Along with many Canadians I voted for the Liberals in the last election because of the lack of, for me, viable alternatives, Mark Carney’s experience and the need for a leader who could handle Donald Trump. More people trusted Carney to make a “good” trade deal — and deal generally — with Trump than they did Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader.

Carney’s background as governor of two national banks, as well as his academic credentials, and his cool demeanour — and, as it turned out, rather dry sense of humour — coupled with the necessity of having a strong negotiator who could see through and respond appropriately to Trump’s bullying and lies led to many of us being willing to ignore some of the his other positions (but who would we have voted for otherwise?).

When it came to it, however, while Carney talked the talk, it wasn’t necessarily evident that he’d walk the walk, after all. As we watched him make concession after concession without getting anything back (these giveaways seemed to be treated as the price to be paid to enter the negotiations to lead into negotiations over renewing/revising CUSMA). In other words, the Americans were forcing a price of admission, although addressing preliminary issues isn’t an unusual approach before dealing with the major issue. In this case, however, the preliminary issues were pretty fundamental and all seemed to be put on the table by the Americans.

The debacle over the Gordie Howe International Bridge didn’t help. Despite Carney’s efforts to reframe the apparent Canadian loss in a revised deal that shouldn’t have happened in the first place, it wasn’t at all clear that Canada didn’t look weak. There were two aspects of this imbroglio that are relevant to the current situation. The first is that Donald Trump, on the basis of a lie about who paid for the bridge, insisted on reopening a deal completed some time ago and the second is that Howard Lutnick involved himself on behalf of the owner of the Ambassador Bridge who had been a donor to Trump’s campaign and who had fought the creation of the new bridge from the beginning.

I began to lose faith that the Prime Minister would fulfil his promise of making the best deal for Canadians. The negotiations were not reassuring. Why weren’t we making demands? If lies about fentanyl crossing the border from Canada into the United States “justified” tariffs in Trump’s mind, why wouldn’t we threaten tariffs to demand the Americans do something about, say, the actual number of guns crossing from the United States into Canada? To some of us looking on, recognizing that we couldn’t know everything that was going on (but that bridge loomed large – we couldn’t trust Trump, but could we trust Carney to tell the truth?), we always seemed to be on the back foot.

There was and is a second challenge that has underlain the American tariffs throughout and that is Trump’s determination to undermine Canada’s sovereignty. Mimicking his “renaming” of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, his latest barb is that he will rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. But it goes back to his second Inaugural Address in January 2025 when he indicated the United States would revive the policy of “manifest destiny”. While there is much to say about this, I’ll limit it to his intention to use economic force to annex Canada as the 51st state. For him, removing the “artificial border” between Canada and the United States is needed for the US’s security. (See Murray Brewster, “Trump is starting a trade war. If he wants to absorb Canada, what comes next will be worse“, CBC, February 1, 2025). This threat has been a constant. And as it turns out, these latest negotiations involved some very specific American demands that if accepted would result in Canada’s becoming, as some have said, a “vassal state” of the United States or close to it — and that’s before the parties closed in on CUSMA.

For me, the importance of maintaining Canadian sovereignty has been a major element in our negotiations.

As last Friday’s deadline approached, I confess to feeling let down. This didn’t seem like “the best deal for Canadians”. Carney was considering I told myself I didn’t know what the terms were, maybe it was better than it seemed. The Trump-imposed deadline loomed. It was hard to imagine that Carney would walk away. And yet, and yet: he did!

It certainly seemed that Carney would make a “bad deal”. He wanted the premiers to abandon their bans on American alcohol, which have been very popular and hurtful to the market in the United States, as well as other efforts. And then two things happened: the written document did not, from Canadians’ perspective, accurately reflect the discussions and it turned out that there was a saviour in the wings. Time for a BIG sigh of relief.

The snap-back provision would have allowed the Americans (that is, Trump) to impose the 50% tariffs the deal was supposed to avoid, if they/he decided unilaterally that we hadn’t lived up to certain provisions — or let’s face it, Trump didn’t like what we said about him or…or….or…. Unacceptable. No party could accept that possibility, especially given the mercurial and ethically challenged Trump. (I’m not sure whether Dominic LeBlanc, Janice Charette and advisor Steve Verheul missed its significance or it was brought into play late in the game. I’d like to think the latter.)

Now this is where Lutnick enters the picture, twirling his metaphorical mustache (his actual mustache is pretty ordinary). He was apparently responsible for striking out medium- and heavy-duty trucks in the provision reducing tariffs on cars, among other new provisions, including changes to French language requirements on commercial products and approval of Canada’s deals with other countries, this last cutting at the heart of Carney’s plan to reach trade agreements with other countries. The final straw. At the 11th hour, Carney called his negotiating team back to Ottawa. He explained, “in recent days, the United States proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits to Canada, and called into question the reliability of any deal. In short, they asked too much and they offered too little.” (CBC, “Read Mark Carney’s full speech after trade talks with the U.S. collapsed“, August 22, 2026) Not to point too fine a point on it, it’s a mistake to rely on agreements with the Americans: “Canada’s government ‘recognized from the start’ that the U.S. has changed. ‘We recognized that sometimes its signature was written in pencil.'” (CBC, August 22, 2026)

(On the last-minute events and changes in the written agreement the American and Canadian negotiators had reached, see, for example, Ashley Burke, “What we know about how the Canada-U.S. trade talks fell apart“, CBC, August 24, 2026 and Campbell Clark, “The trade cold war suddenly turns hot again“, The Globe and Mail, August 24, 2026.)

When I saw the announcement on a substack on Saturday morning, my heart gave a little leap. This was the right call. Carney is getting a lot of credit for standing up for Canada, but maybe we should really thank Howard Lutnick without whose intervention in the waning hours, contempt for Canada and supercilious behaviour pushed Carney too far or gave him an opportunity to do what he should have done before.

Already Trump has increased tariffs on cars as of January 2027. He couldn’t tolerate someone walking away from something he and his cohort believe is their right to dictate the terms of the relationship. He won’t tell his negotiating team how to get negotiations back on track, which would require acknowledging Canada’s sovereignty and treating it as an equal nation; he only knows how to bully. The administration (and some considerable ordinary Americans, if they think about it at all) don’t understand why we wouldn’t want this wonderful relationship with them, why being threatened with economic dominance or loss of our sovereignty isn’t appealing to us. (Having said that, I see American writing on substack and elsewhere or talking on tv about how foolish Trump is to treat their best friend the way he has.)

The majority of Canadians believe Carney made the right call (see Adriana Fallico, “76% of Canadians think country ‘did right thing’ by ending U.S. trade talks: poll“, Global News, August 24, 2026). Most of us are under no illusions that it’s going to be a hard slog and harder for some than for others. We intend to make it hard on the other side of the border with retaliatory tariffs.

No one can predict what Donald Trump and his acolytes will do and say. But as we are told so often: you can’t control someone else’s behaviour, you can only control your own. We’ve controlled our own: we remain and independent and sovereign country. As the Prime Minister said last Saturday, “We can’t control the storm that blows in from Washington. We can, however, chart a new course by building Canada strong at home and diversifying our trading relationships abroad.”

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