The Trump admins trolling – including Amb. Hoekstra sharing Canada 51st State – further erodes a historic bilateral partnership. Team Canada’s Carney/Ford good-cop/bad-cop strategy is strategic defense pre-free trade reviews.

The Trump administration, right down to these ambassador lackeys, are practically begging for a return to the dark ages. The entire administration exists solely to troll. It’s government by grievance & trolling, and Trump understands better than anyone else that all business, even politics, is show business. He puts on the massive spectacle and the administration falls in line. But no one should make the mistake that we’re not dealing with a very serious situation.

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Some might laugh off Trump calling Canada the 51st State – again – this time because we have fallen into a recession. But the real story is his Ambassador Pete Hoekstra sharing the Tweet.

While trade deals are quietly made behind closed doors, the cameras are distracting us from behind the scenes. The real danger is when everyone starts to mistake the theater for the actual policy.

Before modern democracy, political disputes were settled with broadswords and shields. The Trump administration actions through the ambassador are almost begging for a return to broadswords. Does this mean diplomatic decorum is dead? No. Nationally, we’re going to keep pretending it’s on life support because we’re Canadians and we’ve got a pathological addiction to over-politeness and a smug moral superiority, a dry smugness that’s baked into us. It serves us well to be honest.

But we have to be clear eyed about this: we didn’t break the relationship that we once had with the United States. Washington broke it. Trump torched and burned the most successful, lucrative bilateral partnership, the best global relationship that’s ever been seen in human history, that’s ever existed. It took generations of trust-building, hundreds of years to build that level of deep bilateral trust to construct our dynamic, relatively open, non-militarized border, and Trump managed to smash & completely destroy it in five years flat. That trust won’t be built back overnight. How easily can it be built up again? We’re looking at a minimum of three generations, seventy-five years, to get back to where things were pre-Trump. The rot & damage is permanently baked into the system.

PM Carney is playing a sophisticated game of diplomacy. He’s not going to risk the economy and national unity, he’s going to play things pragmatically smart and diplomatic. When he dismisses annexation threats as the ramblings of an exceptionally active social media user, that is the ultimate display of dry smugness that Canadians have built into us. It’s polite and it’s not rude, that is unless you know what he’s actually saying. It’s a masterclass in linguistic gymnastics to sidestep what’s actually happening and avoid the cage match Trump wants to have in his newly errected UFC stage outside the White House.

It’s no coincidence that the US Ambassador decided to jump in the 51st State antics on the eve of the CUSMA/USMCA/NAFTA review. The United States administration knows they have us over a barrel and that we need them more than they need us.

Which is why Carney’s cold, calculated, pragmatic response is shows that it’s about the economic line, and by refusing to hand the ambassador his walking papers via recall, he’s showing his the statesman who cares about the citizens; even if the lack of action upsets them all the same.

Enter Premier Doug Ford who knows how to swing a rusted iron pipe. While PM Carney plays pragmatic diplomacy, Doug Ford is scrapping outside. But here’s the thing: it’s not one or the other because one won’t work without the other. We are watching political good cop, bad cop on a national scale, a tag-team fight that has been agreed upon before the match kicked off in earnest.

The U.S. holds all of the cards and know it; we’re dealing with a bully who has the royal flush. But Doug Ford, our own self-proclaimed 800-pound gorilla, is the pocket wild card that we have to play. He can play to the show and cameras while Carney negotiates in the backroom.

If full USA tariffs actually went into full effect and we lost our free trade agreement, it would be the destruction of the entire Canadian economy. Both Carney and Ford understand that we need to be strong, but they also realize that sometimes being strong means one person gets to act rash while the other acts calm.

Will the Team Canada Mark Carney & Doug Ford Tag-Team performance actually save our economy from targeted tariffs? I have my doubts and time will tell. But we’re in a street fight, and we need a loud-mouthed scrapper making a scene out front while the quiet technocrat is in that back room figuring out how to keep the power on, because our trade relationship with the United States is what allows for us to prosper, and we can’t afford to let the lights go out.

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