For Canadians, It Is Forever 2025

The following story is co-published with Luke Savage’s Substack .

In the early months of 2025, Canadian politics looked to be in moment of unprecedented flux . Facing unprovoked belligerence from their southern neighbor, the longstanding continental trade consensus (and much else) was on the verge of collapse. Canada was going to have to radically rethink its relationship with the United States and, with it, the very foundations of its economy and its place in the world. As a sudden wave of civic nationalism swept across the country, even Canada’s more cautious and conservative politicians seemed to take note, contemplating a suite of retaliatory measures that would have previously been unthinkable.

The chief political beneficiary of this moment was Prime Minister Mark Carney, who in his election night address warned that “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. … President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us.” In terms of what needed to come next, Carney sounded unequivocal: “Our old relationship with the United States, a relationship based on steadily increasing integration, is over. … We have to look out for ourselves and above all we have to take care of each other.”

In the election’s aftermath, Carney quickly shifted gears, trading the language of defiance for the rhetoric of conciliation in an effort to secure a new trade deal with the White House. Carney’s skills as a negotiator had been central to his campaign pitch — though, importantly, the exact nature of the deal he was ultimately seeking was never really specified.

Regardless, the past 18 months have seen Carney’s government adopt an astonishingly deferential posture toward the Trump administration. As I wrote earlier this summer for the Star:

Since last year’s election, however, the Carney government has repeatedly assumed a far more deferential and obsequious posture in its dealings with Washington. In trade negotiations, it capitulated to U.S. tech giants by abandoning plans for a Digital Services Tax, dropped retaliatory tariffs and introduced draconian border legislation that has been justly criticized by human rights groups. More worryingly, the prime minister’s efforts at cajoling the Trump White House have seen him go beyond these kinds of policy concessions and align quite explicitly with some of its most abhorrent behaviour.

Earlier this year, Carney offered swift backing for the illegal U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (even as that war’s earliest casualties included nearly 200 children killed in the bombing of a school.) He has similarly backed the administration’s Orwellian “Board of Peace” plans in Gaza, indicated a willingness to sign on to its proposed “Golden Dome” defence initiative, refrained from criticizing Marco Rubio’s attempts to dismantle the International Criminal Court through coercion and sought to reassure American investors by pledging to help “Make America Great Again.” Last fall, the government also invited Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts — a key Trump ally and architect of the far-right blueprint Project 2025 — to attend a closed-door meeting with members of cabinet (the visit was ultimately cancelled, almost certainly thanks to the ensuing backlash.)

This approach was clearly a far cry from the days of Elbows Up, but its defenders argued it was the necessary path to any new trade pact.

For my part, I don’t believe any deal negotiated with the Trump White House was ever going to be one worth signing. But, putting the desirability of any such deal aside for a moment, the recent collapse of trade talks suggests it was never really in the cards to begin with. A would-be negotiating partner who openly muses about annexing you was never going to deal in good faith and offering concessions of any kind to Donald Trump was only ever going to result in him demanding more.

This, in fact, is exactly what happened. And, as Alan Beattie notes in the Financial Times, Trump’s penchant for making outrageous demands very likely saved Canada from accepting a bad deal that Mark Carney would have tried to spin as a victory.

So, here we are. Eighteen months on from the dizzying days of Elbows Up and right back where we were in the first place. The trade war is back on, counter-tariffs are on the way, Donald Trump has reverted to 51st state talk and is trying to rename things , and Doug Ford is busy performing the kinds of empty gestures that shouldn’t get him a bump in the polls but probably will.

This outcome wasn’t inevitable in January 2025, but the conservative direction taken by Canada’s Liberal government after last year’s election made it very likely. Under different leadership, Canada could have seized the moment to reverse the decades-long experiment that brought us here in the first place.

As I wrote for The Walrus in February 2025:

In the wake of Trump’s threats, there’s a much more ambitious vision of nation building to be pursued and plenty of older questions that are worth asking again.

Do Canadians really want their country’s economic destiny so closely tied to the boardrooms of American multinationals and the shifting whims of Washington? Do they really want the power of their elected governments to protect Canadian workers and industries to be constrained by anti-democratic trade agreements? Do they want to live in a permanently stratified society or in one bound together by an ethic of solidarity, community, and social co-operation?

Substantively speaking, the only satisfactory answers to any of these questions will all involve rebuilding the capacity of the democratic state and wielding that capacity to intervene in the public interest. In the short term, this means we should be looking beyond retaliatory tariffs and consumer boycotts to more ambitious industrial policies that create good jobs and high-quality manufacturing. Instead of building pipelines and financing privately owned infrastructure, we should be exploring green options like the creation of an east–west electricity grid and fully national, fully public high-speed rail that will both fight climate change and consolidate our energy independence around clean and renewable resources.

Beyond those things, however, Canadians should be looking at the current trade war as an opportunity to think more profoundly about the nature of our institutions and the structure of our society. In this spirit, a renewed sense of national solidarity in the face of external threats can be made concrete through policies that begin to reverse the long march of social and economic inequality. The tens of billions some hope to see invested in new military equipment — at least some of which is ironically bound to end up in the hands of American arms contractors — could instead be used to end food insecurity, wipe out homelessness, and lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.

Since I wrote those words, the spirit of democratic ambition they describe has been largely absent from the Carney government’s agenda. Over the past year and a half, the crisis prompted by Trump’s trade war has been transformed into an excuse for lacerating public sector cuts and the embrace of military Keynesianism. The promise of renewed “economic sovereignty,” meanwhile, is now synonymous with the steamrolling of environmental regulations and the creation of a more favorable investment climate; billions in handouts to profitable corporations with progressively coded phrases like “sovereign wealth fund” and “industrial strategy.”

As a final indignity, the very government elected on the heels of Elbows Up quite literally bent over backward to secure a new trade agreement with the Trump White House and was only pulled back from the brink by the president’s impulsiveness. Eighteen months later, things are right back where they were.

A long and circuitous voyage, it would seem, only to reach a very familiar shore.

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