“Canada – USA Tariff Wars”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has developed a reputation for delivering the Trump administration’s message with an unusually eloquent, and frequently sarcastic, edge, and Canada was the latest target.

In a CNBC interview Monday, Bessent laughed off the idea that Ottawa could meaningfully pressure the United States as the two countries escalate their trade war. The exchange came just a week after Washington and Ottawa imposed 50 percent tariffs on one another following failed negotiations to come to a trade agreement the Trump administration found satisfactory.

🔥 LMFAO! Sec. Scott Bessent just DROPPED THE MIC on Canada. Brutal.

CNBC: Are we in a tit-for-tat trade war with Canada?

BESSENT: I don't think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who's 13 times larger than you.

CNBC: They say they're doing OK

BESSENT: What else are… pic.twitter.com/VbHATNopEA

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 31, 2026

Canada's politicians went on American TV and got ROASTED 😂

It is important to understand as you watch this:

> Liberal politicians don't get asked hard questions by Canadian MSM.
> Both of them were part of the government that gave us a lost decade.
> Chrystia Freeland, who has… pic.twitter.com/u4iIiyXZd5

— Kirk Lubimov (@KirkLubimov) August 30, 2026

Having reportedly read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in French, during a military tour of duty in Iraq, Jamieson Greer considered himself an unlikely target for accusations of francophobia.

But Donald Trump’s US trade representative, hitherto one of the president’s less high-profile cabinet members, found himself in that uncomfortable position amid the acrimonious collapse of bilateral trade talks with Canada that now threatens to degenerate into an all-out trade war between the two close trading partners whose economies are tightly intertwined.

An apparent pending deal between Washington and Ottawa aimed at avoiding damaging tit-for-tat tariffs broke down at the last minute, with Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, claiming his country had come “under attack” from the US.

An American corporate executive who married my Montreal cousin decades ago always insisted that Canada in time would be absorbed by the U.S. It was inevitable, he said. The most powerful nation in the world would be hungry for all our northern resources and Canada would be powerless to fight back.

If the negotiating terms the Trump team recently offered Canada is anything to go by, Trump would seem to hold a similar view today.

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canada is under attack, bombarded by U.S. tariffs and a trade partner that moves goalposts on a whim.

The federal government’s initial response was to offer short-term support payments for companies and workers hit by this latest round of American tariffs.

The US and Canada appear no closer to resolving their ongoing trade dispute.

Tensions have been simmering between the two neighbours since President Donald Trump returned to the White House just over 18 months ago, and unleashed a wide-ranging global programme of tariffs.

Canada was one of the first countries the Trump administration hit with levies, and is one of two countries to respond with its own reciprocal measures.

With the Trump administration’s promise to impose more tariffs on us in January, many Canadians are asking: What leverage should we use to get them to change course?

The question suggests that there are actually real things we can do to change U.S. President Donald Trump’s mind — that if Canada hits back hard enough, or demonstrates its willingness to suffer enough, we will get that policy change.

Christopher Ragan, the founding director of McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy and former chair of Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission put it this way: “Canada is in a set of negotiations with a party that appears to be unpredictable, volatile, so I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going to work here.”

The decision by Donald Trump to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America is dumb, juvenile and designed to provoke a response. On that last front, Trump succeeded, as Canadians reacted to this outrageous decision with their own vitriol and bluster.

Doug Ford had a rough spring and a summer that wasn’t going much better.

His government’s ill-advised purchase of a private jet blew a hole in his everyman persona so much that he might as well have started showing up to public events with a top hat and monocle. Spending scandals followed, solidifying the image of his governing PCs as a party that was self-satisfied, sloppy or both.

The Ontario premier’s poll numbers sagged, so much so that the PCs were behind a Liberal party that doesn’t even have a permanent leader.

President Donald Trump further ripped into Canada as the U.S. trade war with the country escalates, trashing its leadership as the “worst” of all countries he’s dealt with.

While Trump’s insults against Canada are nothing new, his descriptor of Canadian leaders as the worst is a step up, especially given it puts the U.S.’s northern neighbor below Iran, whose fanatical leadership Trump has repeatedly derided as insane and murderous. He made the recent criticisms in a Sunday post on Truth Social.

As everyone knows, the Canadians have their maple syrup panties in a wad and are baby-soft elbows up, warding off the evil capitalist Americans while playing the current round of ‘Trade Wars.’

It all blew up last Friday, when the Canadians inexplicably walked out on what the United States thought was a done deal – a ‘fantastic deal – the best deal in the world,’ as Commerce Secretary Lutnick said this afternoon.

Here’s the key issue: Canada was bringing in Chinese steel and aluminum and selling it as Canadian steel to help China avoid tariffs

When told to knock it off, they refused. This is why the trade deal collapsed

We cannot allow China to build a proxy state on our border

— Department Of Deportations (@DoDeportations) August 23, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump continued his rant on Truth Social Sunday afternoon, claiming he had “revived and saved” the automobile business in America via tariffs, calling Canada “one of the worst abusers.”

“One of the Worst Abusers is Canada. I don’t want Canadian cars, I don’t want Canadian parts, I don’t want Canadian anything. They’ve been ripping us off for decades, and it’s going to stop,” Trump wrote in the post.

Just what the hell are the Canadians thinking? Do they think that if they cry enough, America’s going to roll over? We’re now in another trade war with them, and the Canadians are whining, and the Democrats — who never side with America — are whining right along with them. It’s about time to be done with the country that is touted as America’s best buddy but is actually tied for its most annoying next-door neighbor. They cry that America is being mean because it’s looking out for its own interests. How dare America expect Canada to pull its weight on its own defense? How dare America not want to perpetuate unfair and unbalanced tariff and trade rules in perpetuity? And how dare America not recognize the moral superiority of a country that, if it were a stereotype, would be a fugly, sexually dysfunctional wine woman with a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign on the front lawn of the condo it shares with five cats, all named after characters in “Twilight.”

Following the collapse of trade talks between Canada and the United States continentalism is apparently dead in Canada, again. It would not be the first time that the demise of North American integration has been celebrated prematurely.

In the 1911 federal election, the then-protectionist Conservatives triumphed over the Liberals and their program of conditional commercial reciprocity, which meant equal tariffs on identical goods traded with the U.S., rather than free trade.