Canada has become an outlier in the trade war with the United States, being the only country to walk away from a trade deal when the terms didn’t feel right.
At home, that decision has fuelled a swell of patriotism — with many Canadians getting “elbows up” behind the government’s stance.
But what comes after the defiance?
What happens when tariffs start hitting paycheques, grocery bills and family finances — and when Canada’s search for new trading partners brings China further into the picture?
As Prime Minister Mark Carney tries to cushion the blow, he’s pitching Canada to global business leaders and Europe at the first Canada Investment Summit.
Guest host Catherine Cullen joins Washington correspondents Katie Simpson and Paul Hunter to look at what comes next, and the risks Carney is taking.
We’ve included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full podcast discussion here.
Paul Hunter: Polls [in] the last month or so say, ‘Yeah, Canada is behind Carney’s approach on this.’ But this is before the real impact of the tariffs kick in. What if that starts to drop?
Catherine Cullen: In many ways, it is Mark Carney’s biggest political asset — this huge swell of patriotism.
But the question to me over and over again during Carney’s time in office is: what happens when the rubber hits the road?
We talked about this investment forum — what if it leads to a significant amount of greater Chinese investment in Canada?
What if it leads to a significant amount of greater American investment in Canada? There’s certainly American folks around the table.
What about the tariffs dragging on, and what that does in people’s lives? It’s one thing to say, ‘Elbows up, I’m with the prime minister on this,’ and we have to acknowledge, part of this is the work Carney did in how he framed why the talks broke down.
He gave Canadians an explanation that this was about fundamental issues of sovereignty that Canadians have been willing to get behind.
But do you feel differently about it if your spouse loses their job because of this?
Do you feel differently about it when [in] already such difficult times — price of groceries and whatnot — things get that much more expensive as this drags on, and some of that initial patriotic adrenaline settles down?
Paul Hunter: It’s also fair to say that what is underlying so much of this, is Donald Trump, slash the Trump administration’s desire to seek pre-eminence.
This is about — I don’t want to say global domination — but it is certainly about hemispheric domination, and the way to get to that through these trade deals that have been happening with all these other countries — and the one that they would like to get with Canada — if you look in the fine print of all of them, it’s about restricting trade with third countries, which is code for China.
I think it’s fair to say that the real target in all of this is China. The U.S. has all these other deals with 19 countries now, [and] none have walked away from the table the way Canada has.
What do we know about the degree of success that other countries have had with the U.S. on trade lately?
Katie Simpson: I think we need to [ask] ‘What does success mean?’
That is the underlying part of that question there, because in the start of the Trump administration this second term, when President Trump, when his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, when his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, were all getting out there, and they were talking about, ‘We’re going to have 90 deals in 90 days, and we are just going to have world leaders coming into the White House like a revolving door.’
They were setting these agendas with tariffs, and all of these changes they were going to do, and after all of that initial push and talk, we’re just shy of two dozen deals, roughly, that have been reached.
