“We’ve got the reserves, we’ve got the resilience, we’ve got the plan,” a defiant Mark Carney told journalists after the breakdown of trade talks with the White House over the weekend.
Few would make the case that Canada was “attacked” and therefore is “at war”, as its prime minister plainly put it, and the idea that the country is in a position to withstand a full-blown economic conflict with the US is pretty silly.
Nearly 75pc of Canadian exports head to the US market, and the US economy is roughly 10 times larger. Meanwhile, the new sweeping tariff slate covers another C$28bn (£15bn) worth of Canadian exports – equivalent to 5pc of products sent south of the border.
