A week after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a new deal to expand the Churchill Falls hydroelectric project, he held a press conference in Lévis, Que., on Monday to announce a contract to build six icebreakers for the Coast Guard at the Chantier Davie shipyards.

While Canada desperately needs electricity to power its economy and icebreakers to protect its shores, Carney has yet to demonstrate that his government is capable of enacting economic policies beyond spending massive amounts of borrowed money.

Although Monday’s announcement was years in the making — Ottawa announced plans to purchase the new icebreakers in 2019 — the prime minister did his best to tie it to the trade negotiations with the United States that broke down on Friday.

“We’re here today as part of Canada’s change in tack,” Carney said, flanked by Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette and key federal and provincial ministers, with a view of the St. Lawrence in the background.

After explaining that Canada “worked relentlessly and in good faith with the United States to negotiate a new comprehensive trade agreement” but was not prepared to “accept what the U.S. had offered,” Carney claimed that, “Building at home and diversifying our trade abroad” has been “Plan A from the start.”

Part of this strategy, according to the prime minister, includes expanding ports and having the icebreakers necessary to keep vital waterways open year-round. Thus Ottawa is spending $11 billion to build six icebreakers to replace the Coast Guard’s aging fleet, the first of which is expected to go into service in 2032, with the remaining vessels delivered by 2038.

“That is what being masters of our destiny means,” Carney said.

There’s no question that these ships are necessary, especially for a northern country that has seen its relationship with the U.S. reach historic lows and is aiming to protect its sovereignty in the North against an increasingly militaristic Russia, whose icebreaker fleet is more than twice as large as our own.

The announcement was also well-timed, as it allowed Carney to sell a defence procurement as part of his overarching economic strategy, noting that the new boats will be made with Canadian steel and that the construction phase is expected to create 5,000 jobs and contribute $650 million a year to Canada’s GDP.

It also gave the prime minister another opportunity to tout last week’s Churchill Falls announcement , which will be supported with $10 billion in federal financing and other financial supports.

Noticeably absent from his remarks was any hint that Ottawa has a strategy to attract private investment. The Liberals have always been good at writing large cheques, even when the coffers are dry and programs are being financed on the backs of future generations. But ports and icebreakers are of little use if Canadian industry isn’t producing the products that the rest of the world wants to buy.

Carney did claim that, “Canadian businesses now enjoy tariff-free access to 1.5-billion consumers,” and that, “Over the next six months, we will double that number through new trade deals with ASEAN and India.”

If that comes to fruition it will be a major milestone, but this country still needs a massive influx of private capital to build the mines and pipelines necessary to extract our natural resources and carry them to market, along with a business environment that gives companies an incentive to produce in Canada at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump is doing his utmost to drive them away.

As Adam Pankratz writes elsewhere in these pages, the future of a mine looking to tap one of the world’s largest undeveloped gold reserves in British Columbia has been called into question after First Nations leaders withdrew their support . That mine has been in limbo since it received environmental approvals more than a decade ago and its private-sector proponent says it has already sunk $1.2 billion into the project.

Meanwhile, Carney’s Major Projects Office is currently reviewing 18 infrastructure projects to see if the government deems them worthy of being fast-tracked through this country’s Byzantine approvals process. But after nearly a year in operation, none have so far been green-lit.

None of this signals to investors that Canada is a safe place to park their money, or that the government is serious about cutting through the masses of red tape or dealing with the myriad of ethnic, regional and political divisions that work to ensure Canada can’t build nice things.

On Monday morning, hours before Carney’s shipbuilding announcement, Trump took to Truth Social to announce that as of Jan. 1, “Tariffs on all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%.” His message to industry was clear: “Build in the U.S. and there are ZERO TARIFFS.”

Asked about this at his press conference, Carney said that Trump’s response was “not a surprise,” and argued the new tariffs would hurt workers in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Alabama who “rely on Canadian demand,” while saying that his government remains focused on “co-operation, putting workers, families first, investing in technology.”

Which is all fine and dandy, but will do nothing to keep auto manufacturers in Canada if Trump follows through on his latest tariff threat.

Given that the prime minister has already said that supports will be made available for companies affected by the latest round of tariffs, we can expect that even more taxpayer money will be used to prop up the economy. But it doesn’t take a central banker to realize that the economy cannot be indefinitely kept afloat with public debt.

