I have heard from many Conservatives that under Pierre Poilievre we would have had a deal with the Americans, and they are most certainly right — having a Prime Minister who completely ascribes to the American president’s values would have assured some kind of deal.

What would the deal entail? We can infer from Mark Carney’s lengthy speech announcing withdrawal from trade negotiations what the Americans want from us, and it is not complicated.

Trump has the subtlety of a nuclear blast and the intellectual capacity of the gold leaf that defines his life. He has told us what he wants since returning to the White House, clearly, unambiguously, repetitively.

He does not want a deal with Canada. He does not want trade with Canada. He does not want partnership with Canada. He does not want cooperation with Canada. He does not peace with Canada. He does not want Canada to exist as its own entity.

He wants Canada to be annexed into the United States, its resources to be American resources, its land to be American land, its people to be American people — at least the white, English-speaking ones.

Canada is a vast, rich land, and, on the Mercator projection, it is vastly largely than the United States. Trump wants Canada and he wants Greenland so that he can own the biggest country in the world as part of his real estate empire, while increasing the pool of people who need to buy access to him to accomplish anything. He wants our energy and natural resources because the people that already openly bribe him tell him to want it, just as they tell him to wage an expensive war in the Middle East to make all of them that much richer.

Mark Carney wants Canada to be strong, to protect its multilingual and multicultural traditions, to be economically autonomous and resilient in the face of adversity and uncertainty. He understands the need to diversify our economy and our international relationships, to break our dependency on the only country ever to have posed a direct military threat to our own.

Poilievre, though, has shown no interest or desire to protect Canada, Canadian interests, Canadian health, Canadian values. He has built his leadership around the grievance politics and self-interest that carried the MAGA movement to power in the United States. Like Trump, he advocated against vaccine mandates while getting vaccinated himself. Collective health, collective interest, is not in his vocabulary.

So faced with the same administration, faced with a list of demands from the Trump White House, Poilievre would not have fought for Canada. It is unreasonable to the point of ridicule to think he would have. He would have sought validation and vindication from his idols in the MAGA movement on whose model he built his own leadership.

Vice president JD Vance referred to him as “this guy Pierre Poilievre or something,” reminding us — and him — of his utter irrelevance today. That is harder to swallow for someone like him than the loss of sovereignty for the country he leads would be.

With Poilievre, we would have traded our sovereignty and our autonomy for the Pyrrhic victory of an agreement with Trump. We would be folding up our supply management industry, as his mentor Harper did when he allowed the Canadian Wheat Board to be sold to Saudi Arabian interests. We would be aligning our food safety regime with America’s collapsing food safety systems. We would be locking into the F-35s and the American defence industrial ecosystem rather than escaping it when the single greatest military and economic threat to Canada is the American defence industrial ecosystem.

His objective is to maintain economic access to the United States, whatever the cost.

Every time Poilievre agreed to an American demand, the Americans would have made another demand, and Poilievre would have agreed to that, too. He would have embraced the idea of being the governor of Canada, of being a part of the American empire in all but name.

He would probably have avoided the bulk of the tariffs, he would have stood tall on the burning embers of Canadian independence, he would have avoided American aggression, and he would have done it all by folding, acquiescing, and participating in it, systematically eliminating our sovereignty while telling us that we are stronger for being within American protection, complete with our very own Flock cameras.

So yes, his supporters are right: Poilievre would probably have a deal where Carney does not.

And what a deal CUSMAGA would have been.