Article content

The book on Donald Trump is that he’s unpredictable, unreliable and untrustworthy.

Article content

Based on the recent trade talks and Friday’s last minute bust-up, it’s an unfair rap. Every move the U.S. made in the weeks of dickering was predictable and, in the end, reliably untrustworthy. You didn’t have to be an Ottawa insider or politically tuned-in pundit to suspect the negotiations were largely a waste of effort and would end badly. Ordinary Canadians certainly made clear they had little to no faith in Washington’s intentions, expected the worst and were not alarmed by it.

Article content

Article content

Article content

“I’m most useful in a crisis. I’m not that good at peacetime,” Prime Minister Mark Carney boasted in his early days as a politician. Now he has the chance to prove it. If the impact of the tariff blow-up proves as predicted, Canada is in for a financial challenge. Jobs will be lost, prices will be affected. As long as the damage of a tariff war was still theoretical it was easy enough to talk tough and thumb a nose in Washington’s general direction.”Go ahead, do your worst.” How the country reacts now will take patience, resilience and backbone, possibly for some time to come. Canadians are being challenged to show what they’re made of.

Article content

Article content

The best outcome would be to finally break our addiction to American commerce and find other customers, other suppliers, other countries that are interested in doing business on an equal basis and with more honesty than has become the American norm. There’s been much talk along those lines over the months since Carney delivered his seminal speech in Davos, but — not surprisingly — there’s a natural reluctance to undertake a rupture of that magnitude if there’s even a moderate hope of avoidance.

Article content

Article content

Carney has jetted around the world at a relentless pace, signing trade deals here there and everywhere, yet outside government hallways the sense of urgency has appeared decidedly less fervent. This month two of Canada’s biggest banks sold a jointly-owned firm to an American buyer, transferring a company that handles about a third of Canadian payment transactions to a private equity operation in San Francisco. On Friday Roots, which turned Canadian iconography into a branding empire, sold itself to New York-based Marquee Brands for about $160 million in a deal identified as “a transaction designed to preserve all that makes Roots uniquely Canadian” — except, of course, the ownership.

Article content

Article content

In just three weeks Carney will host the Canada Investment Summit, a first-ever gathering of “the world’s largest investors” in a bid to lure some of the $100 trillion they reportedly control Canada’s way. According to the prime minister, “they will find a Canadian economy that has never been more connected or more ambitious.” That would be nice. It would be real progress if all they went away with was an impression Canada has more to offer than a range of successful firms willing to be snapped up at an attractive price.