KINSELLA: Does Mark Carney truly believe a deal is possible with Donald Trump?

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The letter reads like it was dictated by a drunk at the end of the bar who won’t leave when it’s closing time.

Donald Trump’s letter to Mark Carney, that is.

Run-on sentences, ungrammatical, improper punctuation, irregular capitalization, lousy syntax, you name it: the Mango Mussolini’s letter to our Prime Minister is guaranteed to give your favourite English teacher a stroke. It’s that bad.

But it’s consistent. It’s predictable, too.

“Starting August 1, 2025,” writes Trump, “we will charge Canada a Tariff of 35 per cent on Canadian products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs…If for any reason you decide to raise your Tariffs, then, whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the 35% that we charge.”

Here we go again.

In mob parlance, Trump’s letter is what is called a shakedown: pay the protection money, pay the pizzo, or else. You’ve got a nice little country, Mark-o. It’d be a shame if something bad happened to it, etc.

As objectionable as that is, it’s still a case of Trump being Trump. In fairness to the man, he doesn’t believe in free trade; he campaigned against free trade. But he’s certainly willing to use our desire for free trade to ruin us.

As some may recall, Trump pledged to gut free trade in his inauguration speech. Ten days later, he declared a fentanyl “national emergency” and his intention to impose 25% tariffs on Canada for everything we sell to the U.S.

Trump proclaimed his fraudulent “national emergency” for one reason and one reason only: to get himself out of the terms of the USMCA trade deal. You know, the deal that he himself signed, with his ubiquitous Sharpie.

And that’s how it’s been, for months. Whenever we think we have achieved a relative degree of sanity, whenever we think the worst is over, Trump threatens more tariffs. In the past seven months, it has happened many times. Supply management, our banking system, defence spending, and on and on: Trump will concoct just about any pretext to break the deal. And us.

But – still – it’s Trump being Trump. It’s what, and who, he is. What of Mark Carney?

In particular: why has the Carney government devoted so much time and resources to negotiating a new trade deal with the U.S. President who has violated the current one – which, again, he himself signed?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. Why does Team Carney now expect Donald Trump to be anything other than Donald Trump? Why are they negotiating a new deal when it, too, will almost certainly be broken?

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There are three possible explanations. All are unconvincing.

One, Carney is genuinely trying to forge a new trade deal to prevent Trump from imposing tariffs. The Prime Minister, alone in the world, has persuaded himself that Trump follows the rules, and will heretofore keep his word. Calling that naive is an understatement – “delusional” would be more accurate.

Two, Carney is playing a Machiavellian game and trying to run out the clock. He’s trying to keep Trump preoccupied until, say, the midterms, when Trump may lose his dominance in Congress. The flaw in that strategy, again, is the naive belief that Trump will pay attention to anything a Democrat-dominated Congress has to say about trade. (It also neglects to acknowledge that Democrats have historically been more protectionist than Republicans.)

The third possibility is as thin as the first two: Carney regards anything – even the smallest concession – as a major victory. If he can carve out protections for some sector of the Canadian economy, goes this theory, it’ll be worth all the effort.

The problem, there, is that such an approach will create big problems for Carney back at home. It is trading one sector’s well-being for the collapse of another. Not smart politics.

So what, then, is Mark Carney up to? Does he really, truly believe a deal is possible with Donald Trump?

If so, Donald Trump clearly isn’t the only guy sitting at the bar at closing time.