Carney drops the maple muscle routine while media work to find meat in a nothing burger
The economist and Trump the troublemaker spared a couple of questions worth asking
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
- Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France.
We learned from the meeting between Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump this week that Burke’s prophesy of extinguishment extends beyond Europe to North America, and across time from 1790 to 2025.
In fairness, Carney did, however tactically and instrumentally, seek to behave with the best modern imitation of graciousness. Alas, the well-intended effort was no match for the craftiness of the sophist-calculator in the room (Trump) or, indeed, for the Canadian PM’s default to his own besetting weakness (the temptations of economics).
The result was such a screaming void of non-information that the inimitable Paul Wells confessed online to sending up a prayer for his journalistic colleagues who were obliged to make news out of the nullity of niceness.
Carney was constrained from reprising the maple syrup tough guy guise he trotted out to win the federal election. The scorch marks from Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent auto-da-fe were doubtless still visible on the Oval Office walls. (Trump even alluded to them). But there were at least a couple of questions that could have been asked during pauses in the forelock tugging.
Or, if the Prime Minister of Canada wished to avoid appearing impolitic on his first official visit to Washington, there were questions that should have been asked by the assembled journalists for whom Wells prayed Godspeed.
One of them would be this necessary and sufficient query: “Mr. President, you’ve repeated until people’s ears ache that Canada has nothing America needs. Yet Canada sells $434.26 billion in goods, and $86 billion in services, to the United States annually. Could you clarify whether you are saying that Americans knowingly buy $526.26 billion worth of things they don’t need –or that they are too stupid to know they don’t need them?”
Even if the answer was only yet another Trump harrumph for 20 minutes circumnavigating the globe as viewed from the Mount Olympus of Mar-a-Lago, the question would at least have been asked. Unfortunately, there seems to be a pandemic in what is now known as the “profession” of journalism (when I was a lad, it was a trade like any other minus the obligation to carry a working class metal lunch pail) that renders the afflicted incapable of asking the obvious. Fancy-schmancy metaphysical theorizing about the future of everything? Fine and dandy. Meat and potatoes grilling about how statement X-Y-Z makes a particle of sense? Fuggedaboutit.
It's a perilous pity because it leaves the very people journalists are supposed to serve bereft of what they need to know and therefore ever more vulnerable to Burke’s sophisters, calculators and, well, economists.
Take, for example, an old-style gin-soaked wretch with fountain pen ink leaking all over his soiled white shirt, toting a dog-eared notebook as a theatrical prop to show he wasn’t just making up quotes. He (or more improbably she) would have asked during Canada’s recent election campaign: “Mr. Carney, you say that as an economist you’re best equipped to take on Donald Trump. How does that make sense when Trump repeatedly makes it clear he doesn’t give a fiddler’s pluck about what happens in economics as long as he can make a deal?”
Such a question would have served at least two purposes.
It might have spared Canadians the cringe-making moment during the Carney-Trump meeting when our inexperienced PM clumsily tried to find common ground with the President by pointing out their shared histories in real estate development. By their metaphors you shall know them. This one revealed that in the basal ganglia of his banker’s brain, the new Prime Minister is what he has been all his adult life: the economist who reduces all things, including the nation, to wealth and/or money.
“As you know from real estate development, some places are never for sale. We’re in one right now (the White House),” Carney said. “Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign during the last several months, it’s not for sale and won’t be for sale ever.”
National Post columnist John Ivison characterized the comment as Carney cleverly speaking Trump’s language, which is charitable (one might say chivalrous) but misses the point entirely. Canadians are not the “owners” of Canada. We’re not shareholders. We don’t invest in Mutual Funds Canada/Fonds Commun de Placement Canada. We’re citizens – long term, landed immigrant or otherwise.
(Alas, we’re also subjects of Charles, the foreign monarchical mongoose, who will soon hit us up for air fare and two days room and board in exchange for delivering the Throne Speech to tell us what “His Majesty the King’s” government plans for the upcoming Parliament. Fingers crossed he’ll abdicate on the spot and clear the way for creation of a proper Republic. But I regress.)
As citizens, our claim to Canada is not as commercial franchisees, money market lenders, or sellers of trinkets and trash. Canada is our home, our collective home, where each of us individually or in families has (or should have) a home, be it ever so humble.
The lapse into mortgage dealer banker speak is a telling indicator of how our just-elected Prime Minister thinks, at least for now, at least as he and his Liberal government proceed with wild-eyed dreams of a new government agency called Build Canada that will use bureaucratic market savvy to create 500,000 ownership dwelling units in the coming fiscal quarters.
Some, many, most Canadians might be perfectly happy with that kind of prime ministerial prime rate mindfulness. Good on them. But we should have known it before casting our ballots so we could make an informed decision. It’s a question an old-style gin-soaked wretch with fountain pen ink leaking all over his soiled white shirt would have wanted answered.
Instead, we had to wait until the economist ventured into the sophist calculator’s lair. A journalistic success story? I think not.
(Peter Stockland is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Montreal Gazette)
Thanks, Peter. I am already very tired of the Liberal biased media attempts to spin straw into gold when it comes to Carney. Almost no one asks real questions, and on the rare occasion one is asked, it is waved off/dismissed by Carney or responded to with word salad served with acetic dressing. Trump’s tariffs are a problem, but the notion that Trump is Canada’s biggest issue was always a farce endorsed by the talking heads and the media. That Carney would be tough and strong in his “handling” of Trump was always another farce. The Canadian electorate is so gullible. The Liberals “young priest” wrecked so much of Canada, so now the Liberal “old priest” takes over the mound, with the same weak bench, I might add.
You hit the nail on the head. Why even go? We need to fix our own economy first. Trump can behave whatever way he wishes, but he isn’t the problem. It’s our history of baaaaad leadership in the past ten years.