Trump blames Canada
And tears our closest international relationship apart.
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The 1999 film “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut” contains a rousing musical number called “Blame Canada,” in which parents of unruly children resolve to blame Canada for all their child-rearing problems.
The humor in the song derived from the fact that blaming Canada for anything seemed so absurd. They’re our kindly northern neighbor, a more polite version of ourselves! They gave us Michael J. Fox, and the Ryans Gosling and Reynolds, Bret “Hitman” Hart, and Shania Twain and Celine Dion! How could we ever be mad at them?
Today, our president is blaming Canada, in an escalating conflict driven by his most petty and vindictive impulses, doing nothing but harm to the citizenry of both countries. It’s not a complete breakup with our closest ally, but it’s drawing awfully close. And it isn’t hard to imagine it getting progressively worse as we slog through the next three years.
Last week in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a remarkable speech in which he all but declared the end of the post-war order that the United States and its allies created.
“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he said. “Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid.”
The “middle powers,” he went on, have no choice but to band together for their mutual interest, free of the delusion that they can rely on the great powers — or, more specifically, one great power. And rather than just lamenting what Donald Trump is destroying, he argued that it was always something of a lie.
“Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised,” he said. “Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.”
Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t take it well. The day after Carney’s speech, he said, “I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful — they should be grateful to the US, Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
Then Trump posted on social media that “the Board of Peace is withdrawing its invitation to you regarding Canada’s joining.” All Canadians were no doubt heartbroken.
Carney’s argument is essentially that while Canada can’t avoid living in America’s shadow, it doesn’t have to stay under our thumb. To that end, he recently traveled to China and announced a deal to allow the import of some Chinese electric vehicles at a very low tariff rate, while China will import more Canadian agricultural products. Up until now, Canada has imposed the same 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars that the US has, which it instituted at the behest of the Biden administration. But now, the inexpensive, desirable Chinese EVs that are rapidly spreading around the world will start coming to North America.
Once again, Trump was not pleased. He lashed out on Truth Social against “Governor Carney,” saying “If Canada makes a deal with China, it will immediately be hit with a 100 percent tariff against all Canadian goods and products coming into the USA, then continued to whine about Canada all weekend. There’s no way to know if Trump’s threat will come to fruition, since any tariff announcement Trump makes is usually followed by a pullback, then a renewed threat, then another pullback.
One thing’s for sure: He certainly proved Carney’s point about smaller countries not being able to rely on the US.
Even more despicably, Trump went on Fox News and belittled the contributions Canada and other NATO allies made when they came to America’s side after 9/11.
“We have never really asked anything of them,” he said. “They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan and this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, off the front lines.”
Tell that to the families of the 158 Canadian soldiers who died in Afghanistan, as did troops from the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, and many other nations that we used to consider allies.
This is all of Trump’s making
One irony of this situation is that while Carney has emerged as one of the key leaders of the Western resistance to the American president, Trump is the reason Carney is prime minister in the first place.
A year ago, then-PM Justin Trudeau had announced he would resign from his position as leader of the Liberal Party and leave office as soon as the party chose a successor. At the time, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who shares some similarities with Trump in style (including an open contempt for journalists), was leading in the polls and seemed certain to become the next prime minister amid widespread dissatisfaction with 12 years of Liberal rule. Had that happened, Poilievre would have likely become one of Trump’s staunchest international allies.
Instead, Trump kneecapped Poilievre and his party just as they were poised to take power after so long in the minority. By imposing damaging tariffs and condescending to Canada by saying it should become the “51st state,” Trump made opposition to him and the US the top issue in the spring election. Adopting the slogan “Elbows Up” — a reference to hockey legend Gordie Howe’s style of play in which he used his elbows to intimidated opponents, often smacking them in the face — the Liberals won again.
In the time since, both countries have been harmed economically by Trump’s tariffs, even if around 90 percent of the goods we import from Canada are exempt under the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. For the moment, the damage to the Canadian economy has been contained, but the EV deal shows the direction Carney wants to move: to diversify Canada’s exports beyond the United States, where the vast majority of them still go.
That won’t be easy, since trade between our countries is so enormous — in 2024, over $900 billion in goods and services passed between us (though as a result of Trump’s trade war, that figure declined significantly in 2025).
Trump’s attack on Canadian identity
Whether Trump understands it or not, his policies and rhetoric about Canada could not have been more perfectly designed to alienate Canadians and shift its politics.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how offended Canadians were by Trump’s needling talk of making Canada the 51st state. The country’s inevitably subordinate relationship to the US lies at the heart of Canadian identity — grappling with America, pushing against America, sometimes rejecting it and sometimes embracing it, all while laboring to define Canadian-ness as something unique and worthy of pride.
As a Canadian friend told me last weekend, “Americans come here and say ‘You’re just like us!’, and they think they’re giving us a compliment,” when in fact it’s anything but. By talking about America absorbing Canada as though it would not just be easy but something Canadians should obviously want, Trump struck at what is most important to the Canadian soul. And he did it with a condescending smirk.
Not only that, he’s still doing it. As he does so often, Trump takes what was implicit, makes it explicit, then turns it into something vulgar. There’s no talk about a mutually beneficial relationship between friends and allies for him; Canada, he says, is not even a vassal state. Its very existence is dependent on the US, which for Trump means it is dependent on him personally. “Canada lives because of the United States,” he says, like a domestic abuser sneering You’re nothing without me.
As always, his lackeys are sent out to echo his contempt. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick accused Carney of displaying “an arrogant kind of thought.” Even worse, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seemed to encourage the right-wing separatist movement in Alberta, which is basically the Texas of Canada, while on far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec’s podcast.
A few days later, the Financial Times reported that a key Alberta secessionist group has had three separate meetings with State Department officials in Washington. The good news is that if anything, that will make a potential referendum in Alberta on secession even less popular, but it’s still a message that parts of Canada should be shorn off to join the US.
Then, last Sunday, Bessent accused Carney of “trying to virtue signal to his globalist friends at Davos.” And what virtue was it that Bessent thinks Carney was insincerely signaling to the Je— pardon, to the “globalists”? A belief in the values the Western alliance always said it stood for, like democracy and human rights? Independence from the mad king in the White House?
So when Carney implies that Canada just can’t trust America anymore, you can’t blame him. And it isn’t just Trump that Canada (and our other allies) can’t trust. It’s us, the American people. Trump may have low approval ratings now, but his approval was even lower after he tried to overthrow the government on January 6, and less than four years later we returned him to office. We could elect JD Vance or some other Republican who wants to continue Trump’s policies in 2028, or 2032. No one can have faith that if they just hunker down for the next three years, everything will go back to normal.
So Canada is pulling away, and our European allies may too. The tricky part is figuring out what comes next. Whatever it is, it almost certainly won’t be better for America than the relationships we had until a year ago. But it might be better for everyone else.
That’s it for this week
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“They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan and this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, off the front lines.”
I cannot believe that our men and women in uniform, high and low rank, are so in love with a Commander-in-Chief, who avoided military draft at all cost, called fallen soldiers losers and has no gram of respect for Veterans. But then, they are recruiting from prisons now, just as Putin did to fill the ranks of the hundreds-of-thousands of dead men he sends into the war with Ukraine.
Thanks for the Really good reporting on this. Sad/horrible but good. Messieur Carney please invite us to join you!