The big problem with writing an adulatory story about someone is when you have to leave out a highly important fact that would completely upend the very premise of your fable. Such was the case with Simon van Zuylen-Wood singing high praises for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as somehow leading the resistance against President Donald Trump in his country.
Mr. van Zuylen-Wood set the adoration scene of Carney early in his New York magazine story on Monday in "The Canadians Are Furious."
For months, Donald Trump had been casually threatening to annex Canada and turn it into a state, adding insult to the injury of the trade war he was waging on the country. One prime minister resigned amid Trump’s bullying, and another was elected because voters thought he could stand up to him. In the ordinarily placid provinces, feelings of bewilderment, anxiety, and offense hardened into a defiant resolve against the United States. “Elbows up,” went the nation’s new hockey-inspired mantra. As a Montreal journalist told me, Americans were preoccupied with “12 different crises.” In Canada, this was the crisis.
Let us continue to be amused by van Zuylen-Wood's Carney "elbows up" hype until we notice that Canadians are now enraged by the same Prime Minister's "elbows down" reality which van Zuylen-Wood conveniently skips because it would destroy the premise of his creative fiction writing.
That month, the central banker and political novice Mark Carney led the underdog Liberals to an upset national victory, which the party owed to the electorate’s view that the once-favored Conservative Party could not credibly stand up to Trump. “Trump is trying to break us so he can own us,” Carney had argued on the campaign trail. Even if most Canadians didn’t deem it likely that Trump would literally invade, there was agreement that he was, for some reason, fixated on crippling them. Carney has since applied counter-tariffs on some $30 billion of U.S. goods, targeting red-state-manufactured products such as bowling balls and bullets.
Finally we get this from van Zuylen-Wood:
In July, seemingly out of the blue, Trump threatened a new round of tariffs on all Canadian goods, posting an open letter to Carney on social media in which he complained that Canada had “financially retaliated” against the U.S. and doubled down on the assertion that Canada fails “to stop the drugs from pouring” across the border. Carney responded on X: “We are committed to continuing to work with the United States.” But, he added, “we are building Canada strong” and “strengthening our trading partnerships throughout the world.”
In July? Notice that van Zuylen-Wood oh so conveniently skipped something monumental that happened just before July at the end of June. An independent Journalist writing at The Globe and Mail of Canada reacted sharply about it in "What was Mark Carney thinking when he walked back the digital services tax?"
So much for elbows up.
Prime Minister Mark Carney briskly walked back Canada’s digital services tax (DST) late Sunday, after U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to stop trade talks. There was not much of even a hint of a fight from our Prime Minister. When Mr. Carney was elected in late April, we thought we were getting a real fighter, someone who campaigned on the idea that the “the old relationship between Canada and the United States, based on steadily increasing integration, is over.”
...From failing to retaliate on steel and aluminum tariffs to stratospheric defence spending promises (likely to result in austerity and major cutbacks to the civil service), from a border bill that responds to fake fentanyl crisis to folding on a modest taxation policy, Mr. Carney appears to be everything his more lettered critics warned us of.
Mr. Carney’s sorry Sunday episode puts in stark contrast his resolve and firmness during the election. We voted for a champion, not capitulation.
If Mr. van Zuylen-Wood had included Carney's cave on the Digital Services Tax his story title would have to be much more truthfully amended to "The Canadians are Furious...at Mark Carney." Ironically those Canadians now most furious with Carney are his own fellow Liberals such as the Canadian Union of Public Employees who declared that "CUPE condemns Carney’s caving to Trump on the digital services tax."
