Remember Art Carney? He was a very talented dancer and actor (Academy Award winner). But he was best known as Ed Norton, the comic-relief buddy of Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden.
While Kramden was a loudmouth with a big self-image (remind you of any presidents you know about?), Norton was his simple-minded foil.
This brings us to Canada’s Prime Minister, Art Mark Carney. Carney, reacting to President Trump’s admittedly bombastic efforts to complete a more equitable trade deal with Canada, is, frankly, making a fool of himself and damaging his already-damaged country in ways that will be hard to remedy.
Victor Davis Hanson, writing for amgreatness.com, has provided us with an excellent analysis of this folly. Here are a few especially trenchant excerpts:
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one. Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Donald Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.
So, at the eleventh hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the United States for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.
Carney claimed that American proposals stripped away Canadian sovereignty and quashed Canadian culture, particularly French-Canadian culture. Yet he has not released the documents detailing the bilateral offers he rejected. Nor has he allowed his representatives to explain to the media why Canada blew up the negotiations at the last minute. Carney’s ever-changing excuses, explanations, and invectives about what happened are incoherent and contradictory.
He has eagerly concluded a comprehensive Chinese-Canadian pact involving travel, visas, food safety, energy, and public security. Carney has grandly described these new agreements with Beijing as part of a new paradigm in which “middle powers” like Canada play China against the United States (Canada’s annual nominal GDP is roughly the size of New York State’s).
How ironic that Carney attacks his neighbor, the United States, for trade unfairness while warming to the communist dictatorship in China. Communist China, after all, is history’s greatest violator of trade protocols—guilty of manipulating its currency, dumping products to secure market share, violating copyright and patent laws, and imprisoning a million Uyghurs.
So what drives Carney’s hubristic fantasies? Has Canada’s natural wealth in oil, gas, timber, and minerals made it a military and economic dynamo, as it once was?
Hardly.
Canada’s population is 11.8 percent of America’s. Its economy is barely one-thirteenth the size of America’s. Canadian GDP per capita is only 60 percent of America’s.
Canada quietly relies on the U.S. military to deter foreign powers from North America, whether by fending off challenges to Canada’s extensive Arctic claims—including its dubious claim of absolute sovereignty over the Northwest Passage—or by keeping Canadian skies free of foreign combat aircraft and missiles.
Canada’s navy—once one of the world’s preeminent surface fleets—has been reduced to fewer than 30 ships. Its 89 American-made jets are more than 40 years old.
Canada has only half the GDP of California—a state currently decaying under neo-socialist governance—despite having roughly the same population.
Nevertheless, Carney now claims, in passive-aggressive fashion, that the United States bullies Canada—even as Canada runs trade surpluses with America, relies on the American economy for 72 percent of its exports, and depends on the American military for its safety. That asymmetry indirectly subsidizes Canada’s disastrous energy, immigration, defense, regulatory, and tax policies.
Mr. Hanson’s article is lengthy, and there is a lot more than what you just read. But every word of it is more than worthwhile. I strongly urge you to use the link (here it is again) and read every word.
Then you can wonder along with me why Carney is beclowning himself this way, and what good he thinks it will do for Canada.
