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LILLEY: Trump administration trashes Canada on trade as Carney calls investment summit

Howard Lutnick says Carney’s strategy of trying to wait out the Americans until the Trump administration is weaker is a bad policy for Canada

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Mark Carney may want to invite the biggest investors in the world to Toronto later this year but the message in Washington is that Canada sucks.

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At the Semafor World Economy Forum in the American capital, a meeting that attracted a global who’s who of the business and political world, a top Trump administration official trashed Carney and Canada on Friday.

LILLEY: Trump administration trashes Canada on trade as Carney calls investment summit Back to video

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, was asked about the future of the Canada-United States-Mexico-Agreement or CUSMA and the President’s position.

“I think he thinks it’s a bad deal,” Lutnick said, pointing out there are parts of trade with Canada that are vital to the United States, like energy, but other parts they don’t like.

“I think it needs to be reimagined and needs to be readdressed,” he said. “There’s plenty of good in it but there’s a huge amount of bad in it and needs to be reconsidered for benefit of America.”

Trump’s trade guy attacks Canadian strategy

Lutnick went on to say that Canada’s strategy of trying to wait out the Americans until the Trump administration is weaker is a bad policy for Canada – though he used colourful language to say so.

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“That is like the worst strategy I’ve ever heard. They suck,” Lutnick said.

Trying to wait out the Trump administration is clearly one of the tactics that the Carney government has been using. The hope contained within that strategy is that the Republicans will suffer a humiliating defeat in the mid-terms and will need to walk back policies like tariffs on allies such as Canada.

It’s a risky strategy, just like it was risky to put all of Canada’s diplomatic faith in the idea that the Democrats would defeat Trump and the Republicans in the last presidential election, but that is what we did.

Canada’s embassy made no outreach to Republicans to try and make the case for free trade with Canada until it was too late, now we are once again banking on a hope that Democrats will win the mid-terms in November.

As Prime Minister Carney likes to say, hope is not a strategy – but it appears to be all we have at the moment.

American voters volatile

Donald Trump’s approval rating is fairly low at the moment and in a generic ballot question the Democrats are leading the Republican by more than five percentage points. That said, when asked to rate both parties, neither is popular and the Democrats are less popular than the Republicans, according to RealClearPolling.com.

All of this to say, relying on the American voters to return a result the Carney government in Ottawa wants is a horrible strategy. We aren’t currently part of any significant talks in Washington – unlike Mexico, which appears to be eating our lunch.

This week, Finnish President Alexander Stubb was visiting Ottawa. Stubb is close to Mark Carney but also describes himself as the most pro-American president in Europe, showing that you don’t have to push the rupture message of Carney to have independent thought.

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Carney calls investment summit

On Friday morning, CBC reported that Carney was inviting 100 of the world’s biggest investors to Toronto for a summit in September. It comes on the heels of an RBC report that showed over the period from 2015-2024 more than $1 trillion in investment left Canada.

The report described it as “the largest capital exodus in Canadian history” and said that for every $1 of foreign direct investment that entered Canada, $2 exited the country.

The message that Carney and the business leaders he travels the world with have been getting as they hit up places like India, China, Indonesia, Europe and the Middle East is that Canada is more interesting as a place to invest if we have American market access.

Without access to the American market, our allure as a place to set up shop dries up.

That is why Carney should be spending more time in Washington, D.C. trying to secure a deal with Trump. It not only secures our existing trade, it opens up many more opportunities.

Sadly, Carney knows that fighting with Washington is good politics even if it is bad economics. He appears to be more concerned with the politics at the moment.

blilley@postmedia.com

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