By Lisa Van Dusen

August 25, 2026

“Let the games begin” is both belated and understated under circumstances in which the games have been underway for quite some time, but let’s say for argument’s sake that the Canada-US trade war of 2026 truly began this morning, with Donald Trump’s egregious assault on our toponymical sovereignty via the arbitrary renaming of Lake Ontario “Lake America”.

As ever, Trump’s greatest gift to humanity is as a generator of internet memes. Still, such is the state of propaganda in this era of reality-show warfare that a weaponized charlatan with a Sharpie can threaten via paste-up post the sort of territorial plundering that once required the mustering of battalions.

After years of the war on democracy being the dominant narrative of the 21st century, that its most potent America discrediting, chaos generating, status quo pillaging, humanity trolling weapon of choice is Donald J. Trump of all people says much, much more about the cynicism of the aspiring post-democracy world order than it could ever possibly say about Trump’s raw political talent.

All of which makes Mark Carney an unusual wartime prime minister, but a wartime prime minister nonetheless.

In drawing a line between the Trump administration’s assault not just on a legal, binding continental trade treaty; not just on the longstanding norms of a global supply-chain web already hacked and undermined by China over two decades of economics-driven borderless democracy depletion; not just on the customs and culture of rational diplomacy but on reality itself, Carney has become the Winston Churchill of the piece, Canada the David fighting a rampaging Goliath, and Canadians the plucky patriots hunkering down to defend themselves and humanity from its latest scourge.

As the Toronto Star’s Althia Raj said in Monday night’s CBC At Issue panel, “The politics could not be better,” for Mark Carney.

Beyond our bilateral conflict dynamic, the course of human events lately hacked by the absurdity of Trumpian transformation stylings is now facing its first major counter-narrative act of resistance.

Donald Trump has made Mark Carney Winston Churchill by giving Canada no choice but the choice between appeasement and defiance, and by making the economic and moral costs of the former simply too great to fathom.

Moreover, by treating Carney as if he has the political instincts and moral compass of a Neville Chamberlain, Trump further made him choose not just between sanity and insanity, but between his own political future and insanity. Or, to quote Canadian columnist Stephen Maher’s more direct formulation, “Donald Trump tried to f**k with Carney. That doesn’t usually work out well for people.”

So, Mark Carney — the two-time central banker with what would be the world’s biggest Rolodex if Rolodexes were still a thing, the sage of Davos — is now with levels of conviction befitting the moment, embarking on the “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” stage of his political career, thanks to Donald Trump.

Beyond our bilateral conflict dynamic, the course of human events lately hacked by the absurdity of Trumpian transformation stylings is now facing its first major counter-narrative act of resistance.

The capitulations to coercion across G7 capitals, the political nose-holding along the paths of least resistance, the lunacy-compelled calculated risks, can now all be measured against a paradigm shift that amounts to a radical return to reason.

What Churchill did by mobilizing Britain’s asymmetrical advantages — its geography, its national character, its history, its mythology — against a formidable, deranged predator who was terrorizing the world was a triumph of moral certitude over both industrialized depravity and conventional wisdom.

Canada is in a trade war with the United States. But in a world reeling from years of undeclared political, geopolitical, and economic war by players whose only ideology is power for abuse-of-power’s sake, the stakes — not just for Canadians but for equally besieged Americans — could not be higher.

In receiving his honorary Doctor of Laws at Harvard following the First Quebec Conference in 1943, Churchill prophesied of great-power games that, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

Canada and its prime minister are in a war of wits. Let the games continue.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.