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The Love Story of Doug Ford and Mark Carney

Their anti-Trump bromance is paying off politically. What Canadians get out of it is harder to say

At first glance, Liberal prime minister Mark Carney and Progressive Conservative Ontario premier Doug Ford might seem like an odd couple. Carney: Harvard-educated economist, Goldman Sachs alum, former central banker, cosmopolitan but dull as dishwater, the first prime minister to have never previously held elected office. Ford: heir to a suburban sticker business, rising to power as a belligerent right-wing populist on Toronto’s city council, now a three-term premier.

Their differences go further. Ford, along with his more notorious brother Rob, has sometimes been compared to Donald Trump, thanks to his talent for culture-war grievance and general air of sweaty, bad-hair, used-car-salesman sleaze. Ford has even praised Trump, predicting in 2016 that the new president would “run the country a lot better” and, in 2025, saying he was “100 percent happy” that Trump had won the previous year. Carney, on the other hand, has built his entire political persona around being the anti-Trump: forestalling an all-but-inevitable Conservative victory last year, he was elected as a steady hand at the wheel, ready to navigate the troubled waters whipped up by the gale-force winds south of the border.

Despite all this, over the past year and a half, Carney and Ford have marched almost entirely in lockstep in their crusade against Trump’s tariffs. Recently, Carney defended Ford against suggestions that the premier’s intransigence had tanked the latest round of United States trade talks. “I’m the prime minister,” Carney said. “Ultimately, I am responsible with the cabinet for those decisions.” Meanwhile, Ford backed Carney’s decision to walk away from the talks—and took a few swipes at his former idol for good measure. “President Trump is a type of person that would steal your lunch money the first day,” Ford told reporters. “He’d steal the toque off your head the second day, and the third day, he’d steal your running shoes. He is not to be trusted, whatsoever.”

But Carney’s and Ford’s diverging styles are exactly what make them an effective tag team. Carney gets to play the role of good cop, leading trade negotiations as the sober, level-headed expert—the adult in the room. Ford, meanwhile, gets to indulge his own Trumpian instincts, displaying a flair for over-the-top attention mongering and insult comedy.

Last year, the Ford government trolled Republicans by broadcasting ads in the US featuring a voiceover of Ronald Reagan railing against tariffs, which helped trigger the collapse of an earlier round of trade talks. Ford has also threatened to cut off Ontario’s electricity and minerals supplies to the US; more recently, in response to the “Lake America” fracas, he installed a sign by Lake Ontario, declaring its name would remain “now and always.” He’s publicly called Trump a “loser,” a “dictator,” and the “king of bankruptcies.” In late August, after telling Trump to........

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