President Donald Trump greets Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the West Wing entrance of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
President Donald Trump has developed a heatedrivalry with his counterpart across the border, Prime Minister Mark Carney. Yet according to a new report, Carney is taking America's unexpected turn against Canada with cool calculation — allowing the northern democracy to implement policies it had been longing to do anyway.
"Canada’s last breakup, with Great Britain, took roughly 100 years of painstaking and piecemeal constitutional reform to accomplish," reported The New Republic's John Last on Sunday. "This time, things are moving a little faster. Since President Donald Trump launched his trade war against his closest neighbor shortly after taking office a second time—leveling tariffs of up to 50 percent on hundreds of goods—relations have been icy, and keep getting icier."
Last proceeded to describe how Carney, who previously worked as a highly successful banker, has utilized his skills and connections to appeal to modern European countries. From the European Union to individual nations like the United Kingdom and France, Canada has long identified more closely with the culture and politics across the pond, in particular their more robust social safety nets and outspoken advocacy for diversity.
As characterized by Last, now Carney is urging European nations to develop trade relationships with the world's second largest nation by area, one with vast untapped natural resources in oil, agriculture and rare minerals. The situation is cast one in which other countries could be vastly enriched because they more closely align Canada's center-left political values than the increasingly far right United States.
"The answer to that question is hard to discern while Trump continues blustering from the White House," Last wrote. "Canadians, Carney likely may have an inclination to lean away from America anyway—from its increasingly crass politics, debased culture, and unrestrained greed. Canadians may be more American than they like to admit, but they are not as American as America is now. Another few years of accelerating decay may simply be too much to come back from. For now, at least, Canada is exploring its options—and it doesn’t seem inclined to wait around."
He concluded, "Jilted lovers seldom do."
Speaking with AlterNet in August, Dr. Richard D. Wolff — professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — contextualized Canada's shifting of economic and political relationships away from America as existing within a large pattern.
Our government is busy strong-arming people around the world in every way that it can, militarily, economically, politically, and discovering time after time to their amazement, if you take them seriously, that the folks are going to resist," Wolff said. "And that's what's going to happen."
Linking the US-Canada trade war and the US-Iran war, Wolff added that "Israel and the United States thought they could bomb Iran June 2025, and that was a 12-day war because they couldn't get them to bend over and surrender. So they went to work, tried it again February 28th of this year. And they're not doing it. And so now you discover, gee, the people of Canada being threatened in this way and that way by the tariffs are not bending and are putting pressure on their leaders to find a way other than capitulation."
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