Well! Like we said in our Friday The Line Podcast, we were tap dancing a bit until we got the news. And boy, did we ever get the news. But. Still. It was a good podcast, and we hope you enjoy it.
Also be sure to check out last week’s On The Line, where Matt Gurney spoke with Anthony Robb from Canada Company about a way to support Canadian military families that have sacrificed a lot for this country, and also with Peter Jones, professor of international relations at the University of Ottawa, on a Canadian cherished myth that has badly outlived its usefulness.
And now, Lord help us, on with the dispatch.
First and foremost, we imagine our readers are asking many of the same questions as everyone else — including us.
What the hell happened?
Late Friday, both the U.S. and Canada appeared to be on the verge of some kind of deal to head off the 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods announced last month and set to take effect on Aug. 19, then Aug. 21. Those negotiations collapsed in the late hours and were followed soon after with reports that the Canadian trade team was to be frogmarched back to Ottawa immediately. Do not pass Go. Do not spend another night in D.C. Pack your bags and get out.
Prime Minister Mark Carney also announced dollar-for dollar retaliatory tariffs to come into effect Sept. 8.
Both sides are blaming the other; the U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer claimed Canada made new demands and walked away — though he did not specify what those demands were, exactly.
For his part, Carney responded on Saturday morning with an extensive Davos-like speech. He claimed the U.S. made a last-minute attempt to inject (or re-interpret?) language that fundamentally undermined Canada’s sovereignty by imposing limits on trade deals with other countries.
For anyone untutored in Laurentian Elite mannerisms, it was also clear that Carney was uncharacteristically unpolished and emotional. He called the U.S. move a callous “power play.” To us, the Saturday press conference read like a man who was visibly restraining his rage. He said the U.S. had attacked this country. “You’re at war when you get attacked ... and we got attacked.”
To be clear, we at The Line are inclined toward Carney’s version of events -- and not simply because every second word coming out of the Trump administration is a falsifiable lie. No, we’re inclined to think that Carney believes what he’s saying, simply because Canada’s reaction is so extreme.
If you’re this country — a country with a pittance of a military and a fraction of the trade power of America — you do not immediately call your trade negotiators home and impose retaliatory tariffs as a bluff. If the deal were only a few percentage points apart on questions of auto tariffs on trucks, or something like that, we would have stayed put, continued talking, and let the American tariffs slide for a bit while we continued to hammer something out.
Something happened, here.
And that something had to be significant enough to trigger an existential panic on our side.
That read was only further highlighted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s own TruthSocial response to the collapse of the deal, which read: “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!!”
That’s not a shot. It’s an unwitting confession — and a threat. “If you want greater access to the U.S. market, submit to statehood.”
That said, we at The Line admit that we’re still trying to parse through Carney’s Saturday’s press conference to figure out, precisely, what the thing that blew everything up actually was.
From what we can glean, there appears to have been three real pillars of contention; tariffs on autos, and how certain kinds of cars and trucks were classified for the purpose of imposing same. Carney said explicitly that the deal the U.S. proposed would make recent investments in Canada uneconomic in the long run.
There also appears to have been some kind of harmonization of digital policy that may have eked into language and cultural protections. It goes without saying that these would have been least tenable in Quebec.
Lastly, Carney said that the terms of the deal would fundamentally undermine Canada’s capacity to make trade deals with other nations — crucially undermining our strategic attempts to diversify away from the U.S. market. While it is true that there are provisions existing in CUSMA that restrict Canada’s capacity to sign a comprehensive free trade agreement with China without informing both the U.S. and Mexico, those restrictions are both limited and were agreed to by Canada in the interests of preserving an integrated economy.
By comparison, an economy in which Americans can unilaterally levy anything they want on us at any time and for any reason isn’t really integrated. And if the U.S. tried to slip a poison pill into the agreement that gave it veto power over our ability to diversify, well, obviously, that would further lock Canada into an interdependency spiral that would ultimately lead to our economic and political vassalization.
What’s not clear to us is whether specific language was inserted at the 11th hour to that effect, or if the deal included clauses whose meaning became clear only upon a closer final inspection.
We also don’t rule out the possibility that this is kayfabe on Canada’s part — that we went into a negotiation in good faith but soon realized there was no deal to be had and so walked away to maximum dramatic effect at the last minute.
Either way — good.
No, really. We mean it.
We at The Line have been clear about our feelings about a deal with the Americans in the present moment. While there are concessions that we could reasonably make that would benefit Canadians while easing long-term trade irritants — hello, Freedom Butter — we had serious doubts about submitting to the pressure of signing anything simply to prevent the pain of the Aug. 19 tariffs. It savored to us of an attempt to apply stress on Canada via an arbitrary and artificial deadline imposed upon us by a hostile trade partner. These are not the conditions that lead to beneficial outcomes for the smaller and weaker party.
