Elbows Down, Ankles Up!
Is Mark Carney dragging us into a swamp of despair?
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By James Pew
With the July 1 Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) review deadline just days away, Canada-U.S. trade relations have reached a critical juncture. Under Article 34.7 of CUSMA, the parties are scheduled to meet on July 1, 2026 — the sixth anniversary of its entry into force — to review the agreement and consider whether to extend it for a further 16-year term. If all three parties confirm they wish to continue, the term is extended. If not, CUSMA remains in force and enters annual rolling reviews for the remainder of its term through 2036.
It remains to be seen if it was all just negotiating tactics when, regarding Canada, Trump remarked to reporters on June 10th from the Oval Office, “...to be honest with you. We don’t need anything Canada has, we don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have, and they have to treat us better,” and then on June 17, 2026, at Paris Orly Airport, on his way back from the G7 Summit in France, “we do better without that agreement.” When asked to clarify, he said: “I would rather not have the agreement but I may sign it.” When pushed further on whether he intends to pull the U.S. out of CUSMA or leave it to be reviewed annually, he added: “I view it as possibly expiring immediately.”
The most likely cause of Trump’s flip-flopping and negative views towards Canada, in addition to his initial beef concerning the U.S. trade deficit and what he deems are unfair trading practices by Canada, has been the relentless and outright undermining and disrespect of the MAGA vision, in both rhetoric and actions, by Carney and the elite Canadian establishment (including the subordinate mainstream media). Carney was premature in his trip to China in January, which should have been deferred until after a trade arrangement was reached with the Americans. Talking to China first, and worse, committing via MOU to an escalating quota of low-tariff EVs beginning at 49,000 per year — a deal which is opposed by the three largest U.S. auto makers in Canada — for all intents and purposes, was a deliberate snub to the Americans.
Even though Canada’s economy and security has been for generations essentially underwritten by the behemoth American economic and military machine, while at the same time China has been found to be involved in all kinds of clandestine operations designed to infiltrate Canadian elections, undermine sovereignty, and coerce Chinese diaspora Canadian citizens, Carney, with infinite ingratitude, went ahead and insulted the best friends Canada ever had, and chose to cozy up with perhaps the biggest existential threat Canada has ever faced. Immediately after Carney’s January China Trip, Trump made a series of Truth Social posts, claiming that China was “taking over (Canada) the once great country.”
During the week of June 15, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly travelled to China where her four-day itinerary included visits to Chinese EV giants BYD, Chery, Geely, and Shanghai Launch Automotive Technology. Joly solicited BYD to invest in Canada, even though earlier this month the US added BYD to a list of firms with alleged Chinese military ties. Frustration levels rise substantially when one considers just how unpopular Chinese EVs are with the Americans — who have kept their tariffs on Chinese EVs at 100%. In fact, on May 27, the Democrats tabled the Protecting America from Chinese Cars Act bill which would prevent the importation of Chinese cars — directly from China or through third parties — including Chinese EVs purchased or manufactured in Canada.
As I have observed in a recent series of essays exploring the Trump administration’s transformative re-install of the American System of political economy (which is the thing responsible for dismantling the so-called rules based order), everything Carney and his Liberals have done since Trudeau junior resigned has been at odds with Trump’s MAGA “counter revolution” — which involves re-aligning and reshaping the way global politics functions. Carney has not only missed the opportunity to be an early adopter and favored strategic partner in an exciting new American-led system of global political economy based on strategic partnerships between strong sovereign nations with shared values, he has deliberately set Canada back by enraging Americans with his feeble attempts to save the old neoliberal globalist system that Trump is so successfully disrupting. Recently Carney criticized Canadians who he claimed were stuck in the past, however, what could be more antiquated in 2026 than an elitist former central banker who failed upward into a political office well beyond his competence level, who grasps so desperately at the dying remnants of free trade globalism?
From the overtly anti-Trump, but obscenely hollow “elbows up” rhetoric that energized the Liberal campaign during last years election, to Carney’s smarmy “middle powers” speech at the World Economic Forum, which signaled to globalists that Carney was the best man, the smartest one in the room apparently, to lead the new post-rules based order globalism, by deliberately opposing “hegemons,” but also, to Carney’s embrace of China (which indicates that China was not the hegemon of concern in Carney’s “middle powers” speech, but in fact, America was, as those with any sense suspected from the moment Carney uttered those ill-chosen words), demonstrated alarmingly with a memorandum of understanding which allows an escalating quota of low-tariff Chinese EV imports, that Canada approves of the espionage of the Chinese Communist Party, including their gross interference in Canada’s elections and domestic affairs.
There is perhaps one kernel of potential positive development: U.S. ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra said there’s a compelling case that “if America needs a single car coming into the United States from somewhere else in the world, the best place to get that car from is Canada.” At this point I’ll take whatever type of kernels Canada can get, while praying for a mutually beneficial trade agreement with our southern cousins which aligns Canada with the ascendent American System of political economy.
Carney doesn’t seem to care much either way. On Thursday, after being asked by reporters about Ambassador Hoekstra’s other comment that Canada and the U.S. were no where close to making a deal, Carney shrugged it off and admitted that he didn’t bring up CUSMA in the previous day’s phone call with Trump. I guess it slipped his mind. Carney is a weak resentful man, as authoritarians often are. He is too cowardly to confront Trump straight-forwardly, so instead gives speeches around the world full of passive aggressive anti-American innuendos, while sucking up pathetically whenever interacting with Trump in person. He won’t secure a good position for Canada that way. When one considers honestly the reality of Canada’s trade dependence on the only trading partner that really matters, it must be admitted that Trump is driving the bus and holding all the cards. Carney’s words and actions, his ungracious and insolent, bear-poking antics make clear he is not a serious player in the post-globalist order. This means he is not serious about Canadian prosperity. Carney is a self-described “elite,” a globalist with a post-national net-zero agenda. He is an enemy to both Canadian prosperity and sovereignty.
Stay tuned to these pages for more examination of Carney’s disastrous mismanagement of Canada. I’ll be looking at a number of major recent Carney missteps, the cost of his energy-sector sabotage, the ramming through of Bill C-22, Bill C-9 before Parliament’s summer recess, then Bill C-34 this fall, and more, demonstrating how Carney is crippling Canada’s present and future prosperity, and assaulting civil liberties, while undermining Canadian sovereignty (a longtime Liberal project) by his philosophical and ideological opposition to Trump’s re-installation of Hamiltonian principles of political economy (The American System) which heralds the death knell for the established powers of the neoliberal global elite (of whom Carney is the golden boy).
Thanks for reading. As mentioned in the piece above, this author has begun publishing a series of essays which explains Trump’s agenda for Canadians. There are three essays so far:
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Thank you for this encouraging article. If it were not for the too many deaf, dumb and blind voters, Canad would not have had two miscreant prime ministers in a row - both narcissistic self serving mean who are the cause of this country’s slow slide into failure.
IMO Carney suffers from a small man syndrome.
Bullseye, James. Perfectly observed and stated.