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Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump speak at the G7 working luncheon, June 16.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
They were the kind of words a parent might say to convince a child scrunching his nose at his birthday present that it’s really what he wanted: “I thought you’d actually like that.”
In this case, the Prime Minister of Canada was speaking to the President of the United States. Mark Carney was trying to convince Donald Trump that a deal allowing up to 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into Canada each year is not an agreement to open the doors wide to Beijing, because it contains a “hard cap” on the number.
Mr. Carney said he thought the U.S. President would like that. It’s noteworthy that Mr. Trump responded saying that he did, actually, “like that.”
The little snippet of conversation captured on a hot mic at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, didn’t tell us everything about the Carney-Trump relationship, for sure. But it told us a few things.
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The first is that the relationship isn’t hostile. It’s an exchange. Mr. Trump didn’t gainsay Mr. Carney.
The second is that Mr. Carney is working to clear away underbrush that might get in the way of United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement trade negotiations.
The brief exchange was just that, but at least it showed Mr. Carney could talk to Mr. Trump about something that the U.S. sees as an irritant and tamp down the irritation. Mr. Trump didn’t push back; he acquiesced.
Mr. Carney was still the supplicant, and Mr. Trump is famously mercurial, so he still might decide later that he doesn’t like the Chinese EV deal at all.
But after Mr. Trump showed pique at Mr. Carney’s news-making Davos speech, and has repeated that the U.S. doesn’t need anything from Canada, the moment suggested the leader-to-leader lines of communication are still open.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that the U.S. would do better without the USMCA on trade and that he would prefer not to have a new one, but added that he was open to doing it.
Reuters
Mr. Carney told reporters later that he had seven or eight “good discussions” with Mr. Trump on a wide range of topics including Iran, artificial intelligence and the President’s birthday.
Of course, that hot-mic glimpse into the leaders’ interaction didn’t show us how Mr. Trump responds if and when Mr. Carney brings up sticking points such as the U.S. refusal to open the new Gordie Howe bridge from Windsor, Ont., to Detroit, Mich.
And Mr. Carney didn’t have a formal one-on-one meeting with Mr. Trump at the summit. He noted that Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc and chief negotiator Janice Charette met U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the sidelines.
Still, Mr. Carney’s comments to Mr. Trump fit a recent pattern. There’s been a Canadian effort to clear away potential impediments to trade negotiations.
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The deal Mr. Carney made on Chinese EVs in January was limited, but in Republican Washington, it has sometimes been inflated into a broad Canadian shift to open markets to China. Mr. Greer called it “problematic” and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested it might imperil trade talks with the United States. Mr. Carney was trying to dispel that notion.
Over all, Mr. Carney’s tone on trade relations has shifted, as we saw last month when he told an audience of New York investors that a strong Canada can help make America great again. The Prime Minister is trying to clear the tracks to make a deal possible.
And on policy matters, Mr. Carney’s government has lately been trying to speak Mr. Trump’s language, too.
Two weeks ago, the government ordered the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to review its plan to triple the sums that foreign streaming services such as Netflix would be required to direct to Canadian content. Instead, the government itself will inject $600-million.
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Last week, Mr. Carney’s government introduced legislation to tighten up its regime to prevent imports of goods made with forced labour. This was after Mr. Greer’s office announced it is proposing tariffs on 60 economies deemed too lax in enforcing such restrictions.
And Canada’s fentanyl czar, Kevin Brosseau – whose position was created when Mr. Trump imposed his first set of tariffs, citing a false claim that Canada was a major source of fentanyl – announced he would travel to Washington this week.
In the broad sense, there have been a lot of recent efforts to talk about Canadian trade in terms Mr. Trump will like.
That’s despite the fact that for the past eight months, there have been outward signs that Mr. Trump was ready to talk about closing a deal. Yet, that little hot-mic moment suggested that at least Mr. Carney can still talk to him about the things that might get in the way.
