Prime Minister Mark Carney’s initial statement and subsequent presser after the trade negotiations with the US broke down touched on something that the government has up until this point been avoiding, which is that any deal signed by this White House won’t exactly be reliable. 

In his late night statement alerting Canadians to the fact that trade negotiations had been called off, the prime minister addressed the unreliability of any deal with the US head on: “Last minute changes in the US proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal,” he wrote. At the presser the next day, the prime minister was more pointed, saying plainly, “We recognized that sometimes, its signature was written in pencil.” 

Responding to a question from a journalist asking who the US could make a deal with if not Canada, the PM went on to point out that the Trump administration is violating the deal we already have with them: “It’s called CUSMA. We have side letters that clarify behaviour in steel and aluminum in autos, all of those are being violated, day in, day out.”

In other words, Carney is finally saying the quiet part out loud, which is that any deals signed with this current administration will ultimately be unreliable because they have no qualms about violating them, while Canada has been nothing other than a stable and reliable trading........

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