From Elbows Up To Make America Great Again

Mark Carney was elected to stand up to Donald Trump. Instead, he's become a key Trump ally.

Note: I keep as much of this Substack free as I can, but writing takes time and energy and if you’re able to subscribe here at one of the paid tiers and support my work you’d be doing me a solid. If you’re unable to afford a paid subscription, consider subscribing for free or send me a message and I’ll gladly comp your subscription.

---

Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba...The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be?

—Walt Whitman. May, 1870.

I have a piece in today’s issue of the Toronto Star on the Carney government’s handling of relations with the United States. Last year, amid an unprecedented trade war and persistent aggression from the Trump administration, Canadians gave Mark Carney a mandate to disentangle our country — economically and diplomatically — from the empire to the south. By any reasonable standard, he has done the opposite: aligning closely with Trump on the world stage, trying to cajole the White House wherever possible, and deepening our integration with the American military-industrial complex. From the piece:

Earlier this year, Carney offered swift backing for the illegal U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (even as that war’s earliest casualties included nearly 200 children killed in the bombing of a school.) He has similarly backed the administration’s Orwellian “Board of Peace” plans in Gaza, indicated a willingness to sign on to its proposed “Golden Dome” defence initiative, refrained from criticizing Marco Rubio’s attempts to dismantle the International Criminal Court through coercion and sought to reassure American investors by pledging to help “Make America Great Again.” Last fall, the government also invited Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts — a key Trump ally and architect of the far-right blueprint Project 2025 — to attend a closed-door meeting with members of cabinet (the visit was ultimately cancelled, almost certainly thanks to the ensuing backlash.) Does anyone seriously think this was what Canadians elected the Carney-led Liberals to do?

It’s important to recognize the duplicity and dishonesty at work here. But we also need to grapple with the extent to which Carney’s ingratiating approach to Trump is a direct extension of his government’s right-leaning domestic agenda:

When the prime minister gave his big speech in Davos earlier this year, what many heard was a stirring call for a new progressive internationalism in the age of Donald Trump. But, as I argued at the time, what he was really saying was that middle powers like Canada can no longer afford to ground their actions in the pursuit of idealistic notions like human rights. This, not incidentally, is more or less how the government has sought to justify its own right-leaning domestic agenda as well: its abandonment of climate targets and gutting of environmental regulations; its tax cuts for the wealthy; its slash and burn attitude toward the public sector; and its overzealous embrace of AI.

Both at home and abroad, the Trump threat serves as a pretext for a form of would-be pragmatism that is really just conservatism by any other name. Within its own borders, Canada is increasingly being run less like a country and more like a business. On the world stage, it is barely even pretending to care about concepts like international law and human rights.

Either way, this is plainly not what millions of people who voted Liberal in 2025 elected Mark Carney to do.

You can read the full piece here.