About the trade deal negotiations

Wesley Wark writes Get a trade deal, get ready to give away our sovereignty? Or, what’s with the leaks?

…As always with high stakes talks, especially where few official details are provided, there will be leakers lurking. The media love them, but rarely question their motives…
The leaks may not be necessarily true or even very definitive, but leakers will hope, or perhaps have been authorized to hope, that they might push the negotiation in some favourable direction. Leakers are not white knights.
They are definitely not to be trusted, even if you are reading this stuff over breakfast (does any Canadian demographic still do that?).

I have no idea where the leaks come from, or what authenticity they have, or what the leak story might be tomorrow.
But consider that there are certainly elements within the Canadian defence establishment who would love to see the Carney government forced to relinquish its Canada-first defence industrial strategy, its skepticism about the F-35 purchase, its reluctance to go all in on Trump’s fabulist Golden Dome missile system, or even its determination to buy radar planes with significant Canadian elements (the Saab Golden Eye, based on a Bombardier commercial jet), in favour of the latest U.S. product from Boeing. That’s leak as putsch pressure.
And there are certainly Americans who might well imagine that they can bully Canada into making grand concessions in defence and economic security—really concessions of national sovereignty– in order to avoid more tariff pain and try to get the Canada-US trading relationship back on some steady plane.
And a further thought, in a different direction. Maybe there are even, among these three Canadian leakers, some motive to try to raise public resistance to any such defence and economic security give-away so that the Carney team can simply say—our public won’t go there, sorry Donald….

In the Toronto Star, columnist Andrew Phillips writes A clear message for Carney: Canadians will not tolerate any more concessions to Trump [gift link]

…Canadians are in no mood to make more compromises. They don’t want to keep giving up ground while getting nothing in return and facing the threat of yet more punishment down the road. “Concessions” has become a dirty word. There’s a stand-and-fight feeling across the land.
That will make it very tough for the Carney government to agree to anything that doesn’t include clear wins for Canada — an unlikely prospect when it comes with dealing with Trump & Co.
What seems to be happening is that the deference Canadians have extended to Carney in this area is running out. The public’s willingness to give the government a pass when it compromises — or just flat-out gives in — to keep the relationship with Trump from tanking completely has been stretched to the limit. The blatant shakedown on the Gordie Howe bridge may have been the last straw.
At this point, things seem to be flipping around. Instead of Carney leading public opinion, his government is finding that public opinion is running ahead. If the Liberals think Canadians will accept the prime minister’s explanations for even more concessions, that it will be “trust Mark” once again, they’ll be taking a very high-risk bet.

In The Globe and Mail, columnist and historian John Rapley writes In the trade war showdown, it’s strong-hand Carney vs. weak-hand Trump

…Put it all together and you have a popular prime minister with a mandate for tough action, even sacrifice, facing down a deeply unpopular president who enjoys no such licence and is coming under intense pressure within his own party to deliver some economic relief. With the Strait of Hormuz still closed, the U.S.’s options in the Middle East currently narrowing and gasoline prices on the rise again, Mr. Trump is not going to get a break from that quarter. He needs to deliver something closer to home, and soon.
It’s thus time for the Prime Minister to put his money where his mouth is. When earlier this year he inserted the word “rupture” into the lexicon of global politics, Mr. Carney placed Canada at the centre of an emergent world order. Politicians, academics and journalists around the world began discussing how middle powers could seize control of a global agenda in an era in which the U.S. was hastening its own decline, China was not fully stepping into the breach and Russia was exposing its fundamental fragility.
Yet while Mr. Carney diagnosed the current condition, he didn’t provide an aetiology of the disease – an explanation for how it came to be. Tempting as it might be to blame it all on one flawed, fumbling U.S. president upending the world order, a malaise that can be rectified by returning to the way things were, the world made that mistake when it assumed the Biden administration had restored sanity to world affairs.
Then Trump came back, because American voters rejected a return to old ways. The rupture is here to stay. The government has both the opportunity and the duty to lead Canada forward into a postrupture era in which the country will have to stand on its own two feet more.

