Prime Minister Mark Carney belatedly came around to the position of NDP’s Avi Lewis, Wab Kinew, and organized labour: that no trade deal was better than a bad deal.
On Friday, Carney walked away from Donald Trump’s trade deal, leading to 50 per cent tariffs on almost $30 billion of Canadian goods coming into effect.
What killed the negotiations was the stupidity, greed, and arrogance of Trump and his top advisors, who took Carney’s sweetheart deal and said “what if we pushed Canada just a little bit more?” They demanded truly insulting things, from controlling our trade with other nations to attacks on the French language. Even Carney couldn’t endorse something this unacceptable and save his political career.
Carney has made a gamble: That capitalism and trickle-down economics will save Canada. That gamble is wrong, and as we enter a new phase in the trade war against Trump’s USA, it becomes even more clear that the only path forward is to oppose the United States on all fronts, not simply to try and out-capitalism Trump and his cronies.
Carney’s pitch from the very beginning was that, by embracing free-market economics and the virtues of inequality (cutting taxes on capital gains on the rich while firing public servants) we would gain the tools needed to defeat Trump, as well as convince Americans to make a deal based on shared right-wing interests. Carney himself was willing to sign a deal largely in the Americans’ favour only days ago, in part because he believed in the capitalist project as a sacrosanct ideal to be preserved.
In his first press conference after walking away from the deal, Carney invoked the rhetoric and imagery of war, how the U.S. was attacking Canada, and he wasn’t wrong. But that raises the question? How do you win a war that poses an existential threat to your country? Do you win by cutting taxes on yachts and making the rich richer? Or do you do it with a collective effort built on solidarity and shared sacrifice?
As new polling indicates, the vast majority of Canadians feel rejecting the Trump deal was the right move, but millions still worry about losing their jobs. There is a sense across Canada that all hands-on-deck are needed to defend this country, but that some may well end up sacrificing more than others.
So it is imperative for Carney and his majority government to ensure not only that workers who face job losses are protected, but also make sure that the richest individuals and corporations pay their fair share to resist the MAGA regime.
This money should be used, not merely as a slush fund for corporations, but to establish crown corporations, worker cooperatives, and other forms of non-capitalist enterprise designed to build a Canada that rejects Trump’s worldview in its entirety.
By creating a special tax on wealth and excess profits, Carney can forge the Canadian Freedom Fund, dedicated to building a Trump-proof economy now — and preparing to build a future in which we need not rely on the whims of the American capitalist class, or any capitalist class for that matter. This money should be used, not merely as a slush fund for corporations, but to establish crown corporations, worker cooperatives, and other forms of non-capitalist enterprise designed to build a Canada that rejects Trump’s worldview in its entirety.
The dogmatic belief in capitalism among Liberals and Conservatives especially is a fundamental barrier for Canada’s autonomy. For as long as we uphold that ideology, we will also be wedded to the capitalist hegemon on our southern border. If we want to beat the Americans, we can’t do it by trying to out-American them. We have to move in the diametrically opposed direction.
In his final speech as federal NDP leader, Tommy Douglas harked back to the Second World War: the last time Canada faced a truly existential threat to our freedom. He made it clear that the war demonstrated the viability of public ownership and economic planning as a way to resist tyrannical foreign forces:
“In 1939, when we declared war against Nazi Germany, for the first time, we used the Bank of Canada to make financially possible what was physically possible. We took a million men and women and put them in uniform. We fed and clothed and armed them. The rest of the people of Canada went to work. The government organised over a hundred crown corporations. We manufactured things that had never been manufactured before. We gave our farmers and fishermen guaranteed prices, and they produced more food than we’d ever produced in peacetime. We built the third largest merchant navy in the world and we manned it. In order to prevent profiteering and inflation, we fixed prices, and we did it all without borrowing a single dollar from outside of Canada.”
While the enemy differs today, the message is broadly similar. We can mobilize our cooperative commonwealth to not only build a just society, but also an independent society.
After the war, Canada returned to old capitalist habits, and this led to the increasing capture of our economy by American plutocrats, culminating in NAFTA 50 years later. That’s what capitalism delivered: a silent surrender of our sovereignty over just a few generations to the Americans, now becoming more explicit than ever before.
If Carney wants to simply get a slightly better surrender deal, capitalism is the way forward. But if he wants Canada to be truly Strong and Free, he’s going to have to realize his own ideology is a dead end.
If we want a post-American order, it must be a post-capitalist order.
Christo Aivalis is a political commentator and historian, holding a PhD in Canadian History from Queen’s University. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, The Breach, Maclean’s, Canadian Dimension, the Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post.
