Read Mark Carney's full speech after trade talks with the U.S. collapsed
Here's the transcript from Mark Carney's Saturday morning Aug 22 news conference:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-full-remarks-us-trade-talks-suspended-9.7317033
There's a lot of details in it. I'll copy/paste what I think are the highlights:
For over a year, Canada has worked intensively and in good faith with the United States to negotiate a new comprehensive trade deal.
We have been under no illusions. [...] We recognized that sometimes its signature was written in pencil.
Over the past year, the U.S. has imposed a series of tariffs that violate its commitments under our agreement with them and Mexico, so-called CUSMA. The United States has continually changed their rationale for these actions, from fentanyl to taxes on U.S. tech giants, to certification of U.S. aircraft, to the sharing of tolls of a bridge that Canada built and paid for, to our dairy policy, to provincial decisions to not sell American alcohol during a trade war, to a television advertisement that quoted Ronald Reagan, to smoke from wildfires while they threatened our communities.
Canada is also the largest customer for 26 U.S. states, and a top three customer for 45 U.S. states. Last year, Americans sold almost $600 billion in goods and services to Canadians - that's more than $1.6 billion every single day. Canadian exports to the U.S. lower the costs for American families. In contrast, tariffs are taxes, taxes which are ultimately paid by US consumers.
And while we believed, earlier this week, that we were moving towards a mutually beneficial agreement, in recent days, the United States proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits to Canada, and called into question the reliability of any deal. In short, they asked too much and they offered too little.
Building at home and diversifying trade abroad is not our Plan B. It has been our Plan A from the start. Canada will continue to pursue this path to build Canada Strong, because it's right and it's working.
Canada is now the best-connected economy in the world. Over the last year we have signed more than 20 trade and security deals across five continents. We completed our most recent deal, with the UAE, in a record 47 days. Canadian businesses now enjoy tariff-free access to 1.5 billion consumers. Over the next six months, we will double that number through new trade deals from ASEAN, to India.
Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us. And I promised that that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started.
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More people need to understand this.
I believe that any country that wishes to maintain a society based on cooperation and mutual respect will have no choice but to accept the hardships that come with it and turn its back on the U.S. once and for all.
The leaders of this country are representatives of an authoritarian oligarchy and thus enemies of democracy, as evidenced by their treatment of their own people.
I see no signs whatsoever that this could change in the future, because, if we’re honest, the U.S. has long been an oligarchy—now it’s simply shedding the facade, as its ruling class has realized that nothing can stop it, a fact also evidenced by the fact that the criminal regime ruling the country is not held accountable even for the most blatant crimes.
Unfortunately the US has turned into a kelptoceacy (listen to the perephal/jackpot series, the show was shit but books are good), their leadership cannot be trusted for the long term. They only want money, cash, hard currency they can increase power with. Even if by some miracle the US votes themselves away from their current situation they will be in danger in another 4 years at most. I think the people are decent but misguided in their security,they don't really understand (due to education deficits in their own system) of why they are truly in the situation they are. Or what it means to others that they let it get that way.
Aka yes lets give the most powerful military to the most money hungry people on earth, oh can we? Seriously at what point was that a good decision?
Never! And at some point I hope the word starts using proper methods to show the US citizens what sort of ideals are being made in their name (since the US media sucks), eventually it'll get through or they're all in 1984 with pee wee gobbles in charge (Steven miller, or other fascist kegsbreath or some unelected official from project 2025, bought or whatever, Trump doesn't care shit as long as his net worth goes up)
https://www.saab.com/markets/canada/gripen-for-canada
I'm not Canadian and I'm not advocating for any course of action here, but there's a LOT of flirting with pushing Canada into a "well, if we're going to have to go it alone anyway" posture where they might just decide to rebuild their arms industry. There's no way they're not thinking about it now.
Canada is no different from the US, we lost a lot of manufacturing ability and it's never coming back. Even the arms industry we have is all US companies just using Canada for lower labor costs because no one can afford US healthcare for employees.
If the Republicans fixed affordable healthcare in the US, Canada and Mexico would be fucked without a single tariff.
I'm very confident that will never happen.
I didn't know/understand that. Is that true of Bombardier as well?
If they're ever going to bring back manufacturing there'll never be a better time than now with GCAP or Gripen if they care about control.
I also agree they'll never bring affordable healthcare to the US.
After his speech Mark Carney took questions from reporters. I'll summarize the first few questions and his responses along with video timestamp.
https://www.cpac.ca/headline-politics/episode/pm-carney-speaks-to-media-after-suspension-of-canada-us-trade-talks?id=6b77d2c2-d09d-47fb-9bf1-7c88f3c2445c
@23:07 What specific last minute changes made the deal untenable?
@25:55 Was Howard Lutnick's involvement in the last days an impediment to getting a deal?
@29:40 What's your message for those who will become collatoral damage?
The "life of the administration" could literally be 90 days away. If Trump loses the midterms, his balls are cut off. If Trump wins the midterms, then it's hopeless and Canada needs to look elsewhere.
I think he meant the administration in Canada, which is good for a couple more years, probably.
I replayed that section of the video. His exact words were:
"We will provide support and we will do whatever it takes to support these businesses. We'll be releasing details of this early next week alongside our tariff actions to support these businesses. And we will support these businesses for as long as it takes. In other words beyond the life of this US administration."