Mark Carney is handing President Trump exactly what Trump demands and calling it diplomacy.
The Canadian prime minister came to office 16 months ago promising an “elbows out” stance against the administration’s trade aggression. Since then, he has scrapped a digital-services tax on American technology companies, rolled back many of the counter-tariffs his predecessor imposed, halted streaming-content regulations the U.S. had threatened to retaliate over, and agreed to hand over half the revenue from a Canadian-built bridge to a U.S.-controlled fund for fifteen years. He declined to adjust retaliatory duties on steel and aluminum—the one category of leverage he did not surrender—while systematically forfeiting almost every other. He has apologized to Trump for a trade ad paid for by the province of Ontario. He has offered concessions on border security.
What has Canada received in return for this 16-month program of unilateral pre-surrender? A 50% tariff on roughly $20 billion of Canadian exports, backstopped by a Depression-era statute and set to take effect Aug. 19. The sum total of Carney’s diplomacy is an agreement to “intensify” talks. The U.S. Trade Representative denounced the concessions as insufficient because Canada “doesn’t get credit for doing something bad and then undoing it.” The Canadian economy has slipped into a technical recession, and 70% of Canadians want Ottawa to stop giving ground.
The arithmetic is straightforward and the column should not be long.
Trump’s negotiating method is not a mystery. It is documented in half a century of real-estate transactions, in his first-term trade policy, and in the experience of every counterparty from Brussels to Mexico City: demand more than you expect to receive, escalate when the other side concedes, and treat every unilateral offer as an admission of weakness that justifies a higher price. Carney’s approach—make concession, apologize, make larger concession, ask for nothing in return—is the exactly wrong response to this adversary. It is not a negotiating strategy. It is an extraction protocol that Carney is operating on his own country.
The question the column title raises is whether Carney is being naive or whether he knows what he is doing and calculates that the domestic political cost of a full rupture is higher than the cost of slow-motion surrender. His approval ratings remain high; a majority of Canadians still see him as the person best equipped to manage the trade crisis. This is the most pessimistic reading of the situation: that the constituency for holding firm is polling at 70%, and the prime minister has chosen to ignore it.
The provincial alcohol bans on American products—decried by Trump’s ambassador as “unfair”—remain in place. The provinces champion them as rare leverage. Carney has made it clear he will not force their hand, offering Washington only a shrug on the one area where Canada is actually fighting back. Washington is trying to exploit the federal-provincial division, but for now the provinces are holding the line Carney won’t hold himself.
A “Fortress North America” vision in which Canada deepens economic integration with a partner currently imposing 50% tariffs on its goods is not a strategy. It is wishful thinking dressed in the language of strategic planning, and it disintegrates on contact with the U.S. Trade Representative’s public statement that Canada’s concessions do not warrant relief because it is “just good practice” to stop doing bad things.
The choices are tough, we are told. But Carney has chosen the one course that guarantees the worst of both outcomes: surrendering leverage on the assumption it will buy relief, then receiving neither the leverage nor the relief, while the Canadian economy absorbs a recession the concessions were supposed to prevent.