The most interesting aspect of Mark Carney’s speech on 22 August, which he delivered with dour resolve having just recalled his trade negotiators back to Ottawa, was not the promise to match Trump’s new tariffs on Canadian products with his own reciprocal tariffs. It was that he said this was a “question of sovereignty”. And that Canadian sovereignty necessitated that he did not capitulate and instead met this attack with a suite of actions that hurt the Americans in retaliation.
The backdrop to Carney’s speech was that a deal to end the trade war, which had been under negotiation for the past year, had fallen apart last week at the final hour. Trump has since suggested that he will rename Lake Ontario as Lake America and JD Vance has called Canada a “state”, implying it isn’t a real country. American demands that were unacceptable to Ottawa included a request for streaming services to be allowed to shunt locally produced and French-speaking shows down the algorithm, and that America had a say over Canada’s trade deals with other countries.
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