Conrad Black: Carney is fearmongering his way into the PMO (2025)

As was widely predicted, including in this column, U.S. President Donald Trump’s initial brinkmanship remarks about Canada and tariffs were his usual shock and awe technique for commencing negotiations. At his “Liberation Day” ceremony on the White House lawn on Wednesday, almost no new tariffs were proposed for Canada and his only direct references to Canada were about our exorbitant and antediluvian supply management measures that cushion the incomes of a large number of Canada’s farmers with artificially inflated prices. This has been a particular bugbear of People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier and a ludicrous anomaly that we should not have needed the president of the United States to highlight for us. The best way to deal with farm income insufficiencies is direct income supplements to the farmers, not forcing the entire population to overpay for what they put on their breakfast table.

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The tariff on Canadian automobiles will be substantially mitigated by the portions of them that originate in the United States. We certainly have a full arsenal of replies to the tariffs on steel, aluminum, oil and potash. We should offer a reciprocal abolition of all tariffs between the U.S. and Canada, and if that is not acceptable, we should ignore U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s advice not to retaliate. Canada is a fair trading country and should not turn the other cheek. Trump has legitimate complaints against many other countries and is right to update tariff policy, but Trump’s complaints against Canada are bunk. He has said he will negotiate and it will not be difficult to reach a reasonable compromise.

The magnification of this issue by the Liberals and their Ruritanian charade of presenting a Churchillian Mark Carney shaking his fist across the Great Lakes and promising to fight on the beaches and in the hills and streets and never to surrender to the Americans is now fully exposed as the scam it was to try to get out from under the catastrophic Liberal record of the last 10 years. Whatever happens in the negotiations, in camera between trade specialists, the present take-away is that Canada has much better and less disturbed access to the world’s greatest market than almost any other country.

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Trump’s comments about Canada becoming the 51st American state were always nonsense designed to stir the pot and alarm the other side in preparation for serious negotiations. Such comments were in any case invited by former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s feeble statement that the Canadian economy would “collapse” if subjected to 25 per cent American tariffs. That (false) preemptive surrender and Canada’s anemic free-loading in NATO, to the point that our fine but pathetically small and under-equipped Armed Forces could now probably be routed by the Palm Beach Police Department, invited such disparaging reflections. But they did not justify Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s anti-American snideries and his childish disparagement of Trump as “orange man.” Fortunately, Trump rose above such churlishness and has professed complete equanimity about dealing with either party in the government of this country. Our election campaign was launched on a phony issue, and the president of the U.S. has assisted us in conducting a serious election campaign. Let’s do that.

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Natural resources constitute the overwhelming majority of our exports to the U.S., which illustrates the absurdity of Carney’s apparent desire to leave them in the ground and strangle the petroleum industry to reduce Canada’s use of carbon, while it continues to rise elsewhere and continues to expose climate change alarm as the hysterical lunacy that most of it is. Carney represents a continuation of the policies of the Trudeau government with which he has been intimately associated for many years.

Now that the Trump bugbear has had a silver stake driven through it and all the Liberal party’s fatuous pyrotechnics have become, in Watergatese, “inoperative,” we may dare to hope the country will hold the Liberals to account for these 10 years of failure. Despite the fact that the United States is just now rebounding from the most incompetent presidency since before the Civil War, the average American has 50 per cent more disposable income than the average Canadian. Canada has fallen steadily down the table of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita. We are mocked and reviled throughout the world as the most witlessly woke of all countries, whose thrice chosen prime minister thought the word “mankind” was sexist, promoted the fraud, abetted by the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, that Canada had been guilty of attempted genocide against Indigenous people and was complicit in the attempted extermination of the English language in Quebec.

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As Canada’s competitiveness and prestige in the world have been immolated, Trudeau has passed the torch to someone who has never before faced an election and is messianically committed to turning our pockets inside out to achieve net zero carbon emissions. The crowning imposture in this election campaign to date, exceeding even the Liberal charade of defending us from the American ogre, is Mark Carney’s record as a central banker.

The latest Liberal television advertisement I have seen announced that Mark Carney had brought Britain through the Brexit crisis. In fact, he was the crisis: Carney was the chief inventor of what was known as ”Operation Fear,” the attempt to terrorize Britain into remaining in Europe and effectively scrapping the parliamentary sovereignty that had evolved over 800 years in favour of Brussels’ authoritarian regulatory despotism of high tax dirigisme, in which Britain’s relations with the United States and the Commonwealth would be subsumed entirely into the blunderbuss anti-Anglo-Saxon foreign policy of the European Union. The rule and high court of Parliament would yield to the authoritarian socialists of Davos. Mark Carney is a self-proclaimed “elitist” and says that is “exactly what we need.” Britain rejected (and almost tarred and feathered) him. He made a mockery of the loudly touted policy of the independent central bank by parroting the hysteria of Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne. Cameron promised “full-on treaty change” from Europe and brought back less from Brussels than Neville Chamberlain got in Munich. Having failed in Britain, Mark Carney is the second team trying again, in the second division; as a political leader, he is both a novice and a charlatan.

National Post

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