Can Trump and Carney reset US-Canada relations?
May 07, 2025
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Quick Take
Ian Bremmer, political scientist and president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, shares insights on global political events.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Prime Minister Mark Carney's first visit to the White House to meet with President Donald Trump. Lots of excitement, anxiety about this meeting, this visit, and predictably, the responses on the internet are all sorts of crazy depending on what your priors are. So, if you are a MAGA type, you thought that Trump wiped the floor with Carney. And if you can't stand Trump, you're like, "Oh, what an idiot the American president was, and the Canadians did so much better." And in reality, it wasn't that exciting of a meeting, and both came away looking okay. The US-Canada relationship has been in freefall over the last three months, and that has not been fixed by a normal bilateral between leaders of the two countries.
But it has reduced cause for panic, in part because Trump stated a commitment of the United States to the basic alliance, to the security umbrella, to defending Canada as necessary, which was something he wasn't saying over the past few months with Justin Trudeau. He clearly likes Carney more than Trudeau, which is not surprising because that bar is pretty much on the floor. And also stopped with the governor speak, which is clearly disrespectful, but did push on the 51st state issue, and how much better it would be for Canada if they were actually a part of the United States, not that he intends to take it over militarily, but rather something he's going to keep talking about.
And Carney didn't interrupt Trump when he was going on and on, talking about that, but then responded with his best line of the conversation, which is, "I've spent the last couple months going around talking to the owners of Canada, meaning the voters, the citizens of Canada, and it's never, never, never going to happen." Trump says, "Never say never," and they kind of agree to disagree on something they shouldn't be talking about to begin with. But at the end of the day, not much there. The bigger problem, of course, is that there is an incredibly important trade relationship between the US and Canada. And no, it is not true that the US doesn't do much business with Canada. In fact, Canada actually buys more from the United States than any other individual country in the world does. And if you go talk to the governors, the senators, the representatives of all of the northern states that border Canada, they can tell you just how integrated those supply chains are, how essential the Canadian economy is for them.
And some of those are blue states, some of those are red states, and it don't really matter, they all care a lot about their relationship with Canada. So, it is important. But because Trump is individually taking the right to tariff from Congress, where it legally sits, and using legally contestable national emergency clauses to enforce tariffs, impose tariffs on other countries, including those that are governed by pre-existing trade relationships, like Canada, which has a robust USMCA, US-Mexico-Canada agreement, that Trump himself helped drive, negotiate, and trumpeted as a huge win at the time, but now he is singularly undermining it. And what that means is that we are very unlikely to get to a new agreed USMCA in the coming year, despite the utility of renegotiating it with the sunset clause, and instead... look, I don't think anyone's going to run away from it, I don't think it's going to break, instead, it means that every year we're going to kick it down the road and renegotiate so that you can keep it going.
And that means that the Canadians don't feel like they have a functional multilateral trade arrangement with the US and Mexico, that also means, because the US president can change it at any moment he wishes, and also that an enormous amount of time is going to be spent in those negotiations, not just now, but every year, creating more uncertainty for those that need to want to rely on the long-term stability of that trade relationship. And here is the rub, which is that the US-Canada relationship will stay important, it'll stay robust, but it will become more transactional, where it had been built on trust and shared values, and that means the Canadians will work really hard to hedge and de-risk their relations from their most important trading partner.
About 75% of Canadian trade is with the United States right now, they rely much more on the US than the Americans rely on Canada, Trump is absolutely right about that, but they now see that as a vulnerability. And for the last 40 years, the Canadians, really since '88, '89, the Canadians have focused singularly on increasing their interdependence with the United States. They built out all of this infrastructure from the provinces, not east-west, but rather north-south. If you look at the way that rail transit, and energy infrastructure, and supply chains work in Canada, it's as if these provinces were independent republics set up to do business just with the United States, not focused on what would make sense for an independent sovereign Canada over the long term, if that relationship suddenly were ruptured.
Well, that needs to change, and that's something that you're going to see the Canadians work very strongly on over the coming years. Easier for Carney to do, because his relationships internationally are much stronger than previous Canadian prime ministers, certainly generationally, if you think about the fact that he was Central Bank governor in the UK, and that one of his best international relationships is actually with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and others and others, I think you're going to see a very strong effort to work with the UK, to work with the Commonwealth, to work with the EU, and to help shift those trade flows over time to hedge further away from the US.
And the costs of that will be significant, the impact of the trade rupture in the near term will be a major recession in Canada imminently, and a mild recession in the United States imminently as well, but over the long term, my view is no one benefits from that.
So, that's the main takeaway, a little less theatric maybe than the internet, apologies for that, but it is the way I see it, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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