At some point, the government needs to focus on creating a business environment that’s conducive to attracting private capital, which largely means getting out of the way and allowing the private sector to do what it does best.

The big question is: when Carney says we need to be “masters of our destiny,” are the “masters” he’s referring to Canadian entrepreneurs and captains of industry, or Mark Carney and his Liberal politburo?

National Post
jkline@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/accessd

• Adam Pankratz: If Canada is to diversify trade, we must get rid of UNDRIP
• Jesse Kline: Deal or no deal, Carney Liberals have failed to build Canada

Prime Minister Mark Carney insists Canada is “at war” with the U.S. after trade talks between the two countries fell apart over the weekend. Fortunately, the war is a rhetorical one over commerce rather than a military conflict, for which Canadians are woefully unprepared. But the exchange of talking points instead of bullets is foolish and destructive enough, and evidence of the futility of managing trade rather than simply getting governments out of the way of people freely exchanging goods and services.

“You’re at war when you get attacked. We got attacked,” Carney insisted towards the end of his Saturday press conference after the failure of the trade talks.

For his part, U.S. President Donald Trump responded that “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one.” He complained that Canadians have “charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of Tariffs. No more!”

Amidst recriminations as to who caused the breakdown — Politico reports the talks “ultimately buckled under a combination of last-minute demands and political constraints on both sides” — the two national leaders are threatening new trade barriers in addition to preexisting tariffs. Pundits and policy experts are digging through such details as have leaked to figure out just where the deal went off the rails.

Strictly speaking, Carney is the more credible figure in the dispute since he’s right that “America has changed” and the U.S. government is trying to “put a series of tariffs on its closest allies and use economic integration as a weapon.” Trump has been notably belligerent in the process of reshaping trade — as he is in all things — making Carney’s “war” talk somewhat believable.

But the parsing of trade demands and personalities misses a larger point. While Donald Trump can be a bully and Carney retains his calm while sniffily complaining about insults to the sovereignty of his country, both of them, and their flunkies, have engaged in the presumptuous business of trying to negotiate the rules of exchange between millions of buyers and sellers in two countries.

We’d all be far better off if even just one of them stepped aside and let matters work themselves out.

Decades ago, economist Milton Friedman noted that protectionists constantly hand-wave away arguments in favour of free trade as “fine in theory” while insisting that trade must be “reciprocal” — precisely the argument the Trump administration makes as it reworks already rule-burdened trade deals.

At a time when Japan was the feared economic behemoth that was supposedly going to eat the world, Friedman warned that tariffs “raise prices to customers and waste our resources.” He argued that when the governments of other countries shield their markets from competition, instead of benefiting their economies they hurt their people and businesses.

“The wise course for us is precisely the opposite — to move unilaterally toward free trade. If they still choose to impose restrictions, that is too bad but at least we have not added insult to injury.”

Evidence for Friedman’s position is found in a recent New York Times article about the vulnerability of electricity grids, largely because of their dependence on expensive, hand-crafted power transformers that are difficult to replace. While U.S. companies are building manufacturing facilities and developing alternative transformer technologies, they’re hampered by tariffs on copper and aluminum. “Costs are up almost 20 percent,” an industry executive told the Times. “We need relief on all of the metals.”

The next massive blackout may happen because trade barriers raised the cost of preventing it beyond the industry’s ability to afford resilience.

Just because Trump is an economic ignoramus who thinks economic activity can be successfully managed by government, despite a long history of evidence to the contrary, doesn’t mean that Carney should follow his example and contribute to the conflict.

Quebec-born Vincent Geloso, an economics professor at Virginia’s George Mason University, argues that “Canada’s response to American tariffs should be incredibly simple: slash our own tariffs and trade barriers. And do not impose counter-tariffs.”

He makes the same argument offered by Friedman, that tariffs hurt consumers and businesses in the countries that impose them. “How exactly does making Canadians poorer punish Donald Trump? If the Trump admin wants to shoot itself in the foot, the Carney government is under no obligation to shoot Canadians in the face with a twelve gauge shotgun for the sake of ‘reciprocity.’”

Or, as the late British economist Joan Robinson wrote , “The popular view that free trade is all very well so long as all nations are free-traders, but that when other nations erect tariffs we must erect tariffs too, is countered by the argument that it would be just as sensible to drop rocks into our harbours because other nations have rocky coasts.”

