And anything that is not a good deal for Canada is a bad deal. No reasonable astute person could expect that someone with no business acumen, no worldly and/or business experience and no documented noteworthy skill set except being a “pit bull” in the Canadian Federal Government.
I’ve never followed politics anywhere and specifically never here in Canada having been totally consumed with becoming successful as an uneducated entrepreneur running all over the globe selling my unique strategic planning services.
But I would like to know who the highly educated people that set up our governance of our democracy because to me, it is literally upside down. Donald Trump has fantasized about taking over Canada for decades in a similar fashion to his buddy and pen pal Putin in Russia.
In 1994 when NAFTA was signed, the assumption was simple. The United States was the engine and Canada and Mexico were the components to that engine. Washington set the terms, always demanding preferred pricing well below the going international rates and Canada adjusted to those terms. And the relationship, no matter whatever friction continued on that foundation for over three decades. That foundation is now gone and the power architecture of North American trade has shifted in a way that this July 1st CUSMA review is about to make it impossible to ignore.
Thanks exclusively to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s literal genius coupled with his world-class negotiating skills Canada is arriving at the most important North American trade negotiation in history and for the first time in history, again thanks exclusively to Prime Minister Carney and his team Canada is going into this negotiation with more leverage than any Canadian government has ever possessed.
What Prime Minister Carney has done has literally changed the math and when you change the math you change the negotiations entirely. You just have to go back to February 1st, 2025, when Trump signed three executive orders imposing 25% tariffs on Canadian goods entering the United States. His justification for doing so was introduced with a lie. He falsely alleged a fentinel emergency to enable his lawyers to unethically but legally exploit existing laws. The data exposed this clearly as a lie but in America, lying is obviously acceptable. In Canada we are old world I guess, old enough to still value and expect honesty, ethics and integrity in all matters. This is what we called “snake oil salesmanship” back in the 70’s.
At the moment Trump signed those executive orders, roughly 75% of all Canadian exports went to the United States. That shows an historic Canadian error handed from government to various governments, leading all our highly educated elected politicians to build in clear observable common sense flawed logic. Doing this constructed a dependency, and dependencies have historically, consistently lead to exploitation. But they don’t teach this kind of thing in our universities which follows what I think is another flawed logic that supports if people get a university education they are smart. My thinking has always been that educated stupid is still stupid and I for one had genuine difficulty understanding having a stand in preschool teacher become Prime Minister.
Finally and thankfully that type of flawed logic (a biased party popularity contest for the Prime Minister job that requires serious negotiating skills on critical matters to a nation. It just has never made any sense to me) ended with Canadians electing Mark Carney to serve as our Prime Minister.
Not only did America lie about fentinel they lied about tariffs to their own people convincing them that Canada would pay the tariffs just like they said the Mexican would pay for the wall!
The Trump strategy was to apply enough cost to Canadian exports create enough pain in Canadian industries, make the price of resistance high enough that we would calculate as every previous Canadian government had calculated, that the American market was just too important, too central and too structurally necessary to our economic survival to rise losing access to it, so America figured they would charge an admission fee for access to their markets.
Our auto industry and workers had jobs because American assembly lines needed Canadian parts. Canadian energy producers had American refineries that ran on our heavy crude oil for them to refine, our farmers had markets because American consumers were buying our agricultural products every day. Three hundred and fifty million people is what a resource heavy country like our needed.
Trump and his trade officials looked at the numbers and saw a country that had no real choices. No exists, no alternatives credible enough to matter, no diversification paths to follow, that could move fast enough to change the calculus before the economic pressure did its job. They were wrong and this points to a fundamental flaw in Washington’s reading of reality.
You see, Canada already had preferential trade access to 51 countries covering nearly two thirds of global GDP thanks to the comprehensive economic and trade agreement with the European Union and the trans-Pacific partnership spanning 11 Pacific economies bilateral agreements with the United Kingdom, with South-Korea, with Chile, with a dozen other markets thanks to Prime Minister Carney’s “globetrotting” as Mr. Poilievre has repeatedly inaccurately alleged.
Trump’s tariffs did not weaken our resolve to diviersify. They financed it and justified it politically. They gave Prime Minister Carney the exact argument he needed to do what Canadian economists had been saying for years but what no previous government had the political cover or nerve to attempt.
Canada’s merchandise exports to non-American markets were up 17% year-over-year in the 12 months to January 2026. Not 3%, not 7%, 17%! In a single year while simultaneously managing a 10% decline in exports to America. That simultaneous movement, exports to America falling, exports to everyone else rising by 17% is the mathematical signature of a successful strategic pivot introduced by Prime Minister Carney and his team.
The Globe & Mail put a dollar figure on it. Canadian businesses tapping into 27 new trading partners recovered nearly 11 billion dollars of the $18.5 billion in trade that the United States tariffs had displace. 11 billion recovered in 12 months through new markets that most Canadian exporters had barely touched two years earlier. The speed of that rebound is what surprises analysts most when studying it because the conventional model of trade diversification assumes it takes years to build the commercial relationships , the logistics infrastructure, the buyer networks and the regulatory familiarity that allow meaningful export volumes to flow to new destination. Prime Minister Carney had compressed that timeline dramatically.
The destinations within that 17% growth shows Prime Minister Carney’s the full strategic story . . . . Singapore, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Brazil Australia, Italy. These countries had always been right there, but it took American belligerence and intellectually flawed tariff strategy to lead Prime Minister Carney to open those doors.
