Canada is not alone in believing that to resist the Trump regime’s aggressions, lawful or otherwise, on the field of battle or at the mahogany table, is what must be done.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney meeting President Donald Trump in May 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
The thing I loved first and most about those evidently vicious trade talks the Canadians recently attempted with the Americans is how they blew up in the Trump regime’s faces at five minutes to 12 (almost literally) last Friday night.
The working assumption on the American side was that, money and profit being all that count anymore, they could pin those ever-understated Canadians to the wall and force them to sign a deal they couldn’t refuse. Then they refused, with other than their customary politesse.
The thing I loved second most is how Mark Carney, who ordered his people to abort the talks an hour before the deadline for going to signature, bluntly told off the Americans in a nationally televised address last Saturday, Aug. 22.
The Canadian prime minister said during those 22 minutes on air,
“We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty. We will not allow any nation to determine our future …. You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked.”
In a couple of sentences, the man who served as the Bank of England’s governor before his election last year on the Liberal Party ticket just declared an historic breach with Canada’s southern neighbor from which there seems no turning back.
‘A Pseudo-Democratic Basket Case’
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, March 2025. (Office of U.S. Trade Representative)
The third thing I love is that the Trumpster’s special trade representative, Jamieson Greer, got caught in broad daylight lying about what happened in his office during the final days and hours of marathon talks.
The Canadians didn’t walk away after he offered them “the best treatment of any major exporter to our market,” as Greer lamely insisted over the weekend. This is patently baloney, given that Carney’s decision to confront the United States will cost Canadians dearly in material terms.
The prime minister’s negotiators got up from the table when, per usual, the Americans attempted to write all sorts of last-minute terms into the documents, some of which were unabashedly imperial intrusions.
Once again, the Americans exposed themselves as “agreement-incapable,” in the memorable phrase of Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, who has long, long experience with Washington’s serial diplomatic perfidies. Or as Carney put it,
“We recognize that sometimes, its [Washington’s] signature is written in pencil.”
The fourth thing I love about the new U.S.–Canada standoff — and there may be more as events unfold — arrived in a New York Times opinion piece on Aug. 24, under the headline, “America Came for Canada, We said No.” A Toronto journalist named Stephen Marche put the case this way:
“For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basket case of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.”
Wow. A pseudo-democratic basket case, the Trumpster’s slapdash vanity: It’s a mess down here, Stephen, and very few people this side of the border have the courage to say so.
The just-collapsed negotiations were an attempt to replace the U.S.–Canada–Mexico Agreement (USMCA), which President Trump signed six years ago and from which he withdrew on July 1. The USMCA. replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, the infamous NAFTA, from which Trump withdrew during his first time around in the White House.
In 2018, Mexican President Peña Nieto, Trump and Canadian President Trudeau signing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement on the margins of the G-20 leaders’ summit, 2018. (State Department / Ron Przysucha)
It is always fun to deal with the Americans, never more than when the Trumpster sits in the Oval Office.
As of midnight Friday, Aug. 21, Canada faced 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of its exports to the United States, notably steel, aluminum products and automobiles. Carney promises to match this punitive regime “dollar for dollar,” and good on him for doing so.
Not to be missed, Canada has middle-fingered all sorts of tacked-on demands, the most preposterous of which, for my money, was the Americans’ insistence that Canada drop its practice of bilingual labeling in recognition of the French-speaking population concentrated in Quebec Province.
Let’s not miss the significance of all this, coming as it does from those kindly people who shall always say “hoose” instead of “house.”
‘Wrecking Ball Politics’
Placed in a larger context, there is only one way to read this dramatic turn in what have been for so long perfectly ordinary relations. Carney’s obviously daring decision to let the acrimony roll in response to Trump trade tricks is a measure, an important one, of the revulsion some in the West, as well as most in the rest, feel toward this regime’s uninhibited aggression, bullying and duplicity.
It was Carney, we ought not forget, who spoke forcefully, and to the surprise of many, of “a rupture in the international order” at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year.
He attacked the “wrecking ball politics” of the United States, without naming it, and described our time as “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” It was at Davos, most notably, that Carney urged “middle powers” to draw together in new alliances and partnerships — economic, military, on the trade side.