In a 2025 paper , Geloso pointed out that Britain benefited from repealing “Corn Law” tariffs on imported grain. “The Corn Laws had the effect of keeping food prices in the UK 9% higher relative to world markets. Since food items were a major component of the budgets of the poor, the repeal of the tariffs was largely a ‘pro-poor’ policy.” He added that most 19th century trade liberalization was unilateral, with no expectation that other nations would necessarily reciprocate. Liberalizing nations quickly prospered.

Yes, it’s better when all governments get out of the way and let people and businesses exercise their right to engage in voluntary exchange without regard to borders. But holding trade hostage to the intelligence, decency, and economic wisdom of political leaders in multiple countries is a sucker’s bet. Inevitably, populists with neo-mercantilist ideas arise and burden their own people with tariffs while claiming to help them.

In the days to come, people will spend much time digging for and through the details of the failed U.S.-Canada trade talks. There will be much debate over what was fair and what was not.

But that’s a waste of time. The only definition of “fair” that matters is what people voluntarily agree to in their own dealings. If, under current management, the U.S. won’t embrace free trade policies that make everybody wealthier, Canada should do so on its own. Canadians would be freer and more prosperous by avoiding the American mistake of burdening commerce with tariffs and conditions.

National Post

• Michael Higgins: Can we ditch the political theatre for the real show?
• Geoff Russ: Fine, don’t trust Carney, but why believe anything Trump says?

For decades, Western governments feared the consequences of confronting Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Today, they should be equally concerned about the consequences of failing to capitalize on the significant damage inflicted on the Islamic Republic.

Honest Reporting Canada has spent years documenting how Iran’s malign influence is too often ignored, not only through its terrorist proxies and human rights abuses, but through their insidious efforts at spreading propaganda in the West.

Our work monitoring Canadian media has given us a front-row view of how easily the Islamic Republic’s activities can disappear from Western public discourse, even as their consequences reach directly into our own communities.

The United States and Israel have severely degraded Iran’s military capabilities in recent months. Its nuclear infrastructure has been decimated , its ballistic missile arsenal degraded , its strategic air defence systems destroyed and 52 senior regime figures have been eliminated . Hezbollah and other members of Tehran’s terrorist network, including Hamas and the Houthis, have been weakened .

More important, the premise underlying Iran’s strategy for three decades has been shattered. Tehran believed it could attack Israel through proxies and would therefore be immune from attack while simultaneously advancing its atomic program as a nuclear threshold state and threatening Western interests, all while serving to insulate Iran from the consequences of its nefarious actions.

That calculation no longer holds.

But military setbacks do not necessarily translate into lasting strategic defeat. Iran’s immediate objective is no longer victory, but outlasting the United States.

If the regime can withstand the current pressure and eventually persuade Western governments to exchange sanctions relief for another diplomatic agreement, it may acquire the two things it needs most: money and time, both of which serve as patient pathways to acquiring atomic weapons and mitigating the regime’s existential concerns.

That would be a serious mistake.

Iran built its power painstakingly over decades: nuclear facilities, ballistic missiles and drones, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Together, they gave Tehran strategic depth and geographic spread.

Much of that architecture has now been damaged, degraded or destroyed. The challenge is ensuring it stays that way.

Iran will almost certainly try to reconstruct nuclear facilities in harder-to-reach locations. For example, Pickaxe mountain , a site widely believed to possess Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Iran will also likely endeavour to disperse missile production sites and rebuild its regional terrorist networks.

With its conventional capabilities diminished, it has every incentive to rely more heavily on terrorism, cyberattacks, transnational repression and using the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of economic coercion by leveraging its geographic control over the vital energy chokepoint.

And the Islamic Republic’s reach extends far beyond the Middle East.

Canada has already seen what happens when Tehran’s intelligence apparatus reaches into Western societies. United States intelligence has warned that Iranian intelligence services have worked with criminal networks to threaten, intimidate and target dissidents and other perceived enemies abroad. The Canadian government has also warned Canadians about a growing number of “state threats” from Iran and their activities in North America, including attacks targeting Iranian dissidents, journalists and Jewish and Israeli communities.

