an economic hit because of Trump, but it’s not because of “defying” him. There was no other choice as this whole trade negotiation was clearly never in good faith. The hit would be greater, and the risks very much greater, if Canada folded to this insane megalomaniac who can never be appeased, never be trusted, and whose policies are consistently counterproductive. A better headline would have been “The costs of having elected Donald Trump in 2024 are mounting for everyone – in the US, in Canada, and around the world”.
Bad for the consumer, good for a manufacturer of the same goods. The day a 30% tariff is applied they rub their hand and raise their prices 25%.
There’s much more to it than that, though in a sense that reflects Trump’s “thinking”, if one can use that word. The 50% tariffs on Canadian aluminum are a prime example of how economically destructive tariffs are. The Smoot-Hawley Act from the Depression era that empowers the president to impose such tariffs on allegedly trade-discriminating countries is widely acknowledged to have made the Depression worse.
The imposition of this tariff is blatantly illegal and imposes huge burdens both on Canadian producers of aluminum and on the American manufacturers who need to buy it. The American economy is weakened by needlessly expensive goods, and a weakened Canadian economy is less able to purchase American goods, so both economies tend to stagnate.
And that’s just one small example of the economic havoc that the Orange Peril is wreaking.
Sure, if they have that. But they don’t have potash or old growth red cedar or something called glulam which I am just learning about now but which I already understand the US simply cannot make anytime soon. You were planning on using glulam? Well, you can eat the new price for it. What’s that, can’t afford it? Too bad, go back to your engineers and tell them you need this building made out of steel and concrete now. I’m sure they’ll that do for free.
So for any of those products (plus others I’m sure) the tariffs are just a straight tax on the US for things they need but do not have the capability to produce. Domestic industries can’t make money on things they don’t have.
And then go out of business when their customers don’t buy, or go to another supplier. If they could raise their prices that much and still have a business, they already would have.
I think that I finally figured it out.
Donald Trump, in his 80 years of life, has never been told “No.” Everything he’s done or planned to do, has been met with “Go right ahead,” no matter how lamebrained it is. Thus, he is used to everybody saying “Yes” to him. He is used to others capitulating to his last-minute demands. He is used to always being obeyed, no matter how wackadoodle his orders are.
Now, for the first time in his life, Trump has been told “No,” and that No was spoken by Canada’s Mark Carney. And Trump does not know how to process that, especially coming from a non-American source. He is responding in the only way he knows how: with tariffs. (Aside: Was the class on Smoot-Hawley the only class you attended at the Wharton School, Donnie?) Americans will hurt economically, Canadians will hurt economically, and all because one man’s ego hurts because he was told “No.”