Trump’s Canada Tariffs Aren’t the Betrayal Ottawa Claims
Every diplomatic breakup produces two stories, and the one Ottawa is telling that Washington ambushed a trusted partner at the negotiating table has already won the sympathy of most of the press. It is a good story. It is also incomplete.
What actually happened last week is that trade talks fell apart because the United States asked Canada to accept terms Canada found uncomfortable, and Canada refused. Prime Minister Mark Carney called the American position “unfair” and “uneconomic.” He may be right that it was tough. He is wrong to suggest that toughness, on its own, is grounds for outrage. The United States has run a trade relationship with Canada for decades that gave Ottawa nearly unrestricted access to the world’s largest consumer market while Canada kept its own protections, most notoriously its dairy supply management system firmly in place. Donald Trump’s blunt framing on social media, “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one,” is crude. It is not wrong.
