Good morning. As Donald Trump threatens to raise Canada’s tariffs, Mark Carney looks to reboot trade relations with China – more on that below, along with Alberta’s end to its teachers’ strike and a promising new Alzheimer’s drug. But first:
Today’s headlinesOpen this photo in gallery:
Mark Carney at the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.FAZRY ISMAIL/The Associated Press
PoliticsThe trade tightrope
These aren’t exactly banner times for U.S. relations. Whatever progress Canada might have made on trade talks with the White House – yesterday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said the countries had been “close to a deal” – those negotiations screeched to a halt after the Ontario government ran its 60-second, Reagan-quoting, anti-tariff ad. Now U.S. President Donald Trump is promising a tariff hike and a long stretch of time before he deigns to meet again with Carney. And Ontario Premier Doug Ford isn’t showing much contrition for his role in the matter: He just called the ad “the most successful in North American history,” borrowing a bit of Trumpian hyperbole.
Perhaps Carney will have better luck with Chinese President Xi Jinping when the two sit down at the APEC summit in South Korea later this week. The Prime Minister emphasized yesterday that there’s lots of diplomatic room to grow here: China is “a country with whom we had no senior-level contact in seven years,” he told reporters from Kuala Lumpur. “We’re starting from a very low base.” His meeting with Xi might not hard-launch a new Sino-Canadian relationship, but Carney said it could begin “resetting expectations of where the relationship can go.”
It is also the result of some fence-mending by Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand, who was in Beijing earlier this month to kickstart talks. (China even granted The Globe’s Steven Chase a visa to join her, after years of denying reporters permission to enter the country.) Relations between the two countries have declined steadily since 2018, when Ottawa arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition request, and Beijing locked up Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in response. Ottawa has since accepted dissidents from Hong Kong and beefed up its representation in Taiwan. In 2021, Parliament condemned China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as a genocide. The next year, cameras caught Xi berating former prime minister Justin Trudeau at the G20 for leaking details of a brief conversation.
And then there are the tariffs. Back in 2024, Trudeau and the Biden administration collectively slapped 100-per-cent tariffs on China’s electric vehicles, in order to protect the North American auto industry from a glut of Chinese EVs. They also imposed 25-per-cent levies on Chinese steel and aluminum for good measure. In response, Beijing whacked Canadian canola oil and peas with a 100-per-cent tariff, Canadian seafood and pork with a 25-per-cent tariff, and Canadian canola seed with a very specific 75.8-per-cent tariff. Western farmers have been hit particularly hard: Plummeting canola prices wiped out around $1-billion in value for the sector, forcing farmers to sit on more than 19 million tonnes of seed.
Codie Nagy is storing canola grain at his farm near Ogema, Sask.Heywood Yu/The Globe and Mail
Beijing has said it’d be more than happy to drop its retaliatory tariffs if only Canada would lift the levies on EVs – and the premiers of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, both major canola-producing provinces, have urged Carney to do just that. The Prime Minister didn’t expressly rule out the move yesterday, though he remained circumspect, pointing only to travel restrictions between the two countries as a specific barrier to tackle. There is an argument, though, that Canada’s protectionist policies may have outlived their purpose. Trump has been very clear he wants to stop buying cars from Canada, which rather seems to undermine any joint effort to safeguard the North American auto industry from Chinese EVs.
Carney says the rapprochement with Beijing is long overdue. “This is our second-largest trading partner. This is the second-largest economy in the world,” he told reporters yesterday. Perhaps offering concessions to China won’t massively inflame Canada’s trade tensions with the States. Trump said yesterday he’s close to inking his own deal with Xi, and in any event, the White House’s trade talks with Ottawa are already off. (Or, at least, they’re off today.) But diplomatic experts warn that one compromise could swiftly lead to another.
“China is essentially using our canola farmers against us, against the Canadian government’s public policy,” Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa’s graduate school of public and international affairs, told The Globe. “If we crumple on EVs, they will do it immediately on other issues like critical minerals, access to our Arctic, our silence on Taiwan.”
The Shot‘I’m overjoyed. It’s about time.’Open this photo in gallery:
The Toronto Memory Program runs trial sites for anti-dementia drugs.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
After a two-and-a-half-year review, Health Canada has approved a drug that slows the progression of Alzheimer’s. Read more here about lecanemab and how it could change the future of the disease.
The WrapWhat else we’re following
At home: The Alberta government has invoked the notwithstanding clause to send 50,000 teachers back to work after a three-week strike.
Abroad: There are widespread reports of massacres in Darfur after a powerful Sudanese militia captured the city of El Fasher following an 18-month siege.
Tech: Toronto online financial-services provider Wealthsimple has hit a $10-billion valuation with its latest funding round.
Talk: There’s an enduring romance between radio and baseball, which remains by some margin the most-listened-to sport on the AM dial.
Unplugged: For parents trying to wait a little longer before giving their kids smartphones, the peer pressure is hard to resist.
No show: Concert cancellations are on the rise in Canada, as a weak loonie and a vast country prompt artists to perform elsewhere.