Carney’s Davos speech was dismissed in many quarters, I well recall, as the phony posturing of another “centrist.” I was not so quick on the draw myself. In now confronting the United States at some material cost to his people — and with their assent, we read — he has put some clothes on the mannequin, it seems to me.
Indeed, a lot of people seem to have missed that, four days before the Davos occasion, the Carney government signed a big new trade agreement with China — so risking (and prompting) the Trump regime’s ire.
Carney is a centrist, successor in Ottawa to the supercilious Justin Trudeau, O.K. The question he raises as he stands down the Americans is, Where’s the center? Or at least, Where does Mark Carney think it is?
During the Cold War, only de Gaulle and to a certain extent Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first postwar chancellor, gave any thought to Europe as a pole of power independent of both superpowers.
At the Cold War’s end, honorable figures such as Václav Havel urged Europeans to (re)discover their identity and recognize their unique responsibilities. Absent both vision and guts, no such turn has come.
Nothing ever came of all the post–Cold War talk of a “third way” — a forgotten phrase at this point. It is almost grotesque to consider the clods now in power in London, Paris and Berlin — centrists all, Russophobes all, obsequious to the Americans all.
I do not see Carney’s “middle powers” thesis going very far in the West, in short. But he is precisely on the mark so far as he expresses an ever-more-vigorous contempt for what the United States has made of itself and the need, at last, to counter it.
Resisting Trump’s Aggressions
Protesters against the war with Iran, Washington, D.C., April 2026. (Nvss132, Own Work, CC-0)
In this connection, Trita Parsi, the executive vice president at the Quincy Institute, put out an interesting piece the other day under the headline, “Why so many countries around the world quietly root for Iran.” And the subhead under this: “It’s not about Iran. It’s the threats that an unchecked America poses to others.”
Making a pointed exception of the Europeans, as well he is right to do, Parsi elaborates:
“I have been stunned by the number of officials from a wide variety of countries who, while hardly favoring Iran or feeling much empathy for the Islamic Republic, have privately expressed to me a huge sigh of relief over Tehran’s success in thwarting US–Israeli aggression….
“This ‘tacit rooting’ for Iran tells us something about the state of global affairs.
“There is relief that aggression and violations of international law did not pay off for the US and Israel in Iran, just as they didn’t for Russia in Ukraine. Venezuela was, in the eyes of many, a terrifying case. Regardless of one’s views of [Nicolás] Maduro, the idea that a superpower could surgically kidnap the head of state of another country, install its favored ruler — who must now get her social media posts approved by the US Secretary of State — and gleefully announce that Venezuela is now American territory was petrifying to a lot of countries. So was the fact that European leaders praised the regime-change operation while dismissing concerns about its legality.”
Parsi’s topic, although he never puts it in these terms, is the creeping isolation the United States brings upon itself at more or less every turn now. The bombing of Iran, Israeli terror, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, the inhumane blockade of Cuba, Greenland, the simmering confrontation with Canada that now comes to a boil: All different, all of a piece. To resist the Trump regime’s aggressions, lawful or otherwise, on the field of battle or at the mahogany table, is what must be done.
From what I read in the reporting and in the speeches, Trump has lit the fires of passion among the Canadians. Not easy to do, given Canadians are a measured people. May they keep it burning and may it spread.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored.
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If the US is treating its closest traditional ally and strategic partner, Canada, in this manner, one can only imagine how it would treat its other allies—not to mention countries in the Global South.
Perhaps some of America’s allies and countries in the Global South still believe that they can simply wait out Trump’s presidency and that, once he is gone, things will return to the way they were before Trump. But Biden’s presidency clearly demonstrated that the US is no longer “the US of the past” and that it is in decline—a decline that, in a sense, began with the 2008 financial crisis.
The war in Ukraine, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, the genocide in Gaza, and the broader failures of the Biden presidency have all exposed the depth of this decline. There is no doubt that Trump is an unconventional and highly unusual president. But the problems confronting the US go far beyond Trump and his unconventional style of rule. They are rooted primarily in the country’s economic woes, compounded by the rise of China and Russia as major global powers.
Trump is not the cause of these problems; he is, in many ways, a manifestation of them.
