By John Delacourt

August 22, 2026

If there were any doubt about our current relationship with the United States after the collapse of trade talks on Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney, in his press conference on Saturday, provided Canadians with all the clarity necessary: we were attacked so, yes, this is a trade war.

This is not, strictly speaking, a war between Canadians and Americans. It is a war on Canadian economic integrity and sovereignty by a rogue regime in Washington already causing so much unprecedented political, geopolitical, military, institutional and reputational damage to America that the inventory of self-inflicted catastrophes is too long to list here.

This creates a communications challenge that takes the communications challenge inherent in any wartime strategy to a whole new level.

As in any war where one aggressor nation attempts to prey on another, the casus belli for an attack must be established by the former.

Donald Trump has an intuitive, compulsive need to declare his intentions and his reasons for his actions via social media, of course, even if those intentions and reasons can change daily – or hourly.

However, the work of threading together a more coherent narrative, one no less aggressive or pernicious, is carried out by his team of enablers in synch. Now more than ever, it is vital, given our proximity to America and its cultural influence on this country, that there is a strong correction of Trumpian propaganda coming from Ottawa.

Carney’s Forward Guidance videos, billed as semi-regular updates or fireside chats, have suddenly become much more pertinent. The first two put to bed any question about the Prime Minister’s ability to be both an effective and engaging communicator.

Those talents now have to be martialed for a new context and the battle ahead; Carney will need to double down on difference, to highlight the fact that this isn’t just an economic war, but a war on the very truth of who we are and what Canada is.

Historical amnesia — or simply historical ignorance — can be so easily weaponized, as this new era of Trumpism has handily proven.

If we are indeed at war, it will require an air war as well as a ground war to defend us from a different kind of attack: the one on our sovereignty.

We have experienced aggressive trade tactics from Trump’s America before, but we’re facing a different enemy in this conflict. Trump 1.0 framed the invocation of the Section 232 tariffs as a corrective measure to reinvigorate the domestic production of materials, slated for defense purposes, made from steel, aluminum and copper.

However, these measures were also framed as creating a revival of heartland America, shining up the Rust Belt so that it glowed with all the promise of salvation for communities left behind as the American economy evolved over the previous four decades.

The rationale for the latest round of Section 338 tariffs, coming from Trump 2.0, is markedly different. It has given us something that most Ukrainians lived through, prior to 2022: the insidious discrediting, by Russia, of any claim to sovereignty their nation could claim. We’re now seeing the same page of that playbook at work.

Trump’s high-ranking officials have re-framed our bilateral relationship as if they are Russia and we are Ukraine. They view Canada as naturally, or inevitably, subservient to the economic power of the US.

When they attempt to flatter, they describe this subservience as ultimately good for us. We’re so much like them, really. We want the same products, consume the same entertainment. Why should we fixate on the narcissism of small differences?

This is an attempt to arrest our defenses, of course. It characterizes any response to aggression as the acting out, or misbehaviour, of a vassal state. It positions our sense of sovereignty as a delusion, a state of denial, that we’ve somehow, perhaps subconsciously misread or misconceived our own historic sense of national identity.

There will quite likely be more of this rhetoric from Washington in the days ahead. We’re not the target audience for this messaging, of course, though it will appeal to a certain constituency on this side of the border, too.

This is why the Prime Minister needs an air-war strategy.

Historical amnesia — or simply historical ignorance — can be so easily weaponized, as this new era of Trumpism has handily proven.

A concerted, serialized effort to explain why particular counter-tariffs will be selected, how we’re building Canada, and how this is fundamental to our legacy and the country’s promise, will help inoculate us from disinformation designed to attack our sovereignty.

And if by chance some Americans are also inoculated in the process, so much the better.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt is Senior Vice President of Counsel Public Affairs in Ottawa and a veteran Liberal strategist. He is the author of several novels, including The Innocent Canadian.