On the related issue of Canadian sovereignty, I saw an opinion piece last night (which of course I can’t find now) criticizing Carney’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. I don’t know much about economics, but my family were old-time CCF supporters back in the day, and we always felt it was a valid role of government to promote infrastructure projects that the private financiers wouldn’t undertake.
So tonight I saw this interesting article at Concis Canada. Shankar Narayan writes The Oligarch Wing Launches a Desperate Attack on Canada’s Sovereign Wealth Fund And on Prime Minister Carney for helping design Britain’s National Wealth Fund

…The country is preparing for a wave of investment in oil and gas, critical minerals, pipelines, ports, electricity, data infrastructure and new trade corridors. Canada needs foreign investment to build many of these projects. But foreign participation does not require surrendering control over the assets on which Canadian sovereignty will depend.
Part ownership is welcome. Private investment is essential. But in certain critical projects, Canada should retain an equity position, board representation, emergency access rights or some combination of the three…
…What happens if a foreign billionaire eventually acquires the company controlling a strategically important storage terminal, pipeline, mine or supply chain? What happens when that owner begins using control over essential infrastructure as political leverage while campaigning publicly for a more accommodating Canadian government?
Canada can review or block certain foreign acquisitions. But a defensive veto is not a substitute for ownership. By the time a hostile transaction reaches the review stage, Canada is already reacting to somebody else’s move.
A sovereign investment fund gives the country another option: enter early, retain a strategic stake, establish governance rights and ensure that indispensable assets cannot be quietly consolidated under oligarchic control.
That is the deeper purpose of the Canada Strong Fund. It is not merely another pool of government money. Properly designed, it would give Canada the ability to convert strategic development into public ownership—and public ownership into national freedom of action.
The safeguards must be hardwired from the beginning: an independent board, a published investment mandate, commercial return requirements, full disclosure of holdings, parliamentary audits and clear separation between strategic investment and political patronage.
With those protections in place, this fund would not expand oligarchic power. It would place a barrier in front of it.
That is also why the project is attracting such a targeted attack.
The Canada Strong Fund must move forward. But the C$25 billion announced by Carney is not sufficient for the scale of the energy, mineral, infrastructure and supply-chain transformation now beginning across the country.
It should be treated as the opening commitment—not the final size.
Canada should double it to C$50 billion.

About Americans

At The Line, Andrew Potter writes The American Karentocracy Our neighbours to the south are the last people on Earth to realize that the problem is them.

…What distinguishes the Karen is that they justify their own aggression as a response to a perceived injury or offence. They are not making a demand, they are seeking redress. And crucially, they have no conception of how they appear to anyone else: not to the 17-year-old at the till, not to the people behind them in line staring at their feet, fuming.
By almost any measure, this is now the governing creed of the United States of America: pure, unadulterated grievance. The behaviour of the American political class toward its allies over the past 18 months makes very little sense as statecraft and near-perfect sense as a customer-service complaint escalated well past the point of reason.
Consider the record.
Asked last April about Canada’s negotiating strategy, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick replied that “they suck,” mocked Mark Carney for getting on a plane to China, and reminded everyone that America is a $30-trillion economy and “the consumer of the world.” Canada’s economy “leans on” America’s, he explained later under Senate questioning, yet in the same breath complained that Canadian liquor stores were not stocking American spirits. He has elsewhere called Canada a “socialist regime” that has been “feeding off of us for decades upon decades upon decades.”
Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, for his part, seems to understand his duties as something akin to a Karen-at-Large. He told a Halifax business audience he was “disappointed” to have arrived in a country where it was “very, very difficult to find Canadians who are passionate about the American-Canadian relationship.” He had earlier explained, in Bellevue, Wash., that Canadians declining to visit the United States or buy its bourbon was why the president and his team “referred to Canada as being mean and nasty.” This is pure Karentocracy: It isn’t the ongoing annexation talk, the schoolyard insults, or the gangster threats that are the problem; it is Canada’s response to them.
(And lest one think this is just a bilateral Canada/U.S. thing: In January, the president threatened to put tariffs on eight NATO members for the offence of sending troops to help defend Greenland, noting that Denmark “currently have two dogsleds as protection, one added recently.”)
Which brings us back to the fires. Canada’s north is burning again this summer, the smoke is back over the Eastern Seaboard, and Americans are once more complaining to the manager.
Senator John Hoeven brought a resolution to the Senate floor calling on Canada to fight its wildfires harder. Senator Bernie Moreno introduced a bill requiring the president to determine whether Canada had failed to control its fires and, if so, to impose sanctions, revoke visas, and have the Secretary of State consider declaring Canadian diplomats persona non grata. The president called the smoke “willful negligence,” said the United States was “being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air,” declared that the cost “must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying,” and posted a picture of the border sealed off with an enormous furnace filter….

About American ambassador Pete Hoekstra

A petition is now underway to get him kicked out. On substack, Guard the Leaf says