In New York yesterday, speaking to “a crowd of New York industry titans,” the Prime Minister of Canada said the following: “Canada Strong will help make America great again. The examples are legion where we should work together and compete with the world together.”

“Make America Great Again” is the signature slogan of the eponymous MAGA movement. MAGA is an authoritarian, white supremacist, Christian nationalist political movement/cult of personality devoted to US President Donald Trump/straight-up cult. It is the dominant force in the far-right Republican Party, one of only two parties in their political system. MAGA, under Trump, has already wounded US democracy, perhaps fatally.

MAGA is ICE. It is concentration camps. It is the destruction of USAID, of the US Department of Health and Human Services, of the Environmental Protection Agency, of the National Weather Service. It is the murder of innocents at sea by the US military in the Caribbean, the illegal invasion of Iran, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s President, the undermining of Ukraine’s fight for its freedom against Russia, a MAGA ally.

MAGA is the threat to invade Mexico, to invade Greenland (remember that?). And to annex Canada.

MAGA is what every single Canadian who supported Mark Carney in the 2025 Liberal leadership race and the April federal election was voting against. They – we – put our trust in an untested politician with no political record, choosing to believe him when he claimed that he would stand up for Canada against MAGA. How else to interpret, in good faith, his claim on election night, “America wants our land, our resources, our water, our country. But these are not idle threats. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never ever happen”?

I am not interested in trying to rationalize Carney’s words, linking it to some underlying strategy that the prime minister, over a year into his mandate, refuses to share with his constituents, choosing instead to do whatever he wants and call it the national interest. I’m not a political strategist, so I won’t blow smoke about how this might play in the polls, or whether he might get away with all this or whether it’s a bridge too far.

Supporting MAGA

What I will say is that to invoke “make America great again” in a political speech is to endorse the MAGA movement. It is to buy into the unsupported, misogynist, white supremacist grievances of a movement that threatens to tear the US apart, one based on dominance, not cooperation. It labels the speaker as a MAGA supporter. Carney cheerleaders can try to spin this all they want, but words have meaning. If you say, in effect, ‘my policies [and note that Carney’s referring not to a strong Canada, but to his own, personally approved and branded Canada Strong policies] will help Make America Great Again,” then you’re throwing your support behind MAGA, and all that it stands for.

(And for anyone who tries to argue that I’m reading too much into this, don’t play me for a fool. Carney chose those four specific words to express support for the US, for Trump. The capital letters are silent but implied.)

Simply uttering “make America great again” in a positive manner in a public speech is an affront to everyone who voted for Carney thinking he would stand against MAGA. To then bind Canada to the MAGA mission – which is, in part, to dominate Canada, “to break us so that America can own us,” as someone once said – that’s on a whole other level. It’s a betrayal of the plain-language understanding of what millions of Canadians thought they were voting for. It’s obscene. And it should be seen as such.

Who is Mark Carney?

Mark Carney’s “Make America Great Again” speech is, without question, the single most cynical moment I’ve witnessed in almost 40 years of following Canadian politics.

And I remember Brian Mulroney.

Words have meaning. In politics, they’re currency. They’re how politicians make deals, how voters assess politicians, linking words and deeds. If that link breaks, the trust needed to run a democracy breaks down. And yet Carney has spent the past year debasing this currency, vacillating from ‘elbows up’ and ‘our relationship with the US is over’, to “Fortress North America” and “Canada Strong will help make America great again.”

Now, Carney has used one of the most hateful, polarizing political phrases of the past several generations to suck up to the United States, and to Trump in particular. At this point, “Make America Great Again” is not even a dog whistle, like “states’ rights.” Every honest person knows what it means, and what it implies. In contemporary US politics, offering to work to “Make America Great Again” hits the same as offering to help bring about the thousand-year Reich. Politics can have a lot of ambiguity in it, but not that much. There are some things democratic, human rights-supporting politicians simply can’t say. “Make America Great Again” is one of them.

I try to steer clear of these issues, but Carney’s choice to use the phrase “Make America Great Again” raises fundamental questions about his character. Is there anything he wouldn’t say in order to get what he wants? Which is what, exactly? What is Carney’s endgame? Awkward truths abound: Nobody wants to hear this, but Carney’s “Fortress North America” is wholly incompatible with a more autonomous Canada. The hint is in the name.

MAGA and the Canada-US relationship is about much more than economics. Official Ottawa’s laser focus on the USMCA renegotiations has made it easy to forget that the actual US threat to Canada isn’t economic; it’s political. Specifically, it’s the looming threat of consolidated US authoritarianism. The economy is a means to domination; it’s not the game.

Does Carney care about any of that, or will he do literally anything, compromise any value (e.g., deeper military integration with a US military that’s shown it no longer respects international law) to save the USMCA and restore ‘certainty’ to the relationship?

Who – or who else (cough, Elizabeth May, cough) – would he throw under the bus for the sake of expediency? Does he feel bound by anything he says, or does he believe he has the right to say whatever he wants, to whomever he wants, to push his own agenda forward, no matter whether he’s telling the truth or lying?

Does Carney have any principles? Does he feel beholden to his voters – most of whom almost certainly would recoil, as I did, at the mere mention of that phrase, as if it were the n-word? Or does he believe that, secure in his majority government, voters’ views are no longer of any concern?

We might not know Carney’s endgame when it comes to economic policy (although if you’re paying attention, you have a pretty good idea). But that a Canadian prime minister, elected because of his seeming anti-MAGA bona fides, would go to New York and blatantly, willfully disrespect his voters and embrace, even rhetorically, the most destructive movement in modern US history, tells us a lot about the man and the leader. None of it is flattering; all of it is concerning.