Canadians elected Mark Carney for one reason: they believed he’d stand up to Trump. A few days ago, the lefty Canadians I follow, including Charlie Angus, seemed to think that Carney was going to agree to a deal where Canadians were going to have to eat some shit. This was based on a news story saying premiers had been told to get ready to put US liquor back on the shelves of provincial liquor stores. One of the first, easy and fun things that Canada did was remove all US liquor from their provincial stores when Trump started the trade war. There’s really no more easily substitutable good than liquor, wine and beer, so it was a great symbolic move that also did some damage to the US adult beverage industry.
So this one was going to hurt. Even though Carney has been working his ass off to make trade deals with every other country but the US, you can’t reverse years of trade habits overnight.
Apparently, however, the Stephen Millers and other couchfucker incels in the Trump Administration wanted to do things like demand that Canada change the way they handled Quebec’s French Canadians, and other stupidity. It then became clear to Carney, if it wasn’t already, that this wasn’t a serious negotiation, and he pulled out.
As an aside, I have to say that Claudia Sheinbaum handled Trump better than Carney. First, she has consistently decided not to mention the trade conversations much in her daily briefings — she basically says that my negotiators are on top of it, next question. And her government’s claim is never that they got a great deal from Trump, but that Mexico has gotten the best deal of any country. That’s an achievable goal. Claudia’s cautious approach is probably because a 63 year-old woman has had plenty of encounters with malignant narcissist males, and also because Mexico’s history is full of being screwed by their neighbor to the North. In other words, expectations were higher for Carney, but he perhaps should have managed them more effectively.
Nevertheless, he did the right thing here. It’s going to be painful, but the good news for Democrats is the shittier the trade deal, the better we’ll look reversing it. That’s pretty obvious, but the second good thing is that we’re going to have work to do something to reverse the horrible perception of the US with our trading partners. This is ultimately impossible, since we’ve shown that we’ll elect Trump twice, but at least we won’t have to work against the horrific public opinion hit that Carney would have taken had he put US liquor back on the shelves in Canada.
(Sorry for the lack of links — I’m on a slow connection. The good news is that I haven’t had a close encounter with a murder cow a.k.a. bison yet.)
