Weak Carney betrays Canadian electorate on only thing that put him into office

Telegraph

7 hours ago

Mark Carney leaned into his past as an ice hockey player during his successful campaign to become Canadian prime minister.
'Elbows up,' became his battle cry and his promise to the electorate that he was ready to defend the country against Donald Trump and the American president's aggressive moves on their country.
It was one of the issues that turned around the election, propelling the Liberal candidate (and former ice hockey goal tender) to a come-from-behind victory. Voters decided that Mr Carney would do more to stand up to Washington than a conservative candidate, Pierre Poilievre, who leaned into comparisons with the America First president south of the border.
But it takes a tough stomach.
Mr Trump's playbook is obvious by now. Double down, double down, double down and simply keep going until the other guy folds.
He doubled down with Canada on Friday. After agreeing a 30-day deadline for trade talks between the two countries during cordial meetings at the G7 summit two weeks ago, Mr Trump made his move.
He announced a suspension of trade negotiations in a social media post and then told reporters in the Oval Office: 'Economically, we have such power over Canada.
'I'd rather not use it, but they did something with our tech companies… We have all the cards.'
At issue was the digital services tax which applies to Canadian and foreign businesses that engage with online users in Canada. The first payments, backdated to 2022, were due on Monday.
They amounted to a 3 per cent levy on companies such as Amazon and Uber, bringing in about $2 billion in total.
When push came to shove, Mr Carney, the former central banker, did what technocrats tend to do: he weighed the pros and cons, and plumped for the most pragmatic approach. He folded.
'In our negotiations on a new economic and security relationship between Canada and the United States, Canada's new government will always be guided by the overall contribution of any possible agreement to the best interests of Canadian workers and businesses,' he said, at the end of a day of diplomacy and a phone call with Mr Trump.
In other words, keeping an eye on the bigger picture and overall trade negotiations with Canada's biggest trading partner was more important than the digital services tax.
It is exactly what a mild-mannered technocrat would do.
It is just that Mr Carney did not exactly campaign as the pragmatic bean counter.
'We are facing the biggest crisis of our lifetimes. Donald Trump is trying to fundamentally change the world economy, the trading system, but really he's trying to break us so the US can own us,' he said during the campaign.
'We will fight back with counter tariffs and we will protect our workers.'
Rather than fighting back against Mr Trump in their high-stakes game of chicken, the elbows came down pretty fast.
'We are starting to get a sense of the character of the government and that it is a kind of chicken dance government,' is how Garnett Genuis, the Canadian Conservative Party's shadow minister for employment, put it.
'It is elbows up, elbows back down, elbows up, elbows back down.'