The Decibel - What the Carney–Trump meeting signals about Canada–U.S. relations

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Prime Minister Mark Carney met with U.S. President Donald Trump face-to-face in Washington, D.C. for the first time on Tuesday. Tensions between the two leaders’ nations are at a historic high: a trade war, escalating tariffs and threats against Canada’s sovereignty have all been major issues since Trump’s re-election. For many Canadians, the central question in the recent federal election was how the next prime minister would handle U.S. aggression. Carney is now facing that reality.Doug Saunders, The Globe’s international affairs columnist, joins The Decibel to analyze the Carney-Trump meeting and what it signals about the Canada–U.S. relationship now.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail] 

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney went to the White House to meet with President Trump. It's a great honour to have Prime Minister Mark Carney with us. As you know, just a few days ago, he won a very big election in Canada. The meeting comes after months of back and forth, on again, off again tariffs, and Trump threatening to make Canada the 51st state. It was the first time the two leaders met since Carney became prime minister. Thank you for your hospitality and above all for your leadership. After the meeting in the Oval Office the two leaders held a working lunch. There were no changes to tariff or trade policies from the meetings.

Later in the afternoon, Carney spoke to the press. We had what I would describe as wide-ranging and, as I said a moment ago, very constructive discussions. We agreed to have further conversations in the coming weeks and we are looking forward to meeting in person at the G7 Summit in Cananascus in Alberta. So today, we're talking to Doug Saunders. He's an international affairs columnist for The Globe. Doug will help us analyze this first official meeting between Prime Minister Carney and President Trump, and what it signals about where the relationship between the two countries goes from here. I'm Maynika Raman-Welms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Doug, thanks so much for being here. A real pleasure. So Doug, we're talking Tuesday afternoon. Carney's press conference just finished. And earlier today, we watched this meeting between Prime Minister Carney and President Trump in the Oval Office. How would you say this meeting went? I think it achieved the bare minimum of what Prime Minister Mark Carney would have hoped from it.

Let me put it this way. He began his press conference with a subtle quote of Winston Churchill. He said, today marked the end of the beginning. And of course, Churchill said that in 1942 when things were going very badly in World War II and it wasn't at all clear that Hitler was going to lose. And Churchill said, this isn't the end. This isn't the beginning of the end.

But it might be the end of the beginning, i.e. maybe there's hope. And I think Carney deliberately used that line to suggest, okay, this isn't gonna resolve anything. We're still being economically punished by this, let's say, mercurial president, but maybe I put a token down that can start us on the path to getting out of this in some way.

Interesting. And we are gonna talk a little bit more about kind of, you know, what this meeting achieved or didn't achieve. But I just want to ask you generally about how the two men interacted, like their body language, the power dynamics there. What was your impression of this relationship? So Carney did not do what President Macron of France did, which is to put his hands all over the president and have a, you know, a touchy feely bromance type of relationship, which I think Macron

can get away with because Macron does not give anything up or he's not seeking anything from Trump. He's not trying to get out of tariffs or anything like that. On the other hand, he didn't get himself into a position where he was going to be belittled and humiliated by the president like Zelensky from Ukraine was. Carney managed to go in and say the things that Canadian voters expected him to say because he had won an election based on the idea that he would be tougher on Trump than the other guy.

And he was able to clearly say Canada is not for sale. As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. We're sitting in one right now, Buckingham Palace, that you visited as well. And having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign last several months, it's not for sale, won't be for sale ever.

But the opportunity is in the partnership. Donald Trump didn't exactly say, yeah, I agree with you completely to that. He did say, never say never. But in a way that doesn't really matter because the important thing was that Carney said that and he seemed to say it persuasively. He also suggested not necessarily that tariffs be ended immediately. He knew that wasn't going to happen, but that the president could be persuaded to see all of the tariff stuff happening under the rubric of NAFTA and its replacement. So as far as the performative rhetoric

of the Oval Office meeting, it went just fine. He didn't have to do what Justin Trudeau did eight years ago in his first meeting with Donald Trump, which was to win the handshake. Oh, yeah, we talked about this a lot at the time, didn't we? That was the big issue. And in fact, Trudeau's people spent a long time studying how Donald Trump shook hands

with people, how he was able to belittle a lot of leaders by yanking them in during the handshake and making them look weak. And Justin Trudeau, who's a more physical sort of person, probably put an emphasis on that. And the stakes were lower then. Mr. Trump was not threatening Canada's sovereignty or economically punishing us in a way that would devastate our economy. There was nothing this time about winning a handshake or anything like that.

