Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Carney walks away from Trump and turns his Davos speech into action

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Yeah, we're more dependent on trade with them than they are with us. But as we've seen in other types of conflicts, in asymmetric conflicts like this, the smaller party, if it's more unified, more determined, um, more, um, solidly based, um, can do a lot of damage and can, can, can stand its own against, um, a larger, less r- less solidly based, less unified adversary.

Welcome to a special Monk Dialogue. Today, Monday, we're getting together in the afternoon with our regular contributor, Global Mail columnist Andrew Coyne, to break down the weekend's big news, the trade fallout between Canada and the United States, and a war of words taking place, at least from the president's side, uh, on his Truth Social account today, Monday. Andrew, your top-line thoughts on what we're witnessing.

Well, I don't think the prime minister had any choice but to walk away. Um, we were talking about it, you and I, before we knew, before any of that happened, before we knew exactly what was in the deal, not that we know precisely what's in it even now. But I think there was mounting alarm at where the negotiations were going even before this. I mean, the, the official line from the prime minister's office is, oh, the, the Americans threw in all these last-minute demands, uh, you know, in the final written text that we hadn't anticipated. Maybe that's true. But even before some of those demands, um, some of the terms that had emerged were pretty hard to understand why we would even be entertaining this. For example, um, the Americans had agreed supposedly to reduce what were previously 50% tariffs on, I think it was, um, uh, steel, uh, to 25%. Well, 25% is not a particularly, um, um, a, a good outcome for us to be accepting. It's one thing to have the Americans putting on a 50% tariff and us protesting it, but for us to sign on and agree to 25% tariffs, basically locking those in, uh, would have been, uh, really tough to swallow. Um, but what really made an absolutely, uh, uh, intolerable outcome was the suggestion, and again, we don't know the details, but the suggestion the Americans were going to place limits on our ability to strike trade agreements with other countries or to have an independent trade policy. Now, there was an element of that in the original CUSMA agreement in 2018 that for- forbade the parties to the, to the, uh, treaty from s- striking free trade agreements with non-market economies. That was troublesome at the beginning, but you could sort of say, "Well, we don't have any intention of striking a free trade agreement with China anytime soon." Um, but if this is, as it's been presented, a more broad-ranging, uh, prohibition or limit, um, that just is utterly a non-starter. That