EDITORIAL: Carney moves the goalposts on tariffs

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Prime Minister Mark Carney finally admitted on Tuesday that any trade deal Canada signs with U.S. President Donald Trump is likely to include new American tariffs on Canadian goods.

“There is not much evidence at this moment of agreements, arrangements or negotiations with the Americans for any country, any jurisdiction, to have a tariff-free deal,” Carney said.

This should surprise no one, save for those who naively believed Liberal rhetoric on the issue up to now.

So much for CNN’s Christiane Amanpour describing Carney as the “Trump whisperer” in an interview with the prime minister last month.

So much for Kirsten Hillman — Canada’s ambassador to Washington and the federal government’s chief negotiator — asserting Canada was holding out for a deal with no Trump tariffs as late as two weeks ago.

This, while according to the Globe and Mail, the Carney government was surveying Canadian business leaders on what level of Trump tariffs they could live with.

So much for the Liberals’ “elbows up” rhetoric during the election that boosted them into power.

Now Carney is managing — read, lowering — expectations about what Canada can achieve in the ongoing negotiations with Trump because, as he put it: “We need to recognize that the commercial landscape globally has changed. It’s changed in a fundamental manner.”

Moving the goalposts, Carney said a successful deal will be one in which Canada protects its auto, steel, aluminum and copper industries along with other key sectors of the economy.

Carney’s new position raises the question of how Canada will respond to Trump’s tariffs, since the PM has delayed many retaliatory tariffs — which raise the price of American goods purchased by Canadians — pending the outcome of trade negotiations with the U.S. before Canada’s new deadline of Aug. 1.

The ground has shifted since mid-June, when, at the G7 meeting in Kananaskis, Alta., which Carney chaired, there was optimistic political speculation that Canada and the U.S. would be able to achieve a deal within a 30-day deadline by July 21.

To be fair, Trump launched his tariff war against us — not the reverse — and it may be that nothing Canada could have done would have resulted in a deal with no tariffs, despite the Carney government’s claim one was possible.

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