Since my reference to it last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address in Davos seems to have been both intended and received as a policy manifesto for Canada and also for other countries that feel short-shrifted by what have traditionally been known as the “great powers.” The prime minister quoted the Czech president and former dissident Václav Havel that the communist system sustained itself by adopting the habit initiated by a greengrocer, of placing in his window the Marxist tocsin “Workers of the world, unite!”  (The 300 divisions of Stalin’s Red Army had more to do with it.) This gesture to the regime was widely taken up in the Soviet bloc, in what  Havel described as “living within a lie.” Carney considers this analogous to the adherence of Canada and other countries to “what we called the rules-based international order” (a clangorous platitude that reminds me of my bossy Grade 1 public school teacher).

His point was that the “rules-based system” was being abused and that Canada and other countries are the victims of it. “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness,” he said. He went on to criticize great powers for using “tariffs as leverage” and treating “supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” He was clear that he regarded the United States as the wrong-doing hegemon, and represented his recent trade deal with China as a strategic pivot.

His premises are hard to sustain. Comparing the relationship that the United States has with Canada, or that exists generally among western countries, with the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe is an outrage. Stalin murdered millions of his own citizens, negotiated the Nazi-Soviet pact, tore up all his agreements to vacate the countries the Red Army ostensibly liberated and looted the so-called satellite countries for decades. The United States tolerated a trade deficit of $1.2 trillion, which was simply an outright gift, mainly to America’s so-called allies, most of which are prosperous countries in no need of such charity.

At this point, Carney’s deal with China is effectively a swap of 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles annually at the most favoured nation rate of 6.1 per cent (down from the former 100 per cent), in exchange for China reducing tariffs on Canadian canola seed to 15 per cent. This is not a very seismic adjustment of our trade patterns and has to be seen as a pilot project. The fact remains that the United States in 2024 received about 76 per cent of Canada’s exports ago and supplied 62 per cent of its imports into Canada, which ran a $103-billion surplus with the U.S. Canada ran a $31 billion trade deficit with China in 2024, which accounted for only eight per cent of Canada’s imports, and received only four per cent of Canada’s exports. And China is a totalitarian despotism that’s proud of its comprehensive surveillance of its vast population, is not a fair-trading country and has been meddling in our elections.

Canada has been trying to diversify its trade for many years, but nothing has significantly reduced the percentage of Canadian exports to the United States. Canada’s trade strategy has to begin with the fact that our most valuable strategic asset is our preferential access to the U.S. market. Many readers will recall that prior to the first election of U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016, it was impossible to set foot out of doors without being button-holed by someone announcing that China was about to pass the United States as the world’s greatest economy. Today, U.S. nominal GDP is nearly $31 trillion and China’s is $19 trillion.

I agree entirely with the objective of Canada becoming less dependent on the United States, but this is not going to be achieved by name-calling and tokenism. We have to shrink the public sector, cut taxes, attract investment, exploit and not compromise our access to the U.S. market, not be embarrassed by our resources, especially oil and natural gas, and craft policy around the inconvenience of the economic imbalance in size between this country and the U.S.

A number of President Trump’s comments on Canada were seriously annoying and uncalled for, and I have, as I have written before, had the opportunity to tell him so. He substantially acknowledged that but felt he had been somewhat provoked by former prime minister Justin Trudeau and said, “Canada has better trade negotiators than we do.” I suggested that he get better negotiators and not insult Canadians. (Mark Carney’s campaign disparagements and the Churchillian charade he conducted of heroic defence against Trump’s aggression weren’t much better.) Like most Americans (and most other people), Trump fails to see any serious distinction between English-speaking Canadians and Americans and assumes that everyone would like to be American. Since Trudeau told him that our economy would collapse if he increased tariffs and Canada has not been paying for its own defence for decades, it’s somewhat understandable that Trump developed reservations about how seriously Canada should be taken as an independent country.

None of this entitles Carney to call the United States a bully. By Canadian standards, the United States is a corrupt, violent and rather vulgar country, with a complicated sociology including the legacy of slavery and a conspicuous amount of human poverty for such an immensely rich country. But it is also by far the most important and powerful country in the world and the most successful country in the history of the world by most measurements. It is also a democracy, as we are, and Americans are free to run their country any way they want, as we are. We have been far too tempted by the almost stagnant example of Europe while ignoring the positive aspects of the powerhouse that adjoins us. Twenty years ago, the European Union and the United States were almost equal in nominal GDP — today, the EU’s GDP is 65 per cent of the of the U.S. (and only a small part of that is due to Britain’s exit from the EU).

Carney had recourse to Thucydides to explain that those countries not among the most powerful “suffer what they must.” Thucydides and Herodotus are generally recognized as the founders of modern western history, as they emphasized historic personalities and trends and were not mere chroniclers. Thucydides is the principal creator of the imperishable renown of Pericles as the philosopher-statesman. His role was somewhat analogous to Edmund Spenser’s laudation of Queen Elizabeth I’s Gloriana. And he was right: even virtuous Athens tried to convert the Delian League of allies into an outright colonial taxation system imposed by Athens on its allies. But where, exactly, have we been so put upon?

Strong countries have some obligation to be fair, but not to be weak, or even always polite. And all countries have an obligation to do their best, which is where we have failed. Trump, whatever his limitations or excesses, isn’t our problem — we are. We have to do better and that starts with the prime minister. The rules-based order was a priggish fraud in which the Americans held up an umbrella that kept the Soviet Union away and the U.S. generally indulged a hodgepodge of countries in order to prevent them wandering off the reservation in the Cold War. We have only ourselves to blame for not having made the most of our magnificent country and it is certainly not too late to put that right.

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