We have already made too many concessions to the U.S., and we have seen, time and time again, that they neither respect these gestures, nor can be trusted to adhere to any agreement that more concessions might buy us. Worse, we were signalling weakness. We were demonstrating that our national appetite for resistance was confined to the symbolic and the costless. And if that was the conclusions the Americans had drawn about us — and, accordingly, that was certainly the belief held by senior administration figures like J.D. Vance — then capitulation was only ever going to be met with ever more and increasingly onerous demands.
Lastly, things aren’t actually going well for Donald Trump right now. The war in Iran continues. Approval ratings have collapsed. And the last thing Americans want or need right now is a trade war with us. We have bandwidth and time on our side.
As small business owners ourselves, we have endless sympathy for the small business owners who are going to get caught up in this mess. We can only implore them and our fellow Canadians to remember who started this. It really was not us.
We’d further ask them to weigh the short term economic pain against what this country might lose if America comes to the conclusion that our tolerance for their punishment is limitless.
Regardless of how we got here, we’re now at war. Trade war, yes. But a trade war is still a war, and we must now turn ourselves to the task of what must happen next.
Firstly, we should be telling the entire planet what happened, and releasing the receipts.
We want to be clear about something: we generally believe the versions of events laid out by the prime minister in his remarks on Saturday. We’re sure it’s self-flattering and not entirely spin-free, but the big picture is one we can accept, in large part because it’s what we always thought would likely end up happening.
That being said, there is a problem here for the PM. Not every Canadian is going to take him at his word. Nor will every Canadian ally, or American voter. We need as many friends as we can get. And to be blunt, the PM did some damage to his own credibility when he was, ahem, less than candid about the revised deal to operate the Gordie Howe International Bridge.
The answer to this is a mixture of radical transparency and all-out info war. Line editor Gurney already offered his thoughts on this in a column for the Toronto Star (they beat us to the publication punch by a few hours) but the short version is this: Release details about the deal Canada was prepared to accept and exactly what the Americans dropped on us, and when. Name names. Be specific, bring receipts, and take this message directly to the American people.
Remember how mad the U.S. got about those ads Doug Ford paid for? Let’s do that again, but, like, times a thousand. Get the PM on every U.S. news show and podcast, and offer him up for interviews with every U.S. newspaper. Hell, throw him at some TikTok influencers. Who cares? All in, baby.
Does this risk blowback? Absolutely. But also, who cares? We’re in a trade war or we aren’t. If we are, as the PM has said, then it’s time to act like it. Let’s show the whole world that we were prepared to bargain in good faith and the U.S. wasn’t.
And then, for the love of God, let’s get better at info war. Info war is a fancy term for propaganda, and there’s nothing wrong with propaganda. After all, there’s nothing that says your national narrative can’t be true. If the truth truly is on our side, let’s deploy it with all the sophistication we can. Let’s push our message onto U.S. media and into social media. Let’s get our own meme factories cranking (maybe refer one to the Major Projects Office). Let’s do a hostile rendition on whatever Iranian dude has been doing their LEGO videos during the war with America and get him working for us.
And this is the hardest one, something our government will absolutely hate the idea of — let’s abandon the reflexive secrecy that constitutes 99 per cent of Canadian government media relations planning. Let’s embrace radical transparency here. Get Carney to re-enact the infamous Chris Christie press conference about the bridge scandal, wherein the then-governor of New Jersey decided to get ahead of a story by standing at a lectern and taking questions from the press, for hours, until the press exhausted itself and had nothing left to ask. Let’s send our trade team on a world tour to publicly brief every foreign government and small-town chamber of commerce that dares to invite them.
Info war and influence operations and cyber campaigns are a major and fast-growing component of 21st-century conflict. Canada has begun to develop some defensive capability here, though it’s not really set up yet to be useful to our politicians. So we should fix that, and we should also rapidly develop — like, by tomorrow, if possible — an offensive capability, too.
We have the talent, we have the money and we at least claim to have the truth on our side. That’s a winning combination. And every moment we aren’t filling the airwaves with our version is a moment where someone else, someone who is better at this than we are, is getting their version out there. Info wars are always — always — a race to set the narrative first.
So what the hell are we waiting for?
As noted above, nobody knows precisely why the trade deal collapsed on Friday night, though each side has its agents fanning out across social media giving their interpretation of what happened.
It is probable that there is something to both stories, and we are inclined to think that neither Canada nor the U.S. really wanted this deal and were willing to bail at the slightest pretext. At any rate, while some of this will get reported out over the next week, a lot of it won’t, and Canadians are justifiably wondering where we stand, and worried about what is coming next.
Fortunately, we have an institution purpose-built for exactly this situation. It is a large room in the West Block with desks and green chairs in it, and it is currently empty and scheduled to stay that way until September 21.
