In the late 1600s, as hostilities between England and France built up, Parliament at Westminster took the step of moving from tariffs on French wine to an outright ban. The result was that French wine went from being 70% of the wine Britain imported prior to the Nine Years’ War to just three per cent in the 1720s.
It can only get ugly and Carney ain’t helping.
OTTAWA — Former prime minister Justin Trudeau said the U.S. is an “extremely unpredictable” partner because President Donald Trump’s administration is “no longer working” in the best interest of Americans.
The former prime minister shared his thoughts on the current Trump administration as part of a question and answer session with Brown University President Christina Paxson in Rhode Island on Tuesday.
President Donald Trump was wrong to launch his trade war on Canada, majorities of adults in both countries agree.
Now Canadians of all political stripes are rallying around their government, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, while in the United States, even some self-identified MAGA voters are worried about the political fallout for Trump.
I never imagined Politico publishing such a piece!
Canadian Industry Minister Melanie Joly said there’s bipartisan political support for tariffs in the United States, raising the possibility the country’s manufacturers will face barriers to North America’s largest market long after Donald Trump’s presidency.
Joly is among a number of Canadian officials who have travelled to the U.S. over the past year and a half to encourage American opposition to Trump’s trade policies. Last week, she met with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, and in June she held a meeting with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Duh.
Trump does not need Belarus to replace Canadian potash. He only needs it to make Canada less indispensable over time. And that should concern Ottawa far more than the headline itself
Donald Trump says the United States is working on a “massive” agreement to purchase potash from Belarus at substantially lower prices than it currently pays Canada. The announcement was quickly dismissed by some Canadian observers as economically unrealistic. That reaction may be premature.
The speeches keep coming, each building on the previous one, as the Canadian prime minister builds a case for a new world order that has strikingly little to do with the United States of America, the country that has led the west since the second world war.
On 20 January, in Davos, Mark Carney proposed that the world’s middle powers do more to support each other, in light of a “rupture” in the global order. That was clearly a reference to the destabilizing policies of Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated exactly one year earlier, and had spent most of that year insulting the US’s allies.
Oh yea?
Pivot away… so exciting pic.twitter.com/ZkVtiRBQln
— Bree (@brethordark) September 20, 2026
U.S. President Donald Trump says he is working on a “massive deal” to purchase potash from Belarus.
“The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for our Farmers and Ranchers,” he posted to Truth Social on Monday.
As I’ve said time and again, the world’s largest economy has options.
President Trump’s message below about potash makes that abundantly clear. Our arrogance as a country remains our greatest weakness. pic.twitter.com/ozzVZdXImm
— The Food Professor (@FoodProfessor) September 21, 2026
In the early days of the world’s stupidest trade war, outsiders seemed impressed, amused and somehow surprised when Canada pushed back by yanking American booze from our stores, booing The Star-Spangled Banner and dishing out retaliatory tariffs.
The same punchline kept surfacing online and among late-night TV hosts: “Do you know how obnoxious you have to be to tick off the Canadians?” Because everyone knows that Canadians are docile, polite and self-effacing, basically the world’s stuffed animals.
The Globe is still pushing the Carney line. It’s a lie, Carney sabotaged the talks to further his agenda.
Canada’s “elbows-up” approach to American tariffs has been unique among market-based economies. What have the EU, Japan, South Korea, U.K. and especially Mexico done differently and what lessons might we learn from them? Mexico has recently announced it wants to complete trade negotiations with the U.S. before the November midterms. That would leave Canada as a jilted bride.
The prime minister and the country obviously had a difficult hand to play in dealing with President Donald Trump — erratic, unreliable, crude and rude — and his clear desire to make Canada the 51st state rightfully angered Canadians.
Whatever becoming an “associate member” of the European Union means, what it does is drive home the importance of Prime Minister Mark Carney reaching a deal with the U.S. on trade.
Last year, the value of Canadian goods exported to the 27-member-country EU was $43 billion, or 5.5% of our total merchandise exports of $779 billion.
An image of Lake Ontario was pulled up on my public hotel computer kiosk in Manitoba recently. The website was Google Maps, which shows the correct name to Canadians and the Trump-ordered “Lake America” to Americans.
No one was using the computer when I came across it. Someone had just called up Lake Ontario then left the kiosk, perhaps wishing to remind all who strolled by: Don’t forget this insanity for a second.
🇺🇸🇨🇦 EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra tells me that Canada will NEVER have as good of a deal as Mark Carney was first presented with.
“Anyone who walks away from a deal with the President… when they come back, it’s never as good of a deal as they had before.”
Watch… pic.twitter.com/4E3fRRsoGo
— Élie Cantin-Nantel (@elie_mcn) September 17, 2026
For much of the past year, the Canada-U.S. trade war has been measured in tariff rates.
On Sept. 8, that started to change.
As President Donald Trump escalated his latest round of measures against Canada, his administration did more than raise duties. The White House directed the U.S. trade representative and the General Services Administration to remove Canadian-origin products from federal procurement schedules that manage more than $50 billion USD in government purchasing. On the same day, Trump also moved to ban certain Canadian products from entering the U.S. altogether, rather than simply subjecting them to higher tariffs.
By now it is abundantly clear that the time for elbows up is over. Most of us have a schoolyard sense of justice, and we desperately want a bully to get his due. But those feelings have a time and place. Now is the time for more serious responses.
The bully is certainly a pest, but he is not our responsibility, and we will not influence whatever justice awaits him. The challenges we can and will meet are of our own creation. It’s time to put the elbows down and get our heads up.
Canada is long zombified by a kneejerk hatred for America.
As Prime Minister Mark Carney presses toward creating a “unique alliance” with the European Union, Canada’s ambassador is ruling out paying directly into the 27-nation bloc’s budget.
“We would be very selective,” Canada’s incoming EU ambassador Jonathan Wilkinson said in an interview with CBC’s The House airing Saturday morning. “This is not across the board. It’s certainly not membership in the European Union.”
But Wilkinson did say there are programs which may require some degree of funding. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) program, which offers loans to member states for defence investments.
We’ll pay and pay and pay.
Canada looms over Lance Thrailkill’s office as a dead, stuffed bird.
Mounted above the Texas manufacturer’s desk, a Canada goose, flanked by a mallard and four deer heads, fixes a glassy stare on the room. An open bottle of rye whiskey sits on the floor below.
It is a fitting backdrop for a conversation about another Canadian presence hanging over Thrailkill’s business: the escalating trade war between Washington and Ottawa.
