Keeping a straight face has been perhaps the greatest achievement of Mark Carney’s brief tenure as the prime minister of Canada. For months, Donald Trump has railed against Canada, threatening to turn America’s ungrateful northern neighbor into the 51st state, come what may, an achievement worthy of his visage gracing Mount Rushmore — in the same way Trump will annex Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, free Brazil’s corrupt former President Jair Bolsonaro, repeal the laws of climate change and gravity, and then impose tariffs on all of America’s nefarious trading partners, like the evil-doer Canada.
The only hitch, as the canny Carney has known all along: America has a thing called a “treaty” with Canada. Not one of Trump’s “deals,” the chaotic, almost certainly worthless and delusional transactions that involve the president imagining himself astride the world, TV remote in hand, a colossus of reactionary stupidity and cruelty finally delivering his promised revenge.
Canada and China, the USA’s two largest trading partners both retaliated against the tariffs. The reason for this is because we actually have the leverage because we’re so big.
That and because most countries have citizens smart enough to understand that a tariff is a tax and they don’t like their taxes being raised.