Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday Canadian and American officials are currently “negotiating terms” of a deal on tariffs a day after he met with the U.S. president to try and bring the trade war to a close — and Canada will come out ahead when the two sides come to an agreement.
Speaking in question period while facing pointed questions from the Opposition about what he accomplished out of his Oval Office sit-down with U.S. President Donald Trump, Carney said Canada already “has the best deal with the Americans” — most products are still being sold into the U.S. tariff-free despite Trump’s trade action — and “we will get an even better deal.”
“We are still negotiating further gains in major sectors,” Carney said, after he and the president had what he described as a “meeting of the minds.”
“As we speak, our team is negotiating. This is not just words. We will get a deal.”
Poilievre sees ‘weakness’ on auto tariffs, Carney says he’ll get a ‘great deal’
While the initial focus is on a deal related to the steel, aluminum and energy sectors, Carney said the two sides are “working on the modalities of an auto agreement” and some sort of solution to the punishing tariffs on the forestry sector. “We will only accept the best deal on softwood lumber,” Carney said.
Carney left Washington without a deal in hand or anything concrete to announce. Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who was also part of the White House discussions, stayed behind to hammer out the finer details of a possible agreement.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Carney “pathetically” offered up “a trillion-dollar gift” to Trump when speaking with the president Tuesday, and it was an instance of him “bowing before the president in weakness.”
That’s a reference to Carney’s commitment that the Canadian private sector will resume investing in the U.S. in earnest if the two sides can get to an agreement on Trump’s punishing tariffs.
Carney and Poilievre spar over PM’s ‘meeting of the minds’ with U.S. president
Canadian pension plans in particular hold hundreds of billions worth of American investments, including infrastructure, real estate and technology.
“We are the largest foreign investor in the United States, half a trillion in the last five years alone, probably $1 trillion in the next five years — if we get the agreement we expect to get,” Carney told the president during their meeting, a nod to Trump’s fixation on announcing instances of foreign companies making big investments in the U.S.
Poilievre said Carney sold out Canadian workers by touting possible investments like this.
“Where in his platform did he promise to give a trillion of our investment dollars to the Americans?” Poilievre said.
A seemingly exasperated Carney sighed and said: “I would like to inform the leader of the Opposition that there’s a thing called the private sector. The private sector makes decisions about investment” — a jab at Poilievre’s long parliamentary career.
The prime minister did earn accolades from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith who said she is seeing signs that Carney is speaking Trump’s “love language” by offering up possible private sector investments — and floating a revival of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project Trump supported in the past but one that was killed by his first-term successor, Joe Biden.
As CBC News first reported, Carney raised that shelved pipeline proposal, which, if it’s ever built, would run Alberta oil to the U.S. Midwest and then points further south, during his conversations with Trump.
Fast-tracking the Keystone expansion project would give the president something he has long wanted. Plus, U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, which largely process heavy crude like what’s produced in Alberta, need supplies to replace Trump-sanctioned Venezuelan oil.
Speaking at a conference on Canada-U.S. issues in Toronto, Smith said it appears Carney is developing a rapport with the president — an improvement over what she described as former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s hostile relationship with Trump that delivered little for Canada.
“If you go to the U.S. and say, ‘You should do this because it helps me or you should stop doing this because it hurts me,’ that is not his love language. His love language is, ‘Let me tell you how I can make America even greater,'” Smith said.
Trump is “a relationship guy,” Smith said, and he prefers to work with people he likes and his apparent fondness for Carney is a possible benefit to getting these irritants resolved.
“We should be cheering the prime minister on. We want him to have a good personal relationship,” she said.
Smith said Carney is “putting some credits in the bank account, which is going to get us further.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, meanwhile, said he is losing patience with the Americans.
“I’m in support of the prime minister but I think we have to be tough,” he told the same conference.
“We’re decreasing tariffs and he’s increasing tariffs. If we can’t get a deal we have to hit him back twice as hard,” he said of Trump. “We should never take a backseat to anyone.”
