Elbows Up: Carney’s First Face-Off with Trump

By Jeremy Kinsman

May 2, 2025

Prime Minister Mark Carney is headed to Washington Tuesday to meet President Donald Trump and set the scene for a major negotiation to follow, which Mr. Carney has imagined will be a comprehensive economic/security discussion.

Obviously, the top objective now for Carney is to get the immediate tariffs between the two countries off the table, pending a more definitive settlement of economic issues and re-examination of the terms of the existing CUSMA (aka USMCA), probably moving forward the negotiations set for July 2026 in the treaty review process.

The agenda makes it all sound like a normal bilateral summit between these two countries. But with Donald Trump, nothing is normal. Carney has said repeatedly that the relationship will never be same. The trust is gone from the Canadian side, as unilateral demands and screwball threats escalated from the US, including the repeated assertion by Trump that Canada should be the “51st state,” the insult to Canadians that helped thrust Carney into office.

Trump won’t ever be seen to back down or back away. He will never go on the defensive. The best we can hope for is that he shuts up about it. Carney should insist that any discussion of trade and the border with the US has to begin with agreed numbers, not the fabrications that Trump regularly spins, and with the explicit acknowledgement that we are two sovereign countries.

Carney has to avoid the set-ups in the Oval Office that have been used for previous visitors, in which Trump carries on for an hour or more a Q & A with the mostly deferential propaganda fringe of the White House press corps, while, at best, the visitor is presented as a supplicant, relegated to pondering their nails, closing their eyes in an effort at teleportation, or staring at the paraphernalia in the room while Trump drones on about sleepy Joe Biden and other obsessions. At worst, the visitor gets slated by tag-team yelling from Trump and Vance, an exercise in humiliation that President Volodymyr Zelensky endured in front of the world, prompting the coining of the term “Zelenskied” to describe an Oval Office bilateral ambush.

I’d argue for substantive talks in private, followed by brief respective courtesies and summaries in public from each leader, followed by Carney’s farewell. Trump then has his captive event to say what he will. Mr. Carney can go visit the Senate majority leader before doing a wrap-up presser of his own at the Canadian Embassy on the way out of town. Trump is thoroughly unpredictable and addicted to demonstrations of power. The press will provoke him. Best Mr. Carney make a forceful if courteous presentation in private and avoid any controversy in public, especially over existential issues of sovereignty.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who seems who have the most bandwidth in the Trump entourage beyond MAGA-worship, spoke this week about the benefit of building up North American manufacturing strength in interactive and mutually beneficial ways. It recalled the original motif of Ronald Reagan’s proposal (when he declared for the Republican nomination in 1979), when he proposed a North American free trade zone to reflect a shared community of interests among the American, Canadian, and Mexican peoples.

On one hand, that is very wide of what Trump has said about Mexicans, and indeed Canadians, and his promise to build a fortress America. On the other hand, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum seems to have Trump’s wary respect as a serious colleague, as does Carney, potentially. (President Sheinbaum and Prime Minister Carney have good reasons to become confidantes.) With three strong leaders, Trump ought to recognize he is not helped by alienating the other two.

Carney should insist that any discussion of trade and the border with the US begin with agreed numbers, not the fabrications that Trump regularly spins, and with the explicit acknowledgement that we are two sovereign countries.

Of course, the negotiation with Trump is indissociable from Carney’s other two objectives en route to reducing Canada’s vulnerability to unreliable US domination: strengthening Canadian unity, the economy, and obtaining a single Canadian market; and buiding up enough real economic and shared infrastructure projects with non-American partners to reduce our trade dependence on the US market from 78-80% to a level with some headroom and leverage, around 68-70%.

This issue of diversification has been argued for half a century in Canada. Those most fearful of diminished access to the US market (as Trump now threatens) urge fellow Canadians to recognize the priceless geopolitical reality of being next to the world’s biggest market. Of course, it has always been a part of Canadian foreign and trade policy duality. But this North American “reality” has placed us under threat from a mercurial and nationalist US president. As Carney says, “we’re not going back.”

There are huge markets in Asia we have to develop better, including both India and China. But the trans-Atlantic relationship is the one with proof of concept, and political readiness, if we are up to it.

The EU (and the UK, which is creeping back toward it as a non-member) is almost as big a market and source of capital as the US. We have been trying for fifty years to put economic meat on our sentimental and historical ties and multilateral like-mindedness. Twenty-five years ago, there were high-profile productive Canadian enterprises with more economic activity in Europe than in Canada – Nortel, Bombardier Rail, Magna, and global companies like Alcan. They are gone, or diminished. Small businesses always struggled to take advantage of the access that landmark agreements such as CETA provide.

The change now is how the destructive Trump effect has dismissed as irrelevant the very notions of bedrock values, of democracy, rights, rule-of-law norms, and cooperative international architecture that the US itself mainly designed. Suddenly, a Canadian election campaign against the agent of its destruction caught Europe’s imagination. Mark Carney seems at a despondent time the kind of leader that many, many in Europe now miss. It’s an opportunity.

There is explicit European willingness to elevate Canada to a position of real, substantive partnership, to work for it. Projects such as joining a German-Norwegian submarine consortium, an EU-Canada military infrastructure program, multiple avenues of cooperation with EU countries on issues of Arctic passage, security, and development, even a preference expressed in US-targeted Greenland to work instead with Canada.

Canada needs to goose up plausible active internationalism, economically, and politically – with European partners, including especially Nordic and Baltic nations so similar to ours in outlook, absolutely with Mexico, and even, if it becomes feasible and fair, with China, and India. These ambitions should never be scorned as a distraction or diversion of energy from the US relationship, or an irritant to the Americans. Having the asset of alternatives, as Carney mentions, is a negotiating strength.

“Fortress North America” is an attractive formula for win/win/win economic cooperation, nourished by our other key developing relationships. But if it aims at being a hermetically sealed North American “sphere of influence” amid a global mosaic of other nationalist fortresses, it’s really not for Canadians.

I think Mark Carney gets that better than I do. How or when he explains it to Donald Trump is up to him. 

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman was Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.