The stakes are much higher. And I think Mark Carney needed to look like he was serious, needed to look like he was standing up for Canada, and that he wasn't going to just give in to Trump. Did he win anything? No, not really. And he acknowledged that later.

But he did the minimum necessary. OK, so to continue on from what you're saying here, Doug, what was Carney's main goal going into this meeting? Did he achieve that, then? I would imagine Mark Carney's only really serious goal was to declare that Canada's not for sale, to declare that the tariffs are unnecessary and that Canada is doing the things that Trump expected, that we are being good faith players, in other words,

that we were responding to Donald Trump's tariff threats and tariff imposition with what Donald Trump thinks we should be doing and to not appear subservient to him. I really think that was all he expected to get out of that and that's what he got out of it. He was able to say publicly that we've beefed up border security and all that stuff, but he was also able to get in little phrases saying that he realized that that is actually a fictional problem.

He said, as far as the fentanyl issue, he said, even though it's tiny, we've reduced it to 10% of what it was or something like that. It seems like you're kind of saying, you know, he was able to balance, you know, standing up to Trump while also maybe not insulting him or not offending him in some way then. I should stress that he accomplished this only for the duration of the Oval Office meeting and what he was able to say after the lunch. And I stress this because we know both from Donald Trump's first term and from other meetings with world leaders

that Donald Trump has had in recent months that even if you feel like you've won the meeting, there is no guarantee that any of the commitments made by the president or the friendly tone expressed by the president will last longer than a few weeks. I mean, I point to Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, who had a really good meeting with Donald Trump in late February at the Oval Office. So this is a letter from His Majesty the King.

It's an invitation for a second state visit. This is really special. This has never happened before. This is unprecedented. In which the president seemed to agree to removing tariffs on Britain and having a comprehensive security and trade deal, much like Mark Carney was apparently discussing over lunch. But months later, Britain has terrible tariffs imposed on it by the United States, worse than the US is imposing on the European Union. And JD Vance, the vice president, has stuck his nose into this and is saying there will be no free trade with Britain until Britain gets rid of legislation designed to protect gays from discrimination and

gender minorities from discrimination, which I don't think any British government would do. So there are a few things that can trip up this. First of all, Donald Trump doesn't seem to commit to anything formally. Even if he does commit to them, he doesn't stick to his commitment for any amount of time after these meetings. There are a lot of other people in the room, the guys on the couch across from the president and the visitor in the Oval Office like JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who

have their own interests and tend to like to impede the president's agendas by inserting their own sometimes more extreme ideas. Let me ask you about that because this is an interesting point that you're bringing up because yes, it is Trump and Carney, but then on the side as well in the Oval Office, you've got Vice President J.D. Vance, as you said, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, also Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce. What kind of impact could they actually have on, you know, potential deals or this relationship moving forward?

Well, all of them have said things at various times that are more pessimistic about the U.S.-Canadian relationship than even Donald Trump has said. Trump doesn't really seem to have a plan or anything in particular he wants from Canada. He likes the effect of saying certain things. Howard Lutnick appears to be firmly of the belief that Canada shouldn't have a trade relationship with the United States. He said repeatedly that the US trade deficit with Canada means that Canada is, quote, feeding on the United States. Now, of course, a trade deficit means the US is buying more of our stuff than we are buying of their stuff.

And the more stuff that the US is buying from Canada is petroleum and fertilizer and feed stocks and so on. So, I mean, you could say the US is net feeding on Canada in that regard. And Trump likes to use the phrase, you know, a subsidy, but really, as you're saying, this is a trade deficit. It's really what I'm pointing to. Trade deficit, which means that they're getting cheap stuff and we're getting paid for that

stuff. So, I mean, are you subsidizing your local supermarket every time you go grocery shopping? And this sort of illiterate understanding of trade relations comes to the president via a circle of people around him who have very bad faith ideas about how Canada should be. So I worry about the prospects of fixing this tariff problem anytime soon. I'm willing to believe that Prime Minister Carney can cause changes in the imposition of tariffs, but I don't think he's going to eliminate all of them.

