Mark Carney’s Plans Are Bigger Than Trump

Canada’s new prime minister is trying to play a global game.

Canada’s last breakup, with Great Britain, took roughly 100 years of painstaking and piecemeal constitutional reform to accomplish. This time, things are moving a little faster. Since President Donald Trump launched his trade war against his closest neighbor shortly after taking office a second time—leveling tariffs of up to 50 percent on hundreds of goods—relations have been icy, and keep getting icier. “Canadian-American relations go back and forth, and they sometimes get fairly bad,” Norman Hillmer, Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University and a leading historian on the subject, told me. This time, however, it feels as though the love is really gone. “They’ve never been like this,” he said. “This is right off the charts.”

While the White House has been issuing a torrent of threats—including promises to use “economic force” to annex Canada, and hints at other more direct methods, like forced annexation—Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has been quietly hunting for new suitors. For over a year, The Wall Street Journal reports, he has been exchanging sweet nothings on long-distance phone calls with the leaders of the Old Continent. Canada, he teases foreign leaders, is open for business. Its huge tracts of land are just waiting to be exploited—its amber grain, pink potash, and hot natural gas overflowing in abundance. And with generous new tax incentives to rival even American corporate giveaways, it’ll even pick up the check. We’re just like America, he hints—only sweeter.

It would seem Europe got the message. In her State of the Union address to the European Parliament in September, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, if anything, came on too strong. Tearing the corset of EU precedent, she proposed a wholly invented new category of “associate member” for Canada. “We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world,” she fawned. “And we will now build our shared future as well.”

What, exactly, “associate member” would mean is anyone’s guess; officials on both sides soon played it down with mild embarrassment. In his response, Carney referred only to “an alliance for the future.” Some members of the European Parliament responded with the bitterness of a rejected suitor. “It was an absurd and unrealistic knee-jerk reaction,” Siegbert Frank Droese, a far-right German MEP, lamented. Europe simply wanted “the closest possible” relationship, President of the European Council Antonio Costa clarified. “I don’t think we should get too bogged down with words and labeling,” Mark Camilleri of the Canada EU Trade and Investment Association told me, channeling the consummate bachelor.

In Carney’s Don Draper–esque world of jet-setting luncheons and grenadine ties, this was a play well-executed. Just look, he seemed to say. They’re throwing themselves at us. His oblique references to America’s boorishness on the world stage—“economic integration is now being weaponised,........

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