Yesterday, it was Russia and Ukraine. Today, it is West Asia and Latin America. Tomorrow, it could be Canada, Greenland, Europe, and East Asia.
Given the state of world affairs, can other nations afford to remain bystanders, assuming that they will somehow survive the expanding crises, conflicts, and instability generated by the US response to its own mounting domestic and international contradictions?
It was Carney, we ought not forget, who spoke forcefully, and to the surprise of many, of “a rupture in the international order” at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year.
He attacked the “wrecking ball politics” of the United States, without naming it, and described our time as “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” It was at Davos, most notably, that Carney urged “middle powers” to draw together in new alliances and partnerships — economic, military, on the trade side.
Carney only bitched about the US once they turned on the vassals like Denmark (Greenland) and his own nation Hitherto Carney and his predecessors were quite happy for decades with such bullying and bombing of the Global South, because they got a cut of the spoils. The Canadian PM is a creepy phoney.
Why is Russia still trodden down and deemed against against international law, when Putin made great efforts to support Minsk 1 and 2. Then the “democratic, civilised” European guarantors admitted they had no intention of keeping their word, instead the opposite. And Zelensky refused to keep the promises he’d been voted into office for.
with the collapse of the projects in Europe/Asia, the empire has no choice but to own this entire hemisphere. “America” Hopefully, it will collapse under its own hubris before it can do so, but I am quite concerned.
Everyone was forewarned as a follow up of the need new Pearl Harbor event that led to deep change to France and Germany over the Iraq American frying that signaled we had emerged from a cocoon for fright to take flight and stealth came out in the open to slam dunk the world in foolishness. Fool US how many times now? Just when we thought empires might have started to expire.
Trump is a house burning down the sooner the better. The tragedy is the damage he inflicts on the Republic
Gee, maybe it really is a hoose.
The center sailed away. I doubt that’s it on the horizon.
Interesting analysis of what happened. Patrick gives Mark Carney far too much credit. As a Canadian I’d like to clarify a few points from my perspective.
First of all, when Trump first began his tariff war with us Carney caved immediately by beefing up border security to address the illusory threat of drugs flooding the US from Canada to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Then Carney cancelled the long awaited tax on the social media giants that was set to be implemented giving them a continued free ride in our country and appeasing DT (and his oligarchy tech friends) once again. Then Carney fell for the purchase of the US F-35 fighter jets, known to be substandard, to the tune of 9 billion dollars and he immediately increased our contribution to NATO to 5% of GDP set at the whim of DT without even looking at how it will affect the overall national budget. Prior to this Canada didn’t even contribute the obligatory 2.5 % of GDP to NATO. Carney was his knees to the emperor I’d say.
Mark Carney was ready to sign that trade deal with the US until members of his own negotiating team and a fair number of provincial Premiers convinced him he was giving away the farm and that the majority of Canadians would not support it. He withdrew at the eleventh hour.
Canada is and remains to this day a loyal lap dog of US the empire. Carney supports the illegal invasion of Iran, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s President, the ever harsher blockade and sanctions on Cuba to name but a few actions of the empire my country wholeheartedly supports, including our membership in the racist Five Eyes security group in this hemisphere keeping Latin America and the Caribbean in its “proper” place. Colonialism in this hemisphere is alive and well.
Finally, Mark Carney is not a centrist. He is a conservative in liberal clothing.
Excellent comment. One thing: a conservative in liberal clothing is pretty much exactly what a “centrist” is these days …
Fair point.
I agree. He was prepared to accept a really bad deal until the US made some demands that absolutely would not fly here in Canada. The French language demands and the US ability to control how we deal with other countries. Carney knew he would be immediately ousted had he agreed.
spoken like a true blue Poilievre conservative.
If you are referring to me I have never and would never vote Conservative. Not a conservative bone in my body. You probably think anyone who disagrees with the empire’s narrative on the Russia/Ukraine war is a Putin apologist too. If only life and the behavior of humans was so very, very black and white. It’s called knowing history and understanding the historical context of events because nothing “just happens” out of nowhere.
As always amazing honest journalisim. As a Canadian I appreciate your reporting on this topic.
