In the previous week, I'd lived with a depressing expectation that Mark Carney was going to cave again, giving in on cultural protections, supply management, booze bans, and much else in exchange from some partial tariff reductions that would be countermanded whenever the Americans felt like it.
Mr Carney, after all, is a very conservative Liberal, a millionaire who has spent his life among billionaires. I feared those loyalties were still driving him. His "elbows up" phase seemed to have ended with his election campaign.
But for all that, surely Carney is a smart guy and a canny negotiator, with a sense of what Canadian survival required. When Saturday's news came in, I wondered if in the previous week he had just been stringing out the surrender possibilities precisely in order to make Canadians more and more alarmed by a growing awareness of all we might lose. And perhaps also to encourage the Americans to keep pressing their presumed advantage, raising their demands to ensure Canadians would support Carney when he walked away. That suspicion was heightened on Saturday morning as news came in of late American demands even more excessive than the previous ones.
Among the floods of commentary, I was struck by journalist Stephen Maher's Substack of August 23 entitled "Carney's FAFO Moment."
I am inclined to think that Mark Carney set a trap for Trump and has judged, correctly, that he can beat him in a trade war. ... I think he kept poor Dominic LeBlanc and Janice Charette in talks, knowing that there was no win on the table, then blew up the whole thing on Friday night, knowing that Canadians would rally behind him while Americans would wonder why they are entering a trade war with Canada during a cost-of-living crisis.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Stephen Maher? Not quite, actually. On August 23, Maher did not believe Canada's claims that it was last-minute American demands that killed negotiations. "I am inclined to believe [American trade rep Jamieson] Greer, who says that it was Canada who introduced last minute demands and then walked away from the table."
But since posting the Substack, Maher has received a flood of comments denouncing him for believing Americans and documenting all the late and extreme demands the Americans actually did place on the table. ("Oh Stephen. You're inclined to believe Greer over our Prime Minister?") And by August 24 he had added an addendum, acknowledging what was becoming the (Canadian) consensus: that the confident Americans kept adding demands until Carney thought he had amassed enough red flags to safely walk away with near-unanimous domestic support. (Even Erin O'Toole, Mr Tax-Cuts-at-any-Cost, says this week he might even support restoration of the Digital Services Tax!)
I must say I like the theory of Maher II: Carney never intended to surrender, and was just playing along for most of last week. It bolsters my confidence in Canada's survival, let us say.
Someday people will write books about August 22, 2026 -- and even then we may not have the full story.
