The Canadians are exceedingly angry. I realise this can sometimes be difficult for foreigners to deduce, given our national struggle to express the full range of human emotion outside ice hockey riots. However, let me assure you that the prime minister Canadians saw take the stage on Saturday morning in the wake of the collapse in trade negotiations with the US was a Mark Carney practically vibrating with fury.

“You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” he said, in a rare press conference that was as candid and clear as he ever tends to be. “That’s fine … We’ve got the reserves, we’ve got the resilience, we’ve got the plan, we’ve got the focus. We’re gonna respond, we’re going to focus on what we can control and what we’re going to build.”

Canada walked out of negotiations, with a deal apparently on the verge of completion, mere hours before 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian exports were due to kick in.

Dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs, scheduled to take effect on 8 September, will follow in turn. In a statement, Carney said that last-minute demands from the US were “uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” The US denied this, insisting that it was Canadians who made last-minute demands.

In subsequent interviews with Bloomberg, Canadian ambassador to the US Mark Wiseman said there was no specific item that put a deal out of reach; rather, it was a range of issues in which the text that ultimately wound up on the page – or, at least the interpretation of that text – did not align with what the Canadians thought they had agreed to. The most contentious issues appear to be related to tariffs on autos, digital and cultural policy, and the US claiming the right to veto Canada’s........

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