The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Is Canada prepared for the long fight?

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Rudyard and Andrew unpack a consequential week in the Canada-U.S. trade war, from Trump’s increasingly erratic and provocative behaviour—including the absurd renaming of Lake Ontario—to his apparent preference for perpetual conflict over a lasting trade peace. Andrew believes Canada needs to diversify trade and reduce its vulnerability to U.S. pressure and manipulation. Will Trump’s approach alienate his Republican base ahead of the midterms? How are Canadian politicians capitalizing on the moment? And how much economic pain is Canada prepared to absorb? Andrew is optimistic that Canada is ready to hunker down for a long fight, potentially longer than Americans are prepared for.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There's limits to what we can do to them, but what we can do is to make it clear, you're not going to win this fight. You're not going to be able to coerce us into submission. And not only you're not going to be able to do that, but we're going to inflict costs on you. They're going to are going to accumulate over time. And at the end of the day, you're not going to have achieved your goal and you're going to have done so at considerable cost to yourself. So is it really worth it? Welcome to today, Friday, the 28th of August and our week.

Monk Dialogue with Globe and Mail journalist Andrew Coyne. Andrew, great to be in conversation with you. Good to be with you. So much to break down, a busy consequential week on Canada and America's budding trade war. But let's start with the theater of the absurd. The president has now renamed Lake Ontario, Lake America. To take this just seriously for a moment, not in the context of what it does. the renaming, but more about what it says about this president and this administration.

Andrew, what's going on here? He's unhinged. This is, he thinks this is a funny stunt. His followers, no doubt, or his people around him, no doubt have told him a great job. Yeah, go for it, D.T. Who was it? Bergam, his interior secretary, raced online to say, We're on it, Chief.

So nobody, and people said this before he returned to power, that this would be the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2. Trump 1, somebody would have prevented this. For the first administration, somebody would have said, oh, yeah, I'll get right on that, Chief, and it would have gone into the circular file. Now he's got all people around him, and nobody tells him, this is really stupid,

you're going to look like an idiot. Everybody just, you know, says, Yes, sir, yes, sir. You see that whenever they have these open cabinet meetings where all they do is they just spend the whole time praising him like something out of North Korea. These North Korean comparisons are becoming tired because it's supposed to suggest an exaggeration of the reality. But in fact, it's more or less the same. So, yeah, he proposes this crazy idea just on the fly to say that it's unpresidential. It's just, I mean, everything he does is unpresidential.

And it's not going to change what anybody calls the lake. But, you know, while he's on it, we might as well call it Lake Trump or call, you know, call America, Trump land. And, and, you know, the thing is once he'll start it as a joke, but five minutes later, he'll decide this is, I really want to do this. Just as an aside, I mean, what Google, the big global tech company renamed, at least for American, users, the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. It seems to be the, if precedent has followed, Andrew, while this is stupid and while it's silly and while it's embarrassing for the president, the reality is that 34 million Americans may be waking up in the days to come, going on Google Maps and seeing Lake America. It just, it's this reality-bending nature of this

presidency because it's not just him, Andrew. It's the fact that Google probably will change the name of Lake Ontario for its American users. It's real in a way. The craziness is real. Yeah, because the craziness is reflected, not just in the courtiers around him, but in the sycophants in the larger society. And the biggest sycophants as we've seen have been the people with the most power, the heads of major corporations, the heads of universities, the heads of law. firms have been the first to bend the knee because they've got the most to lose because he's been quite clear that he will punish economically or otherwise anybody who in who's in that kind of exposed position it's harder for him in a way to go after ordinary journalists or you know regular

folk but he will certainly go after people who whose power and wealth makes them exposed and vulnerable yeah just to spend a moment more on this because again I know it can seem absurd. Why should we even discuss it? I guess it's what it might reveal about the state of the trade talks, at least from the American side. Is this distraction? Is it desperation? Is it a tell of sorts, Andrew, that they're engaging in this kind of vaudeville act now on a really serious trade war that's broken out with Canada? Again, I think we have to be careful not to ascribe clever tactics to Trump. It's possible that this is a distraction from a distraction from a distraction.

I mean, people said, you know, that the Iran war was a distraction from Epstein, and then the trade war with Canada is a distraction from Iran. And now this is a distraction from the trade war. And maybe that's true, but it's also, it seems to me equally plausible, that he's just that nutty and he just reels from one thing to the next. Certainly, you know, when people around him are asked off the record, what's behind this obsession with Canada? What's the big picture here about whether in terms of trade barriers

or 51st state under this nonsense? And nobody can really explain it. You know, there was a very good piece in Vox the other day, just where they asked people, Basically, the general thing is it's just this thing he has. And so that is now governing the trade policy of the largest power in the world is this thing that the president has about Canada. And as a journalist, you'd like it to be more complicated. You'd like to be able to enlighten people on the many layers of subterfusion strategy that are involved.

in this or that thing. It makes us feel important, makes us feel useful. Sometimes these things boil down to, there's a crazy guy in the White House and nobody can really explain it. Yeah, it also, I think, gives the illusion of control when maybe things are out of control.

