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The global significance of Mark Carney’s election as Canadian Prime Minister is he now sits at the centre of an alternative pole of global economic thinking. Everything but Trump.
There was a half expectation here that Mr Carney would immediately sue for peace with President Trump when the polls closed on the election. It has emphatically not happened.
In the final days of polling, in his victory speech in Ottawa, and in his interview with me, he clearly intends to continue with the approach that has brought him to elected power, with a majority still possible. Even if he falls just short of a majority, two of the other main party leaders have lost their seats, and are likely to sign up to some degree behind a united Canada agenda on issues facing the US.
Underpinning this approach is absolute conviction that the US is making a mistake that will primarily and visibly backfire on itself, its companies, and its consumers. The fact the White House is attacking Amazon for “hostile acts” in publishing tariffs is a cast iron example of this. President Trump’s gun is pointed primarily at his own feet, the thinking goes.
Jordan Peterson, an implacable opponent of Mr Carney, recently lamented on Joe Rogan’s podcast that “once Carney is elected, Trump will not have a more seasoned enemy in the West. Carney is very well connected especially in Europe and the UK”.
While “enemy” is overstating it, Peterson was right, and additionally Carney is also very adept at understanding the nexus between markets and headlines. He made a number of announcements as PM about rethinking the purchase of US fighter jets, slightly changing the purchases of US government debt, all of which would have quickly focused some minds in the US.
That said, there is significant potential economic damage about to be wrought by these tariffs on a Canadian economy, with three quarters of its exports going to the US. There is no getting away from that.
Carney’s answer during the campaign was to accept the US has changed and to diversify. A credible push in that direction might also help any chance of US businesses, Congress, or forces within the administration rowing back on the tariffs.
Mr Carney was abundantly clear to me that he is no rush to go to the White House or Mar a Lago.
“We’ll have a partnership on our terms. There’s a win win possibility there, but on our terms, not on their terms,” he said.
A key part of that is forging new strategic alliances elsewhere, with Europe, and the UK. “One would assume” that Canada and the UK could do a free trade agreement that has been stalled, he told me. Cooperation on defence and Canada’s abundant critical minerals is also on the table. He also dismissed President Trump’s territorial ambitions not just for his country, but Greenland and Canada too.
On the campaign trail in his home town of Edmonton, I heard him say “America’s leadership of the global economy is over” and that was a “tragedy”. Implicitly, he is saying, with the help of the rest of the G7, he will step up.
And by incredible quirk of fate, it is he who will host the G7 summit in Alberta in June, just days before the expiry of President Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs pause. Will Trump attend on the land he both tariffs and he covets?
All roads lead to Kananaskis in the middle of June.
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