And I think it's going to be a tumultuous ride. We'll be back in a minute. So Doug, during this meeting in the Oval Office, Trump mentioned that he didn't have a good relationship with our former prime minister, Justin Trudeau. He also alluded to not having a good relationship with former Deputy Prime Minister, Christia Freeland. I won't say this about Mark, but I didn't like his predecessor. I didn't like a person that worked. She was terrible, actually. She was a terrible person.

And she really hurt that deal very badly because she tried to take advantage of the deal and she didn't get away with it. You know what I'm talking about. badly because she tried to take advantage of the deal and she didn't get away with it. You know what I'm talking about. She did much of the negotiation, of course, around the USMCA, the new NAFTA deal. We now see a friendlier Trump, it seems, next to Carney. So how much of his animosity towards Canada was really quite personal? Donald Trump at first had a good relationship with Justin Trudeau, at least performatively. And substantively, you could say in the sense that he didn't touch aspects of the relationship

other than trashing all of the multilateral organizations that Canada is also members of. He seems to have decided at some point, even in the last year, that he didn't like Prime Minister Trudeau when Justin Trudeau was Prime Minister and that he would apply a humiliating nickname to him, which is Donald Trump's way of dealing with lots of different people, including friends and people in his own administration. Of course calling him governor, yes, of the 51st state. Calling him the governor of the 51st state. The character aspects of this have a lot to do

with Donald Trump's main career throughout his life, which was reality television, and his like of a certain type of manly man, you could say. I mean, we've watched Christia Freeland's dealings with the United States when she was foreign minister and trade minister before that. And she was quite effective in negotiating the replacement for NAFTA and things like that.

And what I can say is that Donald Trump reserved special animosity for figures in his first term, regardless of their ideology. I mean, the conservatives who ran Britain and Germany were singled out for a special humiliation and attacks, I think largely because they were women. I mean, Angela Merkel and Theresa May got particularly nasty treatment from Donald Trump

and their countries did as a result. I really do think because they were women. The rhetoric about Christa Freeland in that sense is similar. It's a really interesting point to think about. How would you say that Carney actually handled all this talk of the 51st state? I think Prime Minister Carney realized an important thing about President Trump's language of taking over Canada, which

is that it's not part of a plan. It's not part of a plot. It's not part of an agenda by Donald Trump or anyone in his circle. They don't have some plan to take over Canada because they want its mineral wealth. They actually have better access to its mineral and petroleum wealth now than they would if they controlled the country.

They don't have a plan because Donald Trump wants the United States to be the geographically biggest country in the world in any serious way. And in a way, that makes things more difficult for a Canadian leader, because if there were a plan, if there were a plot or an agenda or something like that, then you study it, you look at what their goals are and you negotiate against that. Right.

You have a whole committee on the Trump plan to take over Canada and you strategize around that. But as the second you start to study that you realize there is no plan, there could never be any plan. Nobody takes it seriously. It's a thing he likes to say. And it's a thing he says in order to humiliate Canada and Canadians and to maybe in his mind, gain a stronger negotiating position.

And that makes it harder to deal with. It means that you just have to fight off the rhetoric and say Canada is not for sale. On the other hand, I think there's a recognition by this government that it really alarms Canadians and that every time you see President Trump or go near him, you need to say that the country is not for sale and those sorts of things and that it is combined with with genuine tariff imposition against Canada that is extremely damaging to us. So that is a tough balance to strike is to realize there's no real substantive policy way to fight this sovereignty threat because it's not a plan and it's only just language, but it needs to be fought because it's language of the most frightening and damaging sort. And you said you have to strike the right balance there then if you're representing Canada.

So did Carney get that balance right today, do you think? Today he did on that particular front of the sovereignty threat. I think that's the most you can do is be seen as being the guy who tells the president that your country's not for sale. If it ever came to anything more than that, then we'd be having very, very different conversations, and it wouldn't be a face-to-face meeting in the Oval Office.