Hear! Hear! “Oh, Canada.” TY, for say’n it loud & clear, “[Canada] *can’t run no more with that lawless crowd; while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud; But, they’ve summoned, they’ve summoned up a thundercloud. They’re going to hear from me.”
…… Indeed, “Stand Up. Stand Tall; and, Call Out the rapacious and ravaging forces coming down on communities.” Ralph Nader, “Civic Self-respect” 2025!!!
“From what I read in the reporting and in the speeches, Trump has lit the fires of passion among the Canadians. Not easy to do, given Canadians are a measured people. May they keep it burning and may it spread.” Patrick “Solidarity w/You, Always” Lawrence.
………. IMO, “We”, the people, “Second” that emotion!!! “Keep It Lit!”
“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen, *Anthem.
Trita Parsi, like too many on the Left and all Liberals, are wrong about Russia. While we can all see that Zionist Israel is blatantly aggressive towards Palestinians and desires their land, that the Americans in Iran are blatantly aggressive and desire regional dominance and control of Gulf and Iranian oil, and many other aggressions for gain, this is not the case for Russia. If effect, since 2014 Russia has been under covert attack by NATO forces. The SMO in 2022 was nothing more than resistance to blatant aggression from NATO/USA, spearheaded by fascist proxies in the Ukraine. In other words, Russia resists the same kind of aggression towards Palestinians, Iranians, and even Chinese. It is one battle.
I picked up on that as well. Too many people are still of the impression that poor little Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty as a democratic country. Washington never intended for Ukraine to be sovereign. It’s a tool to bludgeon Russia with. It’s lost half its population and is under the usual IMF debt scam. Not to mention 30% of its best agricultural land has been sold to US agrochemical companies for pennies on the dollar. Washington will wreck as many countries as it feels it has to in order to maintain its hegemony.
The imperialist/capitalist/international bankers who control most of the large corporate media outlets left out the events -the daily bombing of pro-Russian Ukrainian civilians in the Donbass Region – killing about 14,000 men, women, and children, before the complacent Russians responded to their plea to stop the slaughter by the Ukrainian Nazis, adored by the “West” because of their hatred of Russians to finally initiate the SMO.
The Palestinian Holocaust continues by the Israelis and the United Nations (a pathetic organization for allegedly stopping wars) has done nothing to stop it as the Zionists and infamous “international bankers” have honed their propaganda skills to what they are today, since the end of WWII.
thank you..I have tried to say this for years but USA propaganda is very strong
Indeed, thank you. My impression is that there is creeping insanity in Western elite, with one aspect that the reigning ideology dictates deference to USA, which was palatable before MAGA phenomenon created deference to increasingly insane Trump.
Trying to be precise: hierarchical hegemony is not rational in longer term, and it involves a group delusion, but this is a sociological phenomenon, while Trump is increasingly insane in clinical sense. His rants on nasty Canada and “renaming Ontario” lack any rational explanation, even in terms of clever electoral politics or other type of gain.
So true. The NDP, Canada’s so-called left in Canada has bought the NATO narrative on Russia too. Most of the “left” in NATO countries haven’t cottoned on the fact that we’ve been programmed for decades on anti Russian propaganda.
Good article. But in my 69 years living from coast to coast, I’ve never heard anyone say “hoose” … ever. Or “aboot” or any of the other things Americans think we say other than “eh”. But the rest of the article is bang on.
I agree. I’ve never heard either of those pronunciations either – EVER!
Carney did the right thing walking away from Trump’s belligerent “trade deal.”
But Carney’s image outside of Canada amounts in my opinion to projection reminiscent of Obama — who murdered Muammar Gaddafi, destroyed Libya, and set in motion the annihilation of the Syrian State — being handed the Nobel Peace Prize in a flurry of excitement over how smoothly he delivers a speech.
Carney standing up for Canadian sovereignty is the minimum one would expect of a Canadian prime minister. But when it comes to the sovereignty of, for example, Ukraine, Carney is fully on board with fighting the U.S.-NATO proxy war on Russia in Ukraine to the last Ukrainian.
