In early October, Premier Doug Ford sat and stared at the giant floating head of Howard Lutnick as the U.S. commerce secretary explained that Canada won’t be allowed to keep its automotive manufacturing industry.
Lutnick was addressing the crowd virtually, and Doug Ford was sitting in the front row. “America is first, and Canada can be second,” Lutnick declared.
“Car assembly is going to be in America and there is nothing Canada can do about it,” Lutnick told the summit, according to sources at the off-the-record meet who spoke to my colleagues Tonda MacCharles and Robert Benzie. “The question is, ‘what is Canada going to do instead?’” The premier stewed.
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Earlier that day, on Oct. 8, Prime Minister Mark Carney was readying to leave Washington, D.C.
Where Carney had once promised a full, comprehensive deal with America, that possibility had gone out the window. It had become clear, as far back as the chaotic G7 summit in Kananaskis in June, that Trump could not conceive of an actual free trade deal with Canada — he wanted an agreement stuffed with tariffs and compensation for all the harms America supposedly suffered at our hands.
So, now, the prime minister was shuttling back and forth to America, negotiating side deals, trying to lessen the pain of America’s punitive tariffs on our steel, lumber and automotive industries. Even that was a slog: A source in the prime minister’s office says they were only about 60 per cent of the way toward a deal. It wasn’t clear that they would ever solve the other 40 per cent. Carney had been pitching areas of co-operation — a pledge to build Trump’s beloved Golden Dome defence project, and a plan to revive the defunct Keystone XL project — but that didn’t seem to be enough.
Both Carney en route back to Ottawa and Ford in that Toronto conference room were coming to realize the same thing: Trump doesn’t want a deal, he wants subservience. The president was earnest when he said “we don’t need them to make our cars … we don’t need their lumber … we don’t need their oil and gas.”
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