Varcoe: 'Keep calm': How Carney can deal with Trump factor to ensure successful G7
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For Canada's leader hosting the G7 summit in Kananaskis in the coming days, 'don't poke the bear' might also apply — as Premier Danielle Smith told a Postmedia colleague earlier this year when discussing U.S. President Donald Trump and Canada's approach to tariffs.
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Former prime ministers, cabinet ministers and international experts say a low-key approach with behind-the-scenes discussions is the best strategy for Prime Minister Mark Carney when he talks with Trump next week about an array of complex geopolitical issues, while U.S. tariffs continue.
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'Trump is obviously a wilder card than has been at a lot of these sessions before,' former prime minister Joe Clark said Thursday on the sidelines of a G7-related conference hosted by the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy.
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'The constructive management of this conference is what we want to be looking for, rather than home runs . . . One is more likely to make progress with Trump away from the cameras. We'll never get him entirely away from the cameras.'
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A major clash, such as what unfolded in 2018 after the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Que., highlights the risks of a meeting that doesn't go smoothly.
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In June 2018, Justin Trudeau criticized American tariffs on steel and aluminum during a wrap-up news conference. Trump, who'd left early, fired back on social media that Canada's prime minister had acted 'meek and mild during our G7 meetings,' but was 'very dishonest and weak' by later telling reporters he wouldn't be pushed around.
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And that was years before the annexation and '51st state' talk.
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As Business Council of Canada CEO Goldy Hyder put it on Friday: 'This cannot be a headline of the president feels ganged-up on. That would be a bad outcome. This has to be: reasonable people have met, they agreed to disagree about some things, but here are some things they agreed on.'
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Winnipeg Free Press
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Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
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Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has taken aim at rival Musk with Project Kuiper, which launched its first batch of internet satellites into orbit in April. So far Amazon has just 78 satellites in orbit, with 3,232 planned, according to McDowell, and London-based Eutelstat OneWeb has around 650 satellites in orbit, a fraction of the fleet it had initially planned. The European Union is spending billions to develop its own satellite array — called the IRIS2 initiative — but remains woefully behind. EU officials have had to lobby their own member states not to sign contracts with Starlink while it gets up and running. 'We are allies with the United States of America, but we need to have our strategic autonomy,' said Christophe Grudler, a French member of the European Parliament who led legislative work on IRIS2. 'The risk is not having our destiny in our own hands.' China has been public about its ambition to build its own version of Starlink to meet both domestic national security needs and compete with Starlink in foreign markets. In 2021, Beijing established the state-owned China SatNet company and tasked it with launching a megaconstellation with military capabilities, known as Guowang. In December, the company launched its first operational satellites, and now has 60 of a planned 13,000 in orbit, according to McDowell. Qianfan, a company backed by the Shanghai government, has launched 90 satellites out of some 15,000 planned. The Brazilian government in November announced a deal with Qianfan, after Musk had a scorching public fight with a Brazilian judge investigating X, who also froze Space X's bank accounts in the country. 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Assessing Starlink's capabilities and vulnerabilities Starlink's omnipresence and potential military applications have unnerved Beijing and spurred the nation's scientists to action. In paper after paper, researchers painstakingly assessed the capabilities and vulnerabilities of a network that they clearly perceive as menacing and strove to understand what China might learn — and emulate — from Musk's company as Beijing works to develop a similar satellite system. Though Starlink does not operate in China, Musk's satellites nonetheless can sweep over Chinese territory. Researchers from China's National Defense University in 2023 simulated Starlink's coverage of key geographies, including Beijing, Taiwan, and the polar regions, and determined that Starlink can achieve round-the-clock coverage of Beijing. 'The Starlink constellation coverage capacity of all regions in the world is improving steadily and in high speed,' they concluded. 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Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
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In February, he cited the illegal flow of drugs and immigrants across the U.S. border to slap tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico. Then on April 2 — 'Liberation Day,'' Trump called it — he invoked IEEPA to announce 'reciprocal'' tariffs of up to 50% on countries with which the United States ran trade deficits and a 10% 'baseline'' tariff on almost everybody else. The emergency he cited was America's long-running trade deficit. Trump later suspended the reciprocal tariffs, but they remain a threat: They could be imposed again Friday on countries that do not pre-empt them by reaching trade agreements with the United States or that receive letters from Trump setting their tariff rates himself. The plaintiffs argue that the emergency power laws does not authorize the use of tariffs. They also note that the trade deficit hardly meets the definition of an 'unusual and extraordinary'' threat that would justify declaring an emergency under the law. The United States, after all, has run trade deficits — in which it buys more from foreign countries than it sells them — for 49 straight years and in good times and bad. The Trump administration argues that courts approved President Richard Nixon's emergency use of tariffs in a 1971 economic crisis. The Nixon administration successfully cited its authority under the 1917 Trading With Enemy Act, which preceded and supplied some of the legal language used in IEEPA. Monday Mornings The latest local business news and a lookahead to the coming week. In May, the trade court rejected the argument, ruling that Trump's Liberation Day tariffs 'exceed any authority granted to the President'' under the emergency powers law. 'The president doesn't get to use open-ended grants of authority to do what he wants,'' said Reilly Stephens, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, a libertarian legal group that is representing businesses suing the Trump administration over the tariffs. In the case of the drug trafficking and immigration tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico, the trade court ruled that the levies did not meet IEEPA's requirement that they 'deal with'' the problem they were supposed to address. The court challenge does not cover other Trump tariffs, including levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos that the president imposed after Commerce Department investigations concluded that those imports were threats to U.S. national security. Nor does it include tariffs that Trump imposed on China in his first term — and President Joe Biden kept — after a government investigation concluded that the Chinese used unfair practices to give their own technology firms an edge over rivals from the United States and other Western countries.