Andrew, what did we learn from the various leaks, comments, publicly stated, and otherwise from Canadian officials, and American officials this week about, let's focus first on the breakup of talks last Friday. We're seeing competing storylines here. The Americans, I think, contending that it was Canada who walked away, that Canada was putting forward last minute demands. Obviously, the story is 180 degrees different in terms of what came out of the Prime Minister's speech

last Friday and now from his cabinet. colleagues like Dominic LeBlanc, again, reasserting last-minute, unacceptable American demands. Well, first thing, you know, Mark Carney's word is not absolutely unimpeachable, as we know. He gave a very, let's say, imperfect description of what went on with the Gordy Howe Bridge talks. But I'll take his word a thousand times over before I'll take anybody in the Trump administration's word. So just as a preface, they're just, they've just utterly disqualified themselves through thousands, not one or two data points, but through thousands of data points, it's clear that you cannot trust anything that comes out of the Trump White House, point one. Point two is, to the extent that they've commented on this, the differences to me seem more nuanced than real. For the most part, I think for the most part, the interviews with Jameson Greer, et cetera, suggests that the basic points that are the,

that people have been talking about, whether it's the auto tariffs and whether trucks would be included, whether it's some provision to place restraints on our ability to pursue an independent trade policy. I'm not seeing a lot of conflict in the details, in the substance of it. I'm seeing differences of emphasis. For example, the French language thing, again, the prime minister's original comments may have seemed to suggest that there was something to do with bilingualism or thing. It seems pretty clear that it's more to do with content requirements of, you know, discoverability of particularly French language conduct or particularly important in Quebec.

I don't think in the rest of Canada, it's that's really a hill to die on. But because of Quebec's particular situation and the particular potency of the cultural industries there, that's a huge thing. So it amounts to being something about the French language, but it's not a direct thing on bilingualism. So my point being, I think for the most part, the two sides, as I read them, are more or less confirming the kinds of issues that they stuck over.

Who said what at the last minute? That to me is something that you could look at the same set of facts and each side could have their own interpretation of it. You know, if your argument at the last minute, it's very easy to have your own view of who brought this up or who emphasized this. Because again, some of this has to do with, we had something down in broad brush terms of what this is about. And then when we got into the final details of what did this phrase mean, it turns out we had different interpretations. It's very easy for either side to blame the other side for that kind of thing. So I don't see a large gulf, frankly,

between what we're hearing from the two sides. So let's explore that a bit further. It does sound, as you say, like from Jameson Greer, even from a true social post by the president, that this language issue seemingly could be resolved. I think it sounds like the Americans, again, we're just reading into this, but it sounds like that's not a hill

that the Americans would die on, you know, demanding discoverability of all content, not preferential to French language content in Quebec. So what do you think, Andrew really are the real remaining sticking points? We, for instance, haven't heard anything from the administration on Carney's other big contention in his speech last Friday, which was a demand that the Americans were making and effectively to harmonize our agreements with other countries vis-a-vis trade. arrangements with American quotas and tariffs in effect creating a kind of hemispheric or North American approach standardization maybe that's

explicitly targeting China so what do you what do you make of those those two items so that that one is very live I think I think it's very important to the Americans and it really depends on the shape of it in terms of how acceptable it would be to Canada So we agreed even in the 2018 renegotiation of NAFTA that gave us Kuzma. We agreed that we, that to language that would prohibit any of the parties from signing a free trade deal with a non-market economy. Or if you did, it would be grounds for the others to pull out. I wasn't crazy about even that provision.

I'm not eager to strike a free trade deal with China any time soon. But I thought that was quite a concession even to give up the principle of it. But you could live with it because you're not about to sign a free trade treaty with China. From what one understands, and there was some good reporting in the New York Times, for example, on this, this was, went way beyond China. This had to do with external trade policy to third countries and would essentially allow the Americans to dictate the level of our tariffs and would prohibit us from dropping tariffs below that level.

So even with countries that we had a free trade treaty with, if the Americans increased their tariff level, we would supposedly have to do the same, we would have to do the same. That's clearly way beyond just China or free trade treaties with non-market economies. So if that reporting is correct, it was clearly intolerable,

But of a piece with American ambitions generally, they've been making similar demands of other countries, but they've particularly, in view of their sort of goals of hemispheric dominance, quote-unquote, as expressed in their national security strategy, this is very important to them. And it's equally important to us, obviously, to be able to trade freely with other countries, particularly because, and this is where these things are very hard to reconcile,

our ambition at this point, and I think this crosses all party lines, is to diversify our trade away from the United States to make ourselves less dependent on them and therefore less vulnerable to manipulation, since it's very clear that this administration, at least, wants to weaponize that dependence to badger us into submission on a whole range of fronts. And equally clearly, if that is their source of leverage, then the Trump administration, is going to be very unwilling to see us diversifying our trade. So these two things really meet on that clause in the supposed, you know, nascent agreement that we want to get out from under the American's thumb

and they want to keep us there. So I don't see how that is easily reconciled. I don't, you know, we've talked about this before. I don't think the American's goal here is to get to a deal. I think their goal is to keep using tariffs and the threat of, tariffs as weapons against us. So I think we're fools if we think we can just make some tidy package of concessions of things that we were going to give up anyway or things that don't hurt that much. You know, I had a little discussion with your colleague, Sean Speer, online,

because Sean was saying, and it's not an entirely implausible argument, that, well, look, these weren't great these concessions we made on the on the auto tariffs. But if they buy us a trade piece and tariff-free access for the rest of the economy, well, then it's a price worth paying. And I just think the premise there, I'm sorry to, I suppose I should wait until Sean has a chance to counter, but I just think that presumes something that isn't there, which is, if we make this deal, we'll get trade peace. I don't think we're going to get trade peace from this administration. Thank you for listening to the first half of our Monk, dialogue with Andrew Coyne to get access to the full episode right now. Consider becoming a monk

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