But I think to his credit, he recognized it for what it was and called it out for that. We've kind of mentioned this idea about trade deals a little bit, Doug, but let's look at this directly now. Because during the meeting, there was talk of renegotiating the USMCA agreement. This is the new NAFTA. But everything seems to be pretty vague and high level

at this point. We didn't get any real details, right? What should we expect on this front? Oh, I don't think we should expect anything. Because Donald Trump both seemed to agree to the idea that tariff talks should be within the rubric of renegotiating USMCA and Prime Minister Carney suggested that there would be need to be changes to USMCA. But then again, Trump also said maybe we don't need USMCA anymore. Maybe we don't need

a comprehensive trade and investment agreement with Canada. Did he mean we can do it piecemeal? Did he mean we should return to the 1970s when there was tariffs all over things? Nobody really knows. I think that President Trump has the idea, and this is another part of why he seemed to have it in for Christian Freeland, he has the idea that he canceled NAFTA and then Canada negotiated a deal that actually was better for Canada than NAFTA had been, which in some regards is actually true. It was quite a good negotiating act by a number of Canadians led by then Minister Freeland, does he want to avoid striking at renegotiating a deal yet again?

I mean, he's not a very good negotiator, you know, for a guy who wrote a book called art of the deal, he tends to make deals without much research and without a plan B or anything like that. And, and he tends to take what he's, what he's offered, if it seems superficially to be good for him.

Anything that comes to mind when you, when you say something like that? I mean, I take it right back to his book, the art of the deal. The guy who wrote that book became a multimillionaire because his contract for it gave him 50% of the revenues from the book throughout history, which is like five times what

ghost writers of major books normally get. And that's because Donald Trump didn't make a very good deal. He didn't know anything about book deals and that sort of thing. And I started thinking that almost four decades since then, he's not gotten better at that. He's a guy who makes deals, but the history of

them, they don't tend to be very good. Lots of people voted for him because he has this image from reality TV about being a great deal maker, but particularly on trade deals, he doesn't understand how trade works. So Mark Carney in his press conference said that he had told Donald Trump that he needed to change how he was terrifying the auto industry because he needed to understand that the US auto industry is more competitive if it uses Canadian made cars, parts made by Canadian auto

parts companies, and steel from Canadian steel mills because he needs to understand it as a matter of the US auto industry being competitive against Asia and not the US auto industry being competitive against Asia, and not the US auto industry being competitive against the own components of the US auto industry that are located in Canada and Mexico. That could be an effective rhetorical strategy to say that you need us to help you win this competitive battle versus Asia.

Well, you know, from what you're saying here, Doug, of course, yeah, this does bring up the fact, course that you know these tariffs are a very real threat to a lot of people's livelihoods and to our economy. Do you think the way that Carney handled these conversations and handled Trump do you think this is going to be seen as satisfactory to Canadians? For the moment I think so. I think a lot of people who voted in the election wanted somebody who's going to come out the gate challenging Donald Trump's sovereignty threats

and trying to get rid of the tariff threat. And I think he did as much as he could in a single meeting today in that direction. The more difficult part, as Prime Minister Carney himself suggested later in the day, is going to come after this and following up on it. Just very lastly here, Doug, we mentioned the previous meetings that Trump has had with Ukrainian President Zelensky

and Kirsten Starmor. Other world leaders may have been watching this meeting on Tuesday between Trump and Carney and how that all went down. What do you think that they might take away from it? One lesson that I think other world leaders will pick up on is don't say much. Mark Carney didn't utter that many words in the Oval Office. He got out the line that he wanted to say about Canada not being for sale in a couple

other small lines. Donald Trump does most of the talking in these things. And he went off about a supposed peace deal with the Houthis and all sorts of things that were irrelevant to the topic at hand. And Carney was self-disciplined enough not to get into arguments with him after he said Canada is not for sale and the president said, never say never, not to follow up by trying to challenge that. Sometimes there is a very fine line between trying to kowtow to the president or butter up the president and being graceful and polite. But I think unlike some other leaders who've been in the Oval Office, I think he

walked the line fairly carefully. The need to have this meeting in general is a bizarre historical exception. I think a generation from now, we'll look back at this parade of world leaders sitting down beside President Trump in the Oval Office with sketchy looking men on the couch across from them and having to genuflect to him or get in a humiliating argument with him or something like that in order to achieve just sort of

a status quo maintenance level of personal recognition as being a very weird time in world history and one that amounted to nothing in the end, but that forced a lot of leaders of a lot of countries into a very humiliating position. So within that very narrow historical perspective, I think Mark Carney will be remembered only as far as first meetings go as one who got off okay. I think that's a good place to leave it. Doug, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you.

That was Doug Saunders, an international affairs columnist for The Globe. That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our intern is Kelsey Howlett. Our associate producer is Aja Souter. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham.

David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Matt Frayner is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you tomorrow.