For the better part of a year, Prime Minister Mark Carney has argued that, in the United States Canada Mexico Agreement (USMCA), Canada has “the best deal of any major U.S. trading partner.”

Excuse the academic jargon, but this claim has always been bullshit. US President Donald Trump’s decision at the time not to impose tariffs on USMCA-compliant goods (we’ll ignore the illegal fentanyl tariffs loitering in front of the school) had nothing to do with the agreement because he doesn’t respect agreements, laws or treaties. His decision not to tariff USMCA-compliant goods was always purely Trump’s personal choice.

When a state’s actions aren’t constrained by a treaty, or when the treaty depends on the whims of one person, there is no treaty.

In any case, I suspect that we’ve heard this line for the last time.

On Monday, July 20, Canadians got (yet another) reminder that, whatever the Prime Minister might say or believe or wish, the USMCA has been dead for a very long time. Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on USMCA-compliant goods because of, uh, smoke from Canadian wildfires entering the US, is not so much the final nail in the USMCA’s coffin as it is the beheading of a zombie trade agreement.

It’s also yet another reminder that the United States can no longer be trusted to keep its word. It shows, again, that Trump isn’t interested in policy (tariffs because of forest fires is not a serious argument) except as a pretext to domination.

This isn’t just a Trump thing. A Republican party that has drunk long and deep at the well of lawless authoritarianism is unlikely to re-embrace multilateralism and the rule of law. And a Democratic party that has seen what the US can get away with in a world in which liberal internationalism is dead and international law is on life support cannot be expected to behave much differently.

Fantasyland policymaking

The past two years under Mark Carney have been an exercise in wishing away the United States’ authoritarian challenge to Canadian autonomy. In power, he has focused on tariffs as if they were the problem rather than the weapon.

Specifically, Carney has acted as if there is no fundamental contradiction between seeking deeper integration with the US while diversifying somewhat the Canadian economy. Canada-US military cooperation remains as tight as ever, even as the US military embraces lawlessness on the high seas. He’s done little-to-nothing to address the spillover effects on Canada of the US evisceration of its regulatory institutions.

Even now, he continues his quixotic attempt to reanimate the USMCA, seeking in its renegotiation the ability to restrain a US president who has just violated the agreement he’s renegotiating.

If you can’t follow the logic here, you’re not alone.

Carney’s pursuit of deeper integration, including comments about how “Canada Strong will make America great again” and his Natural Resources Minister’s favourable comments about a “Fortress North America” in energy, wish away two realities that are in fundamental, irreconcilable contradiction with his purported goal of increasing Canadian economic autonomy.

First – and I don’t know how many times I have to say this – Donald Trump and the United States can’t be trusted. There is no value – none – in any agreement signed by him. Nor, given that the US is a two-party state that has already twice elected Trump, can Canada take the chance that this nonsense won’t happen again after Trump is gone.

Second – and I can’t believe I have to say this – the only way to increase Canadian autonomy from the United States is to stop integrating with the United States. “Fortress Am-Can,” the Golden Dome, deeper integration into the US security apparatus, tighter energy relations: these won’t buy time for Canada to decouple from the United States at some point in the distant future. They will, by definition, bind Canada more deeply to the United States.

What, exactly, is Canada doing here?

(There’s a definite parallel here with Carney’s energy strategy, which similarly doesn’t seriously engage with the actual climate tradeoffs involved in doubling down on oil and natural gas while embracing more carbon pollution.)

Avoiding difficult conversations

Mark Carney’s entire economic strategy has been based on elaborate arguments from authority. He has yet to present a coherent explanation for his overall strategy.

“Diversify trade, and build up the domestic economy and the military” are table stakes: pretty much everyone was already on board with all of this. What’s missing is the logic behind the “how” of each of these, and most importantly, how they fit with his approach to Canada-US relations.

Carney has been very, very busy. He’s done a lot of stuff. But, amazingly, it’s still not clear – even to people who study these files closely – how it all fits together. For instance, Canada’s now going to spend a boatload of money on the military, including submarines. What are the submarines for? It’s not clear, even to at least one longtime defence analysist. Not a surprise, since Carney hasn’t actually tabled a new defence strategy that discusses how the world has changed.

On Canada-US relations, my University of Ottawa colleague Patrick Leblond highlights a point I’ve made here: that pursuing a Fortress North America strategy is antithetical to Carney’s trade-diversification and domestic economy-building efforts. We could also ask why Carney and the Canadian business community continues to pursue “certainty” in Canada-US relations, when that is the one thing that’s clearly out of reach.

On digital policy, which along with Canada-US relations is my primary academic expertise, we’re still waiting for a clear-cut answer to what the “sovereign” in “sovereign AI” actually means. And I’d love an explanation for why it makes sense to double down on a sunsetting industry like oil, including why it deserves a single penny of public money.

Crucially, Carney’s refusal to discuss the contradictions and tradeoffs in his policies, let alone to consider alternatives, has foreclosed the very hard conversation Canadians need to have. Carney has pursued a deliberate sent of policies: more trade deals, higher military spending, government cuts, and public-private-partnership-led domestic infrastructure building, while leaving the existing US relationship intact or even deepening it seeking US certainty, refusing to upset the Canada-US relationship.

However, Trump’s ridiculous, illegal tariffs, combined with events like his extortion of Canada over the Gordie Howe Bridge, are slowly making two things clear. First, that extricating Canada from the US embrace will be much more difficult, and more expensive, than Carney has let on. It’s one thing to understand intellectually that Canada needs to lessen its dependence on the United States. It’s quite another to recognize that US unreliability means you have to let go of the fantasy that a new trade agreement can restore certainty to the relationship. Or that, because a lack of certainty fatally compromises an integrated continental economy, lessening dependence might cost, say, the auto industry that has been the country’s economic engine for decades.

That’s the level of “expensive” at play here.

The second thing that Trump’s ongoing attacks suggest is that Carney’s current cake-and-eat-it strategy is not fit for purpose. There’s no way appease successfully someone whose goal isn’t prosperity, but domination. Hard choices will need to be made or we’ll end up with integration by inertia.

We need to talk about all of these things.

Discovering solutions

There’s more than a little of Donald Trump’s “I alone can fix it” to Mark Carney’s lone-cowboy charting of Canadian economic policy. Canadians are being asked to trust in Carney, the man. Not because his plan is a good one (we’re not sure what it is), but because he’s Mark Carney: a classic argument from authority.

That’s not how democracies are supposed to work. We should be debating ideas and proposals, not simply going along with what the gray man at the front of the room says we should do.

Trusting in one person to make policy is also a recipe for bad policy. These are very difficult challenges, the likes we haven’t seen in generations. They require an all-of-Canada response, bringing our best and brightest together to work through the challenges and the contradictions. The degree of difficulty involved in navigating successfully the perils Canada faces is why some colleagues and I last year proposed a Royal Commission on Canada’s future. This isn’t something one man can handle on his own, no matter how impressive his Rolodex.

As seriously as most Canadians are taking the US threat, they – and our leaders in particular – are not taking it seriously enough. Instead of avoiding the contradictions, we need to focus very carefully on the actual problem – Canada can no longer trust the United States – and understand exactly what that implies for the country.