Jen Gerson: If Carney signs this deal, let's be clear: it's the beginning of our surrender

There is no piece of paper you could sign that is going to get Trump off our backs. There is no way to secure the illusion of business certainty in this political environment. It’s fantasy.

Well, it looks like our prime minister is losing his nerve, eh?

Reports are now leaking fast and furious that Trump’s surprise August 19 tariffs have worked to break our strategic patience. Canada is working to secure some kind of interim deal, and if the leaks are to be believed, we’re going to give the Americans essentially everything they want while they maintain most tariffs on us. It appears to be a shit deal for us, and one that puts us directly in the glide path toward vassal state.

Worse — and, to be frank, I do think this is the worst part of all of this — it’s the exact opposite of what we elected Mark Carney to do. When facing economic and political aggression from a neighbour and once-ally like the United States, surrender vs. resistance is a valid conversation to have. Given our circumstances, one could make a legitimate case for either choice. However, as a people, we did have that conversation, in the spring of 2025. We did make that choice. We chose resistance. We chose sacrifice. That was the premise of the last election, and that was the value proposition Mark Carney made for himself.

Instead, what we’ve actually done in the past year-and-a-half is a counter-productive middle path: yes, we’ve made moves toward strengthening our economy internally, and this is all to the good. But when it comes to measures that require a willingness to stand up to real power, all we’ve offered has been performative resistance in the form of angry social media sputtering and grandiose global speeches, followed in private by concession after concession. This has left us with the worst of both options. We’ve demonstrated that we lack the collective will to sustain real economic sacrifice. And we’ve just annoyed the Americans, which has clearly only increased their desire to make an example of us.

What we absolutely did not vote for was the prediction offered by Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a political risk analysis firm with long ties to Carney and the Liberals. Last year, Bremmer wrote: “Canadian leaders have a political incentive to put up a bigger fight because Trump’s threats toward Canada’s economy and sovereignty have sharply inflamed nationalist sentiment north of the border in the run-up to the April 28 elections. However, I expect Ottawa will quietly fold shortly after the vote to ensure that ongoing relations with the U.S. remain functional.”

Congratulations, Canada. You got punk’d.

And the only people who deserve as much anger as the Liberals are the Conservatives, who should be dining out on this catastrophe yet can’t seem to get a coherent message track together because they must appease their own Fifth Column ingrates.

But whatever. I’m beyond thinking anything matters anymore.

Carney wasn’t elected to get a deal. He was elected because people thought he could handle Donald Trump better than Pierre Poilievre. The prime minister is not being graded on an objective outcome, he is being graded on a subjective curve. And as long as he can get in front of a microphone and say something like: “We’ve seen Canadians come together in a time of crisis; we’ve seen them explore this beautiful country for their vacations; and forgo American bourbon and ketchup. And as a result, we’ve secured the best trade deal with the Americans in the world!” most Canadians will eat it right up. What matters isn’t what’s in the deal. What matters is how these guys make an electorate of doe-eyed panda people feel about what’s in the deal. Vibes all the way down.

And my guess is that the next few weeks are going to be full of social media posts and op-eds loaded up with undisclosed paid endorsements extolling the state of the Canadian economy under Carney’s stewardship, along with a metric fuckton of post-hoc reasoning. “It’s just temporary,” will be a standard. “Well, we had to try something with the Americans,” surely. Or, “it’s as good as anybody else could have done.”

And it’s complete bullshit. All new signs freshly kitted out for our recently bereft windows. We could also eat the Aug. 19 tariffs and do nothing, but apparently, we won’t. Not only is this shaping up to look like a very bad interim deal for us on its face; not only is it contrary to the democratic mandate that got Carney elected; this is also strategically suicidal.

There is no piece of paper you could sign that is going to get Trump off our backs. There is no way to secure the illusion of business certainty in this political environment. It’s fantasy.

We may sign some kind of interim political agreement, sure. This U.S. administration may lay off for a few months. But all that buys us time, and probably not that much time, either.

Once we float back into our baseline complacency and begin to relax, they’re just going to hammer us with another round of tariffs and demands and sanctions ahead of the next negotiating round. And whatever we agreed to in the interim deal will become the starting position of the “permanent” one. They’ll invent whatever pretext they want to justify it: wildfires, ice storms, China, whatever. It doesn’t matter. They’ll come after us again and again and again, because why wouldn’t they? Once we demonstrate that we’re easy pickings, they’ll sniff for the bones.

And neither time nor leverage are free. Both extract a cost. Carney’s political capital will erode with time, as all political capital does. Baggage accumulates. National resolve wavers.

If we sign this deal, by early 2027, Carney’s credibility as the “global fracture” prime minister will have materially diminished. And after six months of buying bourbon and American ketchup, our reflexes toward even symbolic and pointless resistance will have atrophied. What appetite will there be for real economic pain, then?

We’ll be in an even weaker position to resist than we are today. That’s the price of whatever short-term relief we may be buying. It’s more than a bad deal. It’s a bad trade. There is no better time to fight than right now. It does not get easier.

It looks like we’re going to piss that away on the entirely vain hope that something in the U.S. shifts in our favour; that once we concede everything, they’ll stop asking for even more.

There’s neither virtue nor wisdom nor strategy here. It’s just surrender.

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