LILLEY: Carney changes his tune with Trump at the White House

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It started out as a meeting of the mutual admiration society and was getting tense towards the end. Prime Minister Mark Carney didn’t get Donald Trump’s Zelenskyy treatment, but as the public part of their meeting dragged on, as Trump’s rants against Canada persisted, it looked for a second like Carney was trying to interject to correct one of Trump’s many falsehoods.

“We want to make our own cars, we don’t really want cars from Canada,” Trump said after Carney had once again addressed the 51st state question and tried to steer the conversation back to trade.

Trump went on to say how he has put tariffs on Canadian cars with the hope of making them unaffordable for Americans. He said again how he didn’t want Canadian steel and didn’t want to subsidize Canada anymore – a false point that Carney appeared to want to interject on but didn’t.

After his two-minute rant against Canada, Carney was looking frustrated, and Trump thankfully called the news conference to a close and the two leaders and their teams went to lunch. Had Carney interjected to correct Trump publicly on his false claims that the Americans subsidize Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year, the Zelenskyy treatment may have come out.

As much as many Canadians, especially those who voted for Carney and the Liberals in last week’s election, may want the PM to pick a public fight with Trump, it would be bad for the Canadian economy.

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“Have you asked the president to stop calling Canada the 51st state?” Carney was asked by Postmedia’s Stephanie Taylor.

“Yes, today, exactly what you just said,” Carney responded when asked what he had specifically asked of Trump.

“Look, I don’t know, he’s the president, he’s his own person,” Carney said.

As much as Carney struck the right tone for the meeting and the moment, his demeanour and his words were a far cry from what he was saying just days ago.

“President Trump is trying to break us, so that America can own us,” Carney said repeatedly during the election campaign.

He said that the old relationship with the Americans was over. On Tuesday, he talked about how both countries succeed when they work together while praising Trump.

“Thank you for your hospitality and above all for your leadership, you’re a transformational president with a focus on the economy and a relentless focus on the American worker,” Carney said.

Flattery helps with everyone, including Donald Trump and on Tuesday in the Oval Office, Carney was laying it on thick. Gone was the elbows up rhetoric, the portrayal of the Americans as our enemies to be fought against and in was the talk of a new relationship.

In fact, the White House released a photo of the two leaders standing next to each other with thumbs up rather than elbows up.

It’s politics, it’s diplomacy, it can be messy. But if you had described what happened in Washington just two weeks ago, the Liberals would have said that is how Pierre Poilievre would have behaved in front of Trump, claiming he couldn’t stand up to the American president. Carney talked tough on the campaign trail, he has been talking tough about Donald Trump since he launched his bid for the Liberal leadership in January.

Let’s be honest though, he wasn’t talking tough in the White House.

What he sold to Canadian voters isn’t what he delivered in D.C.; whether that is acceptable to voters is something Canadians will determine during the coming weeks.