When Carney was asked on Saturday whether his rhetoric was running hot, he replied: “You are at war when you get attacked.” Okay, let’s take him at his word. Canada is at war, and the chamber to which the government of Canada is accountable is dark for another month.
The prime minister has spent the past 18 months running the trade file through a small cadre of trusted advisors, some elected, most not. There have also been regular first ministers’ meetings, which have the considerable advantage, from a PMO perspective, of being a forum where nobody can compel the production of documents, nobody can summon Janice Charette to testify, and nobody can defeat him on a vote. Thirteen premiers is a more manageable audience than 343 MPs.
The House of Commons Standing Order 28(3) states that when the House stands adjourned, the Speaker, after consulting the government, may recall it if the public interest requires. Which is to say the decision is effectively Carney’s, and he could have the Commons sitting within days.
This is something Carney should want. If he really did walk away from a bad deal, the strongest available move is to say so under hostile questioning, table what the Americans actually put in front of him, send LeBlanc and Charette to committee, and dare Pierre Poilievre and the CPC to vote against relief for steel and auto workers. (Indeed, it is telling in this respect that Poilievre has not yet demanded the return of the Commons.)
The prime minister told us on Saturday that Canadians are the masters of our own destiny. The room where we actually exercise that mastery was a hundred metres behind him.
Open it.
Speaking of Pierre Poilievre, while he may not have called for parliament’s recall, he did have a statement about the collapse of the trade talks. And it was … pretty good!
You can read the whole thing here, but we particularly noted this part:
Canadians must stand united to defend our country against these unfair attacks on our jobs and businesses. Canada cannot accept one-sided tariffs that will deindustrialize our country. Nor can we accept a bad deal. Instead, we must continue the fight for tariff-free trade.
And this:
We also need urgent economic reforms to restore growth, protect jobs and save our industry. That must include ending the industrial carbon tax, repealing anti-development laws, green lighting the 500 economic projects awaiting federal approval and major tax reforms to return investment to our country, reward work, and recharge our economy.
As we noted in our podcast on Friday, one of the only people actually articulating a coherent opposition position to Carney’s approach to U.S. trade has been Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who has been clear and effective in communicating a pro-Canada position. We also noted in that podcast that while the Conservatives are great in their role as opposition in some areas (immigration and justice come to mind), they have largely ceded the floor on U.S.-Canada relations, because, bluntly, they haven’t yet been willing to take a stand that threatens the unity of their own political coalition.
Poilievre’s statement above is good. It’s coherent. It has a ring of truth — even Carney agrees that we need to ramp up our economic strength, and the Conservatives can and should ruthlessly hound the government when it doesn’t move as fast as it can and must.
This tone is about right — pro-Canada, clear-eyed about where the blame lies, and also accurate about where the Liberals are falling short. We think the Canadian people could, in time, warm to this message.
We just wish we had any faith the Conservatives would stick to it.
Oh, and speaking of internal divisions within the Conservative party? You may have seen this statement by Conservative MP Jamil Jivani. It was, uh, different than Poilievre’s.
As an unrelated aside; we at The Line have tried to note that submission to American demands is an intellectually valid position to hold and argue. Canada is the weaker party. We do have a lot to lose. Even if we do resist, we may not win by our own metrics. That said, if some Conservatives want to argue this position, we ask that they have the courage of their own convictions. Don’t merely attack the Prime Minister for failing to get a deal or acting in his own political self-interest in a lazy attempt to score points. Argue the positive case, openly, explicitly, and honestly. Trust your base and your voters to come to a rational conclusion about how we should respond when the risks and benefits of all our options are considered and fairly weighed.
Anyway, The Line has some personal affection for Jamil, but we’re also realists. He’s clearly running his own policy and communications strategy within the CPC caucus, and he’s not trying to hide it. He reportedly explained his statement’s radically different tone from his leader’s by saying he hadn’t seen the party’s position when he articulated his own, which struck us as more a confession than an explanation.
In any case, we’ll let our readers and the public conclude for themselves which version of Conservative messaging they prefer. We’ll simply note that Poilievre is probably not going to be able to allow Jivani, or any MP, to run his own rogue foreign policy operation indefinitely, especially when it’s in direct conflict with the position the leader has chosen on a matter of massive public interest and national significance.
And we also aren’t sure that the costs of doing something about go down for Poilievre the longer this drags on.
Alright, folks. Stay tuned.
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When Carney doesn't release the information you are calling for, will you finally decide that it is time to stop simply assuming, without evidence, that he is being truthful and acting in the interests of Canadians as a nation?
"Without evidence" is of course generous, considering the Howe bridge case, and its clear evidence that Carney is willing to lie for political reasons. "Less than candid", forsooth.
In the word of the great American philosopher Samuel P. Elliot, "Yup."