Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre seized on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s comments in the Oval Office that Canada had invested $500-billion in the United States over the past five yearsSean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Pierre Poilievre has sure had himself a time this week.
Mark Carney, of course, met with Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday, but left without a deal to relieve the most punishing tariffs on steel, aluminum or softwood lumber. There were odd teasers from the President that the Canadians would be going home happy, and key officials stayed behind to continue negotiating, but no white smoke yet, as the Prime Minister might say.
Well. That’s a pretty big letdown from what the Prime Minister boasted he was going to do, isn’t it?
“Tomorrow, the Prime Minister is going to the White House to announce this deal – surely he’s not just going for a photo op and to make more excuses,” Mr. Poilievre said on Monday in the House of Commons. “The Prime Minister’s Office is already telling the media that there will be the full elimination of tariffs on steel and aluminum.”
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Except they said no such thing. There were news stories citing unnamed PMO sources who identified those sectors as the most urgent focus, and that’s about it. But hey, inventing a promise and setting up your adversary to fail at it is a pretty handy political move.
Afterward, what the Conservative Leader seized on were Mr. Carney’s comments in the Oval Office that Canada had invested $500-billion in the United States over the past five years, and there could be another $1-trillion in the next five if a trade deal was struck. This was plainly an offering to Mr. Trump’s “nice economy you got there, be a shame if something happened to it” tariff shakedown. That’s icky, enraging and unsatisfying, to be sure, but unfortunately it’s also strategically necessary.
When Mr. Poilievre needled Mr. Carney repeatedly about in the House, as though the Prime Minister was about to write a cheque from Canadian taxpayers directly to Donald Trump, Mr. Carney acerbically reminded him that the private sector exists. That gave Mr. Poilievre grist for a new fantasy to peddle in a news conference on Thursday.
“That means he intends to put right in the agreement that he’s going to push a trillion dollars of investment to the United States,” the Conservative Leader said. “How is he going to do that? He said it would be private investment, so he’s going to pass a law forcing pension funds and insurance companies to push their money to the States out of Canada?”
Let us all sigh deeply and massage our temples with our fists for a moment.
Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House on Tuesday.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
A short time later in Question Period, Mr. Poilievre painted a picture of the Canadian economy in tatters and frightened families white-knuckling it at their kitchen tables. He said Mr. Carney’s “tax and anti-development policies” had caused this by “driving billions of dollars in jobs to the United States.”
It feels ridiculous to point out that basically every serious report on the current state of the Canadian economy has in fact blamed Mr. Trump’s tariffs and the accompanying uncertainty for Canada’s current economic woes.
So why would Mr. Poilievre stop here? If Mr. Carney is at fault for everything Mr. Trump does, then it’s the Prime Minister who sicced ICE agents on innocent Americans, who attempted a coup d’etat and who wears neckties that look like they came from a thrift store for clowns.
Consider – just as context for how ludicrous it is to put as much energy as Mr. Poilievre is into blaming someone else for Mr. Trump’s many offences against humanity – a story from The Guardian with the headline, “Norway braces for Trump’s reaction if he does not win Nobel Peace Prize.” In it, a Norwegian politician stressed that the government has no role in deciding the winner – announced Friday as Venezuelan democracy leader Maria Corina Machado – but warned that, “when the president is this volatile and authoritarian, of course we have to be prepared for anything.”
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A spoiled, perpetually mid-meltdown toddler has more power than anyone else on Earth, and everyone knows it and has to live with it. Mr. Poilievre, in other words, is getting perilously close to blaming Mr. Carney for the weather.
Even his description of widespread economic carnage is iffy.
On Friday, Statistics Canada released fresh employment data showing an unexpected gain of 60,000 jobs in September, partly compensating for a cumulative decline of 106,000 over the previous two months. Employment was up for people in the core working age group of 25 to 54, though it fell for older workers, and youth employment remained flat.
The employment rate ticked up 0.1 percentage point in September after declines in July and August, leaving it half a percentage point lower than the recent peak of 61.1 per cent in January.
Of course, Mr. Poilievre knows all of this.
He knows full well that Mr. Carney was hedging on what would come out of Tuesday’s visit to the Oval Office. He knows that the President is the reason the world runs like The Sopranos right now. And he definitely knows that any squeeze on the Canadian economy is courtesy of the White House and not the Canadian government.
Mr. Poilievre knows all of that because he’s not stupid. But he seems to think the people listening to him are.