I woke up on Saturday morning to news that Canadian and American negotiators were unable to finalize a trade deal and PM Mark Carney was suspending trade talks with the United States and recalling its negotiating team.
Late breaking story on the CBC....
Asked for specifics of the Americans' last-minute changes to terms of a trade deal, Prime Minister Mark Carney outlined three examples. He said Americans looked to change the scope of tariffs on Canadian auto content, made efforts to restrict Canada's ability to have other trade deals around the world and made efforts to restrict Canada's protections of language, culture 'and in effect, our sovereignty.'
Earlier, Carney said the U.S. tried to restrict Canada's ability to strike new trade deals with other countries.
Carney said the United States "asked too much and offered too little". Most of us would agree that no deal is better than a bad deal, and I wouldn't trust a deal signed by this American administration regardless. Most Canadians support this decision to suspend trade talks, and retaliate against Trump's tarriffs dollar for dollar. This, my fellow Canadians, is a full out trade war between Canada and the US.
Allan Woods writes in the Toronto Star that Mark Carney has cemented his post as leader of the anti-Trump resistance.
Doing a deal under the conditions Carney described would clearly have undermined Canada’s pivot to new markets by putting Carney firmly under the thumb of the U.S.
As the prime minister described it, he was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.
It does, however, jive with Trump’s repeated 51st state taunts when he returned to the White House.
And Trump’s National Security Strategy said of America’s neighbours in the Western Hemisphere: “We want other nations to see us as their partner of first choice, and we will (through various means) discourage their collaboration with others.”
Since Trump first threatened to make Canada the 51st State I've consistently been disappointed by fellow Canadians travelling to the USA for pleasure. Whenever possible, buy Canadian, and at the very least do not buy American. This trade war will have economic consequences but we must stay united in the resistance and take the financial hit to protect our sovereinty.
Trump's comments yesterday were to suggest Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one. I agree with him on that one count. We are not the 51st state and will never be the 51st state.