In his widely misinterpreted January 20, 2026, Davos speech, Carney boasted: “On Ukraine, we’re a core member of the coalition of the willing and one of the largest per-capita contributors to its defence and security.” At the Economic Club of New York on May 28, 2026, Carney stated proudly: “We are leading NATO’s multinational brigade on the front lines in Latvia.”
And on May 29, 2026, Carney’s government signed an agreement “to manufacture Ukrainian drone systems in Canada for the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”.
Regarding the sovereignty of global south countries: A 2009 article on the Goldman Sachs website titled, “Goldman Sachs Expands its Footprint in Emerging Markets,” describes its activities in “emerging” global financial markets during the 1990s, years that happen to coincide with Mark Carney’s 13-year career at Goldman Sachs from 1990 to 2003, where, according to Wikipedia, his positions included “co-head of sovereign risk, executive director for emerging debt capital markets, and managing director for investment banking.”
The Goldman Sachs article celebrates neocolonial plunder under the rubric of “trade liberalization, deregulation and the privatization of state-owned enterprises, including banks and telecommunication companies”; “advising governments on privatizations and assisting corporations in raising equity and debt capital in public and private markets internationally”; and “liberalizing economic reforms and opening up financial services sectors to foreign investors.”
Finally, Carney’s predecessor Justin Trudeau survived buying a pipeline project no private corporation would touch, intervening in a corporate corruption prosecution causing public outrage, and invoking Canada’s Emergencies Act to shut down the admittedly obnoxious free speech of the 2022 Truckers’ Convoy.
But when Trudeau increased the “inclusion rate” on capital gains over $250,000 from 50% to 2/3, which would have affected 0.13% of Canadian taxpayers, he was gone in year, replaced in a palace coup by Mark Carney.
One year after that, Carney announced his “Sovereign Wealth Fund,” capitalized with $25 billion borrowed in part from the self-same 0.13% of Canadians from whom Trudeau’s capital gains tax increase would have raised $20 billion free and clear: hxxps://radiobill.ca/Content/CarneysChoice.html
Valuable and provable facts about the actual state of affairs, rather than the pro-American/Zionist/NATO version of events in the past few decades.
Excellent post, Mr. Appledorf!
There is a lot in your comment that I didn’t know. Thanks for the information. I didn’t vote Liberal in the last election (well in any election really). I like to refer to Carney as PM Goldman Sachs. You just gave more credibility to it.
People, in this 10-ring circus of a game, keep your eyes on the ball. Or you will be fooled by the diversions and the magic cape being thrown around.
Carney – previously sent out on secondment to be head of British monetary policy, run by the financial oligarchs who control the City of London, is not working for Canada’s sovereignity. He works to serve the interests of the the imperial oligarchy, As does the orange one. He has previously admitted that Canada is an economic and military vassal of the US. In fact Canada’s military defense is quietly integrated with the US, they cannot and could not refuse.
So this is IMO a pantomime battle.
What we can actually see that has happened, is that the imperial masters (who basically dont pay tax) have managed to jack up the taxes paid by ordinary Americans and Canadians. Taxes are what tarrifs are – and they are basically unavoidable for most people, as they are just baked into the cost of everything they buy. That is the outcome here.
So the imperial masters are jacking up taxes on their subjects, to fund their endless wars and to fund government payments for the increasingly expensive government bonds held by…..the imperial masters.
And somehow all the media, big and small, seem to be falling over themselves to describe this pantomime battle, as if it were real.
Amen, Smito! You said it well!!!!
Other nations see our pernicious government as it is. Why don’t we see it too and replace it?
Citro:
A short story from before the fall of the USSR:
An American on an air flight asks the Russian seated next to him, “What is the purpose of your visit to the U.S.?”
The Russian answers, “To study American propaganda”.
The American responds, “Propaganda, what propaganda?”
The Russian says, “Exactly.”
Too true! You can also replace American with Canadian. Totally programmed
All we are offered from the uniparty system is pro genocide, pro lockdown/mRNA, for profit healthcare, pro police state/ICE internment camps, pro censorship, pro huge national debt, pro aggressive/self destructive foreign policy, out of control housing/education/food costs, etc etc etc.
Because USAmericans think replacing the Trump regime with a Democrat regime will solve the problem.
replace it with what, Poilievre? …not much better than Trump