The Fantasy House of Mark Carney — craft rewrite

Voice: Black 101 (craft) Original: The Fantasy House of Mark Carney

Mark Carney now presents himself as more than the Western counterweight to Donald Trump. He presents himself as the global one: the man who will show how to stand up to Washington, how to make Trump lose the midterms, and how to damage the American economy so that no future president can bully smaller partners. At the last moment he walked away from a tariff arrangement that, on the American side, would have given Canada privileged access relative to almost every other trading partner.

Canada has for years run a goods surplus of some fifty billion dollars with the United States inside a supposedly free North American zone. Carney’s public claim is that American terms would have stripped Canadian sovereignty and crushed Canadian—especially French-Canadian—culture. He has not published the rejected texts. His spokesmen have not explained why talks collapsed at the eleventh hour. The successive justifications have been incoherent.

Analysts on both sides of the border now note that American digital firms are not, as a rule, levied special taxes to subsidize local and ethnic culture while they operate in Canada, any more than Canadian firms would be so taxed in the United States. Both governments also accept that China dumps cheap steel and aluminum into Canada; Canadian manufacturers then use that cost advantage to ship assembled vehicles into the American market below the price of U.S.-made cars, thereby routing around American tariffs on Beijing. China will send nearly fifty thousand electric vehicles into Canada under a light tariff, so that the Canadian EV market becomes increasingly Chinese.

The maneuver is larger than steel and cars. Carney has concluded a comprehensive Chinese-Canadian package covering travel, visas, food safety, energy, and public security, and has described it as a new paradigm in which “middle powers” play China against the United States. Canada’s nominal GDP is roughly that of New York State. The irony is that he attacks his neighbor for trade unfairness while warming to the communist dictatorship that has been history’s most systematic violator of trade rules—currency manipulation, dumping for market share, theft of copyright and patents, and the imprisonment of a million Uyghurs. Panama’s experience after inviting a Chinese presence at the American-built canal, and the original Monroe Doctrine’s concern with extra-hemispheric intrusion into North America, are not mentioned.

China is a totalitarian police state that, in the account given here, infected the world with a manufactured gain-of-function virus that killed more than 1.5 million North Americans, stonewalled inquiries into its Wuhan laboratory, and has pledged to take Taiwan, thereby driving Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea into a defensive alignment with the United States.

What, then, fuels the posture? Canada’s oil, gas, timber, and minerals have not made it a military or economic dynamo. Its population is 11.8 percent of America’s; its economy is barely one-thirteenth the size; GDP per capita is about 60 percent of the American figure. It relies on the U.S. military to deter challenges to its Arctic claims (including the disputed Northwest Passage) and to keep its skies free of foreign combat aircraft and missiles. The navy that was once among the world’s leading surface fleets is reduced to fewer than thirty ships; its eighty-nine American-made jets are more than forty years old.

The dreams, the piece argues, come from insecurity rather than strength. Carney and Justin Trudeau nearly wrecked the economy despite the resource endowment. Canada has only half the GDP of California—itself described as decaying under neo-socialist rule—while having roughly the same population. Nearly 45 percent of Canadians are foreign-born or the children of the foreign-born; the resulting welfare costs strain a European-style socialist model. Fertility is 1.25, among the lowest in the West; euthanasia accounts for 5 percent of deaths, the highest rate in the West.

Carney nevertheless speaks of American bullying even as Canada runs surpluses, sends 72 percent of its exports to the United States, and depends on American forces for safety. That asymmetry subsidizes Canada’s energy, immigration, defense, regulatory, and tax choices. The energy sector needs American purchases of tar-sands oil, specialized U.S. refineries, and American pipelines. For more than a decade Canada refused the NATO 2-percent-of-GDP target and relied on American protection.

Carney has called the dispute a “fight” and even a “war.” Yet he is a globalist banker who, until he became prime minister, held citizenship in three countries. Ninety-one percent of his investments sit in U.S.-based companies; two of his four children, like him, attended college in the United States and now live there, along with nearly a million other Canadians.

The timing, on this account, is not accidental. Only by inflating anti-American nationalism can he hope to head off autonomy referenda in Alberta and Quebec, and only by targeting tariffs at red and purple border states while coordinating with left-wing Democrats can he try to affect the U.S. midterms and restore an earlier status quo. At home the campaign has succeeded: Canadians boo “The Star-Spangled Banner,” boast of an “elbows up” policy, and flood social media with schemes to hurt Americans. Three-quarters of the country has accepted the fantasy. Hating America has become a pastime.

It will not end well, the argument continues, for at least the reasons given. America is not the author of Canada’s socialist, globalist, low-fertility, high-euthanasia, under-armed choices; it has merely subsidized them. Washington would prefer a strong partner, not a weak one lashing out. The American public has been largely indifferent, but as the scale of the venom and the brinkmanship become visible, anger is rising and the quarrel is being recast as an affront to Americans themselves, who have long memories. Carney is isolated: Europe may applaud the defiance but will not join the campaign. When the United States demanded symmetrical trade, only China and Canada—the latter already enjoying the most generous access of any country—imposed counter-tariffs. Other nations did not treat the fifty-billion-dollar surplus as a birthright. Canada is far more exposed: 72 percent of its exports go south, while only 15 percent of American exports go north.

The rest of the source is truncated.