The bits are starting to fly off...
Kirk LaPointe: Mark Carney must re-corral the provinces before Washington does it for him
Prime minister needs to re-create the "Team Canada" discipline of 2017-18 and narrow Canada's list of priorities
We remember the warmth in the room as the federation walked down the aisle last spring. It was love on the rebound: Ottawa and the premiers, bruised by their partners in trade, vowing to stand together for the fights ahead. And for a stretch, they did—showing up for one another, shedding bad habits, sketching big plans for the family.
Those were the days.
The impressively intense honeymoon has ended. The unlikely pair is bickering over how to support each other, how to find the middle ground to deal with the irritating neighbour, how to allocate their money, live up to responsibilities, divide their labour, and determine what they want for the future. At this rate, any time now they’ll be sleeping in separate quarters.
They can’t say they weren’t warned.
It has become clear this month that, in the frail and fraught marriage of the federation, Prime Minister Mark Carney and Team Canada are experiencing the logical phase that comes with an unlikely pairing—where reality sets in, flaws enlarge, impatience and irritability overtake the earlier grace, and they revert into going their own ways.
A couple's counsellor would say there is trouble that might be intractable.
Carney’s trade negotiations with the Trump administration offer little signs of reconciling the differences. He is being told there will be no full-fledged trade deal, but a bunch of customized carve-outs that extract, well, who knows what—because several months in now, the talks have no end in sight, nor even the slightest definition as to what they will entail, impose, or excavate when it comes to our living standards.
Province by province, we are witnessing a public rupture of what had been a promising federal-provincial tandem.
