TORONTO — President Donald Trump on Wednesday took a swipe at Canada and its prime minister, Mark Carney, saying the country “lives because of the United States,” a day after the Canadian leader declared in a blunt and widely praised address that the rules-based, U.S.-led international order was over and “is not coming back.”
“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us,” Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “They should be grateful, also, but they’re not. I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful. … Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
In the year since his return to the White House, Trump has frequently taken aim at Canada, historically one of America’s closest allies, imposing tariffs on its goods and threatening to use “economic force” to compel it to join the U.S. as the 51st state. He has questioned Canada’s viability as an independent country and said it would “cease to exist” without U.S. support. Such actions and comments have drawn broad rebuke from Canadians, and opened the most serious rift between the neighbors in two centuries.
Hours before Carney’s speech, Trump posted a digitally altered image on social media of a map with the U.S. flag superimposed on Venezuela, whose leader, Nicolás Maduro, he ordered captured this month; Greenland, which he has threatened to seize; and Canada.
In recent days, Trump allies including former adviser Stephen K. Bannon have declared Canada “hostile” to the U.S. and voiced support for Albertan separatists, fueling once-unthinkable fears that the U.S. might meddle in a separatist referendum.
Carney, speaking to the global political and business elite Tuesday, urged Canada’s fellow “middle powers” to form new alliances as great powers abandon the post-World War II system of freer trade and international norms and rely instead on “economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”
“We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation,” he said. “It calls for honesty about the world as it is. … The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger and more just.”
Carney’s address, in which he quoted the Greek historian Thucydides and the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, drew a rare standing ovation at Davos. He did not say which countries or leaders had created a world where “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” But it was clear he was referring to the U.S. under Trump.
“Canada was among the first to hear the wake-up call,” Carney said, “leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically confer prosperity and security — that assumption is no longer valid.”
Carney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s jabs. Carney, who has met and spoken with Trump on several occasions since becoming Canada’s prime minister in March, flew back to Ottawa on Wednesday without meeting Trump at Davos.
University of Toronto historian Timothy A. Sayle said Carney’s speech appealed to people in Canada and beyond because “it was a clear articulation of what I think a number of people and a number of leaders know to be true, but that has been very difficult to say out loud and in public.”
“For a year now, almost, this sense that the world has changed has been on many people’s minds,” he said. “But I think, quite understandably, people hoped it wasn’t true. … He was saying it in a forum where the president and all other leaders would listen, so the stakes were very, very high.”
Historian Matthew Specter, a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, said the address ripped “the Band-Aid off the fraying liberal order” — but “does so in a spirit that is stoic, not celebratory.”
Carney, who headed the central banks of Canada and Britain, took over the leadership of the Liberal Party after former prime minister Justin Trudeau resigned last year and won a federal election that turned in part on questions about who could best handle the relations with the U.S. under Trump.
He has sought a deal with Trump to ease some of the tariffs on Canada, but Trump terminated those talks in October after the conservative government of Ontario aired an advertisement on U.S. television that featured archival audio of President Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs.
Canada and the U.S. share the world’s longest undefended border, and more than 70 percent of Canada’s exports go to the United States. A review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement, which Trump brokered in 2020 and described as the “best agreement we’ve ever made,” begins this year, and Canadian officials and business leaders worry that Trump will rip it up.
Amid the chaos, Carney has tried to develop export markets beyond the U.S. and to build Canada’s economic resilience with major infrastructure projects. He struck a deal with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping last week for a reduced Chinese tariff on Canadian canola seed in exchange for a reduced Canadian tariff on 49,000 Chinese-made electric vehicles.
The reduction in auto tariffs was a break with the United States; Carney said Beijing, until recently a diplomatic adversary, was “now” a more “predictable” trading partner than Washington. Ties between the nations entered a deep freeze in 2018 when China detained two Canadians in retaliation for Canada’s detention of a Chinese executive wanted in the U.S. on fraud charges.
Carney’s remarks Tuesday were not entirely new to Canadians. In his first budget in November, he referred to a “rupture,” not a “transition,” in the global order. In a speech on defense policy at the University of Toronto last year, he warned that if middle powers “are not at the table, they will be on the menu.” And he has often declared that “nostalgia is not a strategy.”
But Davos, where Carney, a former Goldman Sachs banker, has been a fixture, presented a new audience: an international political and business elite that remains divided over how best to respond to Trump’s second-term assault on the international order and U.S. security and trade alliances.
“Carney is the epitome of a Davos globalist who is now saying to an audience that knows him well and has heard him speak many times that the world has fundamentally moved to what might be a called a post-globalist order,” said Fen Hampson, a professor of international relations at Carleton University in Ottawa.
As much as the speech might have been a message to the president, analysts said, its audience was also European leaders and other allies. When Trump began threatening Canada’s economy and sovereignty, officials here warned their European counterparts that the country was merely the “canary in the coal mine” and that Europe was “next.”
Few leaders then offered Canada much public support. And when Trump did announce tariffs on goods from Europe and other allies, Canadian efforts to get those countries to impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods were unsuccessful. Ottawa has since rolled back its own levies.
“There is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along,” Carney said in his address. “To accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. It won’t.”
Throughout his long career as a central banker and his shorter one as the leader of a Group of Seven nation, Carney has delivered several well-regarded speeches.
As governor of the Bank of England in 2015, he warned business leaders in London that climate change was a risk to financial stability, an address remembered for the coinage “the tragedy of the horizon.”
On the day after Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union, as political leaders scrambled to contain the fallout, remarks by Carney calmed the markets.
After Trump threatened more tariffs on Canada in March, the new prime minister declared the traditional U.S.-Canada relationship “over.”
The challenge, critics have said, is in the follow-up. Environmentalists and scientists have said Carney’s efforts to roll back Canada’s climate policy as prime minister, for example, are at odds with his 2015 speech. Whether Canada can adequately reduce its dependency on the U.S. and get other countries to band together in new alliances remains unclear.
The Davos address, Sayle said, was a “real meaningful effort to try to articulate the current crisis or rupture.”
“The diagnosis was quite striking and strong,” he said. “But the remedy will require enormous effort, and ultimately the question is: Could that and will that even be enough if the president’s going to keep on with these demands?”
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