The new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney assured Tuesday, May 6, that his country would never be “never for sale”, during his meeting at the White House with Donald Trump who, on the contrary, sees the possibility of a “wonderful marriage” if the United States annexed their neighbor to the North.
For their first face-to-face, the tension was palpable between the two leaders despite the smiles displayed. Mark Carney was elected a week ago on the promise to face the American president, whose threats are anxious about Canadians. But he must also avoid pointing the American president if he wants to tear him off a commercial compromise.
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Donald Trump, however, repeated that he would not return to his decisions concerning customs duties, saying that nothing could bring him, even after discussion with the Canadian Prime Minister, to go back. “It’s like that,” he said.
The American president has already imposed customs duties on Canadian steel and aluminum, in particular, and threatens his northern neighbor with generalized customs taxes of 25 %. “Canada is a country that should be able to manage on the economy alone,” said Donald Trump. “There is no reason why we subsiden Canada.”
“White smoke”
Upon arrival of the head of the Canadian government, the two men shaken their hands and exchanged a few words and then Donald Trump raised his fist for the photographers, imitated by Mark Carney.
We should not expect “white smoke” at the end of the meeting, had warned Mark Carney on Friday, using a topical metaphor in these times of conclave. According to him, the old relationship between the two countries based on “growing integration” is “finished”, and it is a question of how the two countries “will cooperate in the future”.
Last week, Donald Trump qualified the new head of the Canadian government “very sympathetic man”, an incomparably more tone leads than that reserved for former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for whom the republican billionaire has a fierce antipathy.
-Mark Carney, who emerged from recent legislative elections as a winner while his training, the Liberal Party (center-left), was still a few months ago promised a bitter defeat, had summed up his delicate negotiation position on Friday.
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“My government will fight to get the best (commercial) agreement. It will take the necessary time, but not more,” said the former central banker broke up with crisis management. For example, he held the rudder of the Bank of England in the Brexit storm.
Technocrat without campaign experience, Mark Carney owes his election to Donald Trump. Since his return to power, the latter has launched a particularly violent political attacks against Canada, repeating that the gigantic countries was doomed to become the 51st US State.
Different personality
“This is a very important moment for (Mark Carney), since he hammered during the campaign he could face Mr. Trump,” Geneviève Tellier, political scientist at the University of Ottawa, told AFP. “It must be fine to leave a chance for the future,” said the political scientist. In Canada, many feared a public altercation such as that having opposed Donald Trump to the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the oval office.
The new Prime Minister, with a measured temperament and prudent expression, has a very different personality from that of the US eruptive president, but also that, very extroverted, by Justin Trudeau.
In the oval office, Trump said in front of Carney that he “would love” to find a new trade agreement with Ottawa, while saying that he did not want cars or steel from his northern neighbor.
The two countries are currently linked by a free trade agreement (ACEUM) concluded during the first term of Donald Trump. But renegotiating this text would be a long and complicated process not very compatible with the will of the American president to quickly conclude spectacular commercial “deals”.
