Howard Anglin: Canada’s relationship with America will never be ‘over’

What does Mark Carney really think about Canada’s once and future relationship with the United States? More importantly, does it matter?

During the election, Carney drew applause from Official Canada when he declared: “the old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military security cooperation is over.” It went down so well, he repeated the line in his election night victory speech.

Yet there he was, a week later, telling Donald Trump that their first meeting marked “the beginning of a new relationship between Canada and the United States,”^{1I’ve seen protests from Liberals that the two statements–that the old relationship is over and that we are beginning a new relationship–are logically coherent. To which I’d ask: what has in fact changed in a week? What agreements ended, what new deals were made? The apologists are confusing the vicissitudes of a relationship with a break in the relationship.} only to back-track for his Canadian audience with a clunky paraphrase of William Lyon Mackenzie King: “we [will] cooperate if necessary but not necessarily cooperate.”

So, which is it? All of the above, of course. Carney is not the first Canadian politician to speak out of both sides of his mouth about the United States (or, for that matter, to flatter different audiences with what he thinks they want to hear). Nor does it matter what Carney really thinks; he will continue to be publicly equivocal because the Canadian people are themselves equivocal about the relationship.

Since 1940, when King and President Roosevelt agreed to establish a Permanent Joint Board on Defence, and despite occasional strains (notably over the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Iraq War), our military fate has been joined with America. From about the same time, thanks to the wartime and post-war industrial policy of King’s economic factotum, C.D. Howe, so has our economic fate.

The yoking of two disproportionate economies was never going to be equal, and Canadians have often resented this asymmetrical dependency, but neither have we been prepared to bear the costs of true independence. The compromise we settled on was to pocket the military savings and the economic benefits while reserving the right to complain and talk up our notional independence to anyone who will listen.

Canadians aren’t unique in our equivocation. In Europe, the buzz today is about “neo-Gaullism” and “strategic autonomy.” What exactly is meant by these terms is unclear, which is fitting given their source. Charles De Gaulle was an anti-ideologue whose “doctrine of circumstances,” which he developed in his 1932 book, The Edge of the Sword, counselled ruthless pragmatism. It is not a policy prescription.

There is no “Gaullism,” the saying went, there is only de Gaulle. The only constants were the man and his quasi-religious commitment to the grandeur of France. It follows that without a de Gaulle, there can be no Gaullism, and it hardly needs to be said that Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Keir Starmer, and Mark Carney are no de Gaulle. Nor is there any grandeur left in Europe outside its museums (there never was any in Canada).

Geopolitics has also changed since de Gaulle’s time. Supply chains and mass communication mean national economies and cultures are more integrated than ever, while domestic budgets devote ever higher amounts to welfare, health care, and pensions—and, consequently, less to military spending. Strategic autonomy isn’t an option for countries whose choices are constrained by such trade-offs.

Strategic independence is even less realistic for Canada than for Europe. We are a North American nation, and a close relationship with the dominant North American power is a necessity for us, not a choice. Pierre Trudeau flirted with a sort of “Maple Gaullism,” but his visits to Havana and Peking were stunts. Even a committed anti-imperialist like Trudeau couldn’t unfuse the Canadian and American economies.

For Canada, geography, rather than politics or popular opinion on either side of the border, is destiny. We can’t move neighbourhoods, and it would be foolish to make generational decisions based on the temporary occupant next door. Trump, like all second-term presidents, is already a lame duck, and after next year’s midterms, he will be mostly irrelevant. He can complicate our relationship, but he can’t end it.

In the meantime, there are things we can do. Dependency doesn’t mean we have no agency. It means we must do everything we can to set ourselves up to deal with America from a position of strength and to remedy the weakness of being a captive supplier of our energy resources. That’s why Trudeau’s woo-woo economics and the artificial caps he imposed on our energy development were so disastrous.

But we shouldn’t confuse diversification with decoupling. Carney can say we “need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States,” but his rhetoric is more dramatic than the reality. Of course, we should diversify, but our governments have been pursuing trade diversification for decades, and we still trade overwhelmingly with our neighbour. We always will; it doesn’t make economic sense not to.

Even if we build more ports and pipelines, as we should, our fate will still be tied to America’s. After his recent meeting with U.S. Vice President JD Vance, Carney acknowledged as much. He posted on X that “We spoke about building a new economic and security relationship between Canada and the United States—one that addresses immediate trade pressures, strengthens our defence cooperation, and secures our shared border. We’re strongest when we work together.”

You may not like it; I may not like it; Carney may not like it—but it’s our only choice.