Canada has a new leader. The Liberal Party of Canada elected Mark Joseph Carney as the new party leader and Prime minister of Canada-designate on Sunday March 9. Carney is succeeding Justin Trudeau as prime minister at a time when the country is at war with the United States of America.  It is a major economic war, declared by Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, that poses a very serious threat to the stability of North America that we had taken for granted. 

Carney is an excellent choice that the Liberal Party has made. He is a 59-year-old economist who holds a high honors bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University, and a master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Oxford, England. His distinguished career has included serving as Deputy Minister of Finance of Canada, Governor of the Bank of Canada, Governor of the Bank of England, and very high-profile positions in the private international finance and investment world. 

Whereas Carney is new in the trenches of partisan politics, he has been at the centre of action in helping Canada and the United Kingdom manage very serious crises. His calm, focused, and very agreeable persona is a striking contrast with the mercurial, inattentive, impulsive, and hyperactive ruler of the United States. 

His superb intellectual ability, an outstanding résumé, and excellent command of the rules and practices of international commerce will likely make Trump feel more insecure than he already is. This will likely trigger the American ruler to hurl more insults and other bully tactics at the new Canadian leader. 

Trump will soon have an opportunity to try and stir things up in Canada a bit more. Carney is inheriting leadership of a Liberal Party that has been low in the polls because the country had become tired of Trudeau. Furthermore, by law, the next federal election must be held no later than October 20, 2025. Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, this country’s main opposition party, is a Trump-lite politician whom the American ruler will likely prefer to do business with than face the more formidable Carney.

These and other factors will be too tantalizing for Trump to resist the urge to mess up Canada more than he is already doing with his erratic on-and-off impositions of high tariffs on Canadian imports into the United States. 

If he can get a more malleable leader in Ottawa, Trump may find it a little easier to pursue what appears to be his true goal in the game he has been playing. He seems to be seriously keen to try and add Canada to the United States and surpass the achievements of American presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Polk, Andrew Johnson, William McKinley, and Woodrow Wilson under whose watch their country bought or annexed Florida, Louisiana, Texas and California, Alaska, the Philippines, and the Virgin Islands.

Such a development would be the crowning achievement of the American ruler who has fantasized about being one of the greatest presidents of his country. Even before he adds territory to the United States, a Bill to curve Trump's head on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota is already before Congress. There, Trump's likeness will join George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.  

Trump knows that most Canadians and their leaders will not contemplate merger with the United States. The two countries share the continent, a long history of trade, mutual defence, and close-knit cooperation in the remarkable scientific discoveries that have propelled human civilization forward in the last one hundred years.

However, Canada and the USA are so different that one literally feels the change the moment one crosses the border. Their social-cultural attitudes to life, money, duty to neighbour, race relations, guns, healthcare, international roles, are a few of the areas where it would be very hard to reconcile their positions. To be sure, Trump would be the least qualified person to persuade Canadians to become Americans. He has been consistently unpopular in this country since he was first elected president in 2016. 

It does not help that Trump has used fabrications to justify his assault on Canada. He has complained that Canada and Mexico, (plus China, Europe, and pretty much everyone else, except Russia) have ripped off his country through trade agreements that favoured them against the United States of America. He has claimed that there is a huge southward flow of fentanyl, a highly addictive narcotic, that he attributes to Canada's lax border controls.

His claims against Canada and Mexico are false. But that is not news to him. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was in force from 1994 to 2020, was a win-win trade pact for Canada, USA and Mexico. It was replaced by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on July 1, 2020, after demands for revisions by Trump himself. The new Agreement, ratified by Trump, included a provision for review and adjustment in 2026. So, Trump has violated his own Agreement. 

So, a positive consequence of the American ruler’s actions has been that Canadians have rallied behind this country’s flag in a show of unity I had not seen in more than four decades. A “buy made-in-Canada” attitude is emerging. A boycott of American products is being seen in grocery stores. People are cancelling planned trips to the United States. Canadians are angry.

The federal prime minister and his provincial counterparts have found a common voice in their tough response to Trump. Canada has imposed retaliatory tariffs on American goods. Different provinces have imposed serious measures. For example, my home province of Ontario has imposed a 25 percent surcharge on electricity that it supplies to the American states of Michigan, Minnesota, and New York. And there is more to come. Doug Ford, our Conservative Premier, who was a Trump supporter, is now leading the charge against the American ruler's attack.

Canada, a natural resource-rich country that is a major supplier of oil, gas, timber and other critical commodities to the USA, has made it known that the gloves are off and none of these goods are exempt from being withheld from Trump’s America.

Clearly, Canadians are in for a very rough ride. This country’s economy is so dependent on the United States that Trump’s tariffs will hurt the Canadian economy, including the Canadian dollar, and destabilize our personal finances. However, current evidence suggests that Canadians are willing to suffer the economic pain than surrender to the American ruler’s whims.

Americans will not be spared the economic pain resulting from their ruler’s declaration of war on their neighbours. Whether they will have leaders to galvanize them to politically resist Trump’s agenda is up in the air. On the other hand, Canadians have a new leader who has already made it clear that he will not let Trump succeed. In his acceptance speech this weekend, Carney said:” We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves.” He was not bluffing. I have lived here for almost 44 years. I have come to know this nation very well. Trump has poked the wrong animal.