Getween March and May of 2025, Canada’s gold exports to the United Kingdom rose 473% in value and 312% in volume compared to the same period the year prior. The UK surpassed China to become Canada’s second largest export destination. That is not a marginal adjustment to a trade portfolio. That is a structural realignment of Canada’s most important bilateral relationships happening at a speed that would have been considered impossible before the disruption that caused it. Thank you Prime Minister Carney!
But the export numbers are only half of the shift that has changed the CUSMA math. The investment numbers are the other half and they are in some ways more significant because they represent not just what Canada has already accomplished but what Canada’s economic trajectory looks like going forward. Canada attracted $97 billion! That number comes from Statistics Canada and from Canada’s spring economic update so you can count on them. And it reflects a dynamic that the Trump trade strategy not only failed to predict but actually created!
Let’s be frank here. Canada has the resources (lithium, cobalt, nickel, rate earth elements that the clean energy transition requires in quantities and qualities that very few countries can match. We have rule of law, democratic governance, and the regulatory predictability that long term capital requires, and it has 15 trade agreement giving investors access to markets across Europe, the Asia-Pacific and Lantin America from a single base of operation. The $97 billion investment figure is not Canada being lucky! It is Canada being positioned at exactly the intersection of resources stability and market access that global capital was urgently looking for when Washington made itself a less reliable partner. I’ve long said that what will bring Donald Trump down is Donald Trump (search his name here at simplycharles.com and you will see my blogs dating back to 2015).
The International Monetary Fund (“IMF”) studied this data and produced a projection that is the clearest single indicator of how completely Canada’s economic trajectory has diverged from what the tariff strategy predicted. We are projected to post the second fastest growth rate in the G7 in 2026. The are the facts that Mr. Poilievre avoids when spewing his poisonous rhetoric.
That’s right! The country that was supposed to be crushed by American economic pressure is growing faster than Germany, faster than France, faster than the United Kingdom, faster than Japan. Mr. Poilievre is in the media each day falsely promoting that “Prime Minister Carney has made no deals“! It is bit hard to identify whether Mr. Poilievre is a liar or not . . . . . these facts destroy this man’s integrity.
And the jobs picture is the most politically pointed number of all! Since the start of 2025 Canada has added nearly three times as many jobs per capital as the United States (amidst a literal trade war!).We’re talking 300% more jobs while America is throwing around more and more tariffs. The American people obviously don’t understand that it is not Canada that pays the tariffs . . . . it is THEM paying the tariffs. American importers pay them and they pass the costs directly onto the American consumes.
The country that Trump said needed America to survive far more than America needed Canada is creating job jobs at three times the rate of the country that started this trade war!
The bottom line is that July 1st will determine what is real and what is smoke and mirrors. Negotiations are all about leverage and very little else. And leverage is determined by the answer to one single underlying question: “who needs this deal more”?
Twelve months ago (pre-Prime Minister Carney) the answer was obvious. Canada needed the CUSMA deal more. Canada has 75% off its exports going to America.Our manufacturing sector, our energy sector, our agricultural sector were all built around the assumption of preferential American market access. The cost of losing CUSMA was existential in a way that it simply was not for the Americans.
Canada can now demonstrate with verified data that it has alternative markets capable of absorbing a meaningful portion of its exports with $97 billion in foreign investment not contingent of CUSMA continuing. We have 51 countries that function independently of whatever happens on July 1st. Our economy is growing at the second fastest rate in the G7 while the trade war is ongoing. Each of these facts change the negotiating calculation in a concrete way.
Prime Minister Carney, at the onset of this fight masquerading as trade negotiations made himself clear that “a bad deal is worse than no deal” and he could not have been more right. That argument was challenged 12 months ago but cannot be challenged today. His statement is definitively credible today and credibility of walking away increases, the other party’s ability to dictate terms decreases. This is not politics . . . . it is basic arithmetic! Arithmetic that apparently above Mr. Poilievre’s and the Conservative Party’s pay grade! These are all major wins for Prime Minister Carney that no conventional Press has recognized. They are too busy selling advertising and grabbing headlines from other media like America’s propaganda channels like Fox News.
So, today Canada sits with 20 new economic and defence partnerships on four continents signed in the preceding 12 months that puts some bounce in Canadian trade negotiator’s step as this is the systematic construction of a diplomatic and commercial architecture that gives us options that the Trump trade advisers did not model when they signed the February 1st executive orders.
And for all the nay-sayers out there spewing your offensive contrarian rhetoric about our Prime Minister “globetrotting at taxpayer expense“, “not making any deals“, etc., I am respectfully posting all of these historic accomplishments that Prime Minister Carney has manifested amidst the most hostile and insulting systemic assaults on our nation that it has ever faced. For Prime Minster Carney to have to deal with Mr. Poilievre’s constant childish attacks against him is simply lunacy that apparently is built into our political system. He crosses the line by introducing lies into his attacks on our Prime Minister.
Lying is not a Canadian trait. It is not acceptable in our government each of whom is paid by our tax dollars. We everyday Canadians are owed better and introducing lying into their job is categorically “malfeasance” that historically has meant a great deal in Canada. I am confident that there is a large percentage of Conservative voters in Canada that agree with me that the job description of their party’s Leader nor their party’s constitution do NOT include lying or tolerating lying. This really is not very much to ask but obviously it requires asking.
I’m Charles
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