Prime Minister Mark Carney has now scrapped a digital-services tax, rolled back retaliatory duties, halted streaming regulations, and agreed to split Gordie Howe International Bridge revenue with a U.S.-controlled fund — all while the Trump administration pockets the concessions and threatens a 50 percent tariff on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods, citing autos and dairy disputes, the day before they are scheduled to take effect. The pattern is not a negotiation. It is a unilateral transfer of bargaining position with no reciprocal movement on the other side.
Here are the numbers. Canada’s concessions since January — the border-security package, the digital-services-tax repeal, the streaming-regulation suspension, the bridge-revenue sharing, the apology for an Ontario ad that hurt Trump’s feelings — represent real economic and regulatory value transferred to the United States. The Trump administration’s response has been to threaten an additional 50 percent tariff on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods under a Depression-era trade law, representing about 5 percent of Canada’s U.S.-bound exports. The gap between what Canada has given and what it has received is not zero in the usual diplomatic sense of “we gave something and got nothing.” It is negative: Carney has paid a tariff to have a tariff threatened.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer stated the administration’s position explicitly at the Aspen Security Forum last week. Canada “doesn’t get credit for doing something bad and then undoing it,” Greer said, as Trump singles out Canada’s dairy system as tariff justification. The framing is significant: the administration treats Canada’s pre-existing policy choices — a digital-services tax the United States objected to, streaming regulations the United States threatened to retaliate over, retaliatory tariffs Canada imposed after Trump’s first round of levies — as unilateral wrongs that Canada must undo before negotiations can even begin. Undoing them does not buy relief. It only buys the right to be considered for relief. The administration has moved the baseline: what was a concession becomes a correction, and the next concession becomes the new baseline.
The Canada that slipped into a technical recession in June is negotiating from a position of structural weakness, but the concessions have not altered Washington’s posture. Brian Clow, a former senior adviser to Trudeau, told the Journal that “Canada has more than put water in its wine, but the Trump administration seems totally unsatisfied.” The asymmetry is not a failure of negotiation tactics. It is the predictable outcome when one side treats each concession as evidence that more can be extracted and the other side treats each concession as a down payment on good faith.
Nearly 70 percent of Canadians want Ottawa to hold firm, according to Abacus Data polling, even if it prolongs economic pain. Only one in five favors further concessions. The domestic constraint is not the problem — Carney’s approval ratings remain high, and a majority of Canadians still see him as best placed to navigate the turbulence. The electorate is rewarding the performance of negotiation while the substance of leverage transfer continues uninterrupted. The concession strategy is failing internationally but succeeding domestically as an optics game. The problem is not domestic pressure; it is that Carney keeps making concessions the audience does not demand, without requiring any reciprocal movement. The border package did not prevent the first tariffs. The digital-services repeal did not prevent the steel levies. The streaming suspension did not prevent the 50 percent threat. Each concession was followed by a larger tariff threat. The pattern is baked: concede, get hit, concede more, get hit harder.
Carney’s experience mirrors that of leaders from Brussels to Mexico City: pre-emptive compromises have failed to buy immunity from Washington’s trade actions. The playbook is the same — pocket the concession, escalate the demand, reset the baseline. At the same time, Carney has pitched a long-term vision of “Fortress North America” — deeper economic integration in some sectors between the U.S. and Canada. Washington has praised the concept in theory while formal trade talks remain stalled. The administration sees every offer of deeper partnership not as a step toward mutual benefit, but as evidence of desperation.
What Carney is handing over is not goodwill. It is leverage — the digital-services tax U.S. tech companies wanted eliminated, the bridge revenue Canada paid for, the retaliatory duties that were Canada’s only immediate response to Trump’s levies, and the implicit authority to deploy instruments like the provincial alcohol bans that hit U.S. producers hard. None of this has been exchanged for relief. These instruments have been given away before the table was set. The administration has no incentive to reciprocate because the unilateral transfers keep arriving without any condition attached.
The administration has signaled it would not reward a hold-firm stance either. U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra explicitly stated that ending the provincial alcohol bans “would not lead to an easing of U.S. tariffs.” The extraction game does not have a positive-sum outcome for Canada from either posture — not from conceding, not from holding firm. The only variable is whether Ottawa preserves what remains of its bargaining position before the Aug. 19 deadline, or depletes it for nothing.
The score is the score. Canada has made concessions worth billions. The U.S. has made none. The next round begins Aug. 19.