Conrad Black: Trump isn't our problem — we are

Re-printed without permission.

Canada has to do better, and that starts with the prime minister

By Conrad Black

Published Jan 31, 2026

Last updated 1 day ago

6 minute read

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/trump-isnt-our-problem-we-are

Since my reference to it last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address in Davos seems to have been both intended and received as a policy manifesto for Canada and also for other countries that feel short-shrifted by what have traditionally been known as the “great powers.” The prime minister quoted the Czech president and former dissident Václav Havel that the communist system sustained itself by adopting the habit initiated by a greengrocer, of placing in his window the Marxist tocsin “Workers of the world, unite!”  (The 300 divisions of Stalin’s Red Army had more to do with it.) This gesture to the regime was widely taken up in the Soviet bloc, in what  Havel described as “living within a lie.” Carney considers this analogous to the adherence of Canada and other countries to “what we called the rules-based international order” (a clangorous platitude that reminds me of my bossy Grade 1 public school teacher).

His point was that the “rules-based system” was being abused and that Canada and other countries are the victims of it. “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness,” he said. He went on to criticize great powers for using “tariffs as leverage” and treating “supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” He was clear that he regarded the United States as the wrong-doing hegemon, and represented his recent trade deal with China as a strategic pivot.

His premises are hard to sustain. Comparing the relationship that the United States has with Canada, or that exists generally among western countries, with the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe is an outrage. Stalin murdered millions of his own citizens, negotiated the Nazi-Soviet pact, tore up all his agreements to vacate the countries the Red Army ostensibly liberated and looted the so-called satellite countries for decades. The United States tolerated a trade deficit of $1.2 trillion, which was simply an outright gift, mainly to America’s so-called allies, most of which are prosperous countries in no need of such charity.

At this point, Carney’s deal with China is effectively a swap of 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles annually at the most favoured nation rate of 6.1 per cent (down from the former 100 per cent), in exchange for China reducing tariffs on Canadian canola seed to 15 per cent. This is not a very seismic adjustment of our trade patterns and has to be seen as a pilot project. The fact remains that the United States in 2024 received about 76 per cent of Canada’s exports ago and supplied 62 per cent of its imports into Canada, which ran a $103-billion surplus with the U.S. Canada ran a $31 billion trade deficit with China in 2024, which accounted for only eight per cent of Canada’s imports, and received only four per cent of Canada’s exports. And China is a totalitarian despotism that’s proud of its comprehensive surveillance of its vast population, is not a fair-trading country and has been meddling in our elections.

Canada has been trying to diversify its trade for many years, but nothing has significantly reduced the percentage of Canadian exports to the United States. Canada’s trade strategy has to begin with the fact that our most valuable strategic asset is our preferential access to the U.S. market. Many readers will recall that prior to the first election of U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016, it was impossible to set foot out of doors without being button-holed by someone announcing that China was about to pass the United States as the world’s greatest economy. Today, U.S. nominal GDP is nearly $31 trillion and China’s is $19 trillion.