Iran’s tentacles extend into Western streets, financial institutions and communities. When Tehran cannot reach its enemies with missiles, it has demonstrated a willingness to use proxies, organized crime syndicates and covert operations instead. The Iranian regime and its proxies are linked to a highly coordinated “ criminals for hire ” network in Canada that has weaponized local street gangs and vulnerable youth to execute shootings, arson attacks, and intimidation campaigns against Jewish and American targets.

This is precisely the dimension of the Iranian threat that Western media and policymakers too often treat as a series of disconnected stories. Our experience monitoring Canadian news coverage has shown how easily Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism, regional proxies, nuclear ambitions and activities against dissidents in the West are reported separately, obscuring the strategic architecture connecting them.

We have repeatedly urged Canadian journalists and decision-makers to connect those dots rather than presenting the Islamic Republic as merely another Middle Eastern government with which the West has a disagreement.

Iran does not necessarily have to defeat its enemies. It has to outlast their political attention spans, and Canada has a role to play in preventing that dangerous outcome.

Ottawa’s 2024 designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist entity was important, but designation cannot substitute for muscular policy. Canada should work with allies to enforce sanctions aggressively, deport regime-linked officials, disrupt IRGC financing and ensure Canadian financial institutions and property markets do not become refuges for regime-connected wealth.

Canadian policy should distinguish clearly between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people. Tens of millions of Iranians have lived under a regime that restricts political freedom, represses dissent and devotes enormous resources to military adventurism abroad. Many have risked imprisonment and death demanding freedoms Canadians regard as fundamental. Western governments should be extremely careful about rescuing their oppressors in the name of regional “stability.”

None of this requires an American invasion of Iran. Sending Western armies into a country of over 93 million people could turn an unpopular dictatorship into the defender of Iranian nationalism and produce consequences nobody can confidently predict.

The alternative is sustained pressure: keep sanctions tight, target the IRGC and its financial networks, help Iranians circumvent censorship, expose corruption and prevent Tehran from rebuilding the strategic capabilities that created this crisis.

There are several possible outcomes.

The worst would be a superficially attractive agreement that restores Iranian oil revenues and releases substantial frozen funds while leaving the regime free to reconstruct its military power. Five or ten years from now, the West could find itself confronting the same threat under considerably worse circumstances.

Another possibility is prolonged containment, with a weakened Islamic Republic surviving while its attempts to regenerate strategic capabilities are repeatedly frustrated.

And there remains the possibility that military humiliation, economic pressure, internal divisions and popular opposition eventually produce political change from within Iran itself. Nobody should assume this will happen. The Islamic Republic has spent nearly five decades building an extraordinarily effective apparatus of repression.

But Western governments are under no obligation to guarantee the Islamic regime’s survival.

The United States and Israel have changed the strategic balance. The question now is whether their allies have the patience to preserve it. Canada has a moral responsibility to help denying the Islamic Republic the resources it needs to rebuild its machinery of aggression and repression while leaving Iran’s future to Iranians themselves.

To reiterate, Iran does not need to win this war. It needs the West to lose interest in finishing what it started. Let’s not make that mistake.

National Post

Mike Fegelman is the executive director of HonestReporting Canada, a non-profit organization ensuring fair and accurate Canadian media coverage of Israel.

• Terry Newman: Carney hasn’t prepared Canadians for trade concessions
• Christopher Dummitt: Canada has its own academic fakery problem

Walking away from trade talks with the United States was the easy part. Prime Minister Mark Carney now needs to sell Canadians a kiss-and-make-up strategy.

Because sooner or later we are going to have to sit down and hammer out a trade agreement or get very hurt in the divorce proceedings.

As expected, U.S. President Donald Trump is already threatening retaliation for Carney’s decision to collapse the U.S.-Canada trade talks at the weekend.

“On January First, 2027, Tariffs on all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%. Build in the U.S. and there are ZERO TARIFFS. Canada will be treated like a State no longer!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account.

“On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with. They feel entitled, and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!”

It comes as no surprise that the president is threatening more tariffs and even less of a shock that he feels the need to belittle Canada.

Even his facts are wrong.

“They do 95% of their business with the U.S.,” said Trump.

Well, not quite. The U.S. is certainly our largest market, accounting for about 70 per cent of exports. That fact alone should have been an encouragement to diversify our markets and build the infrastructure that was so necessary — like pipelines — but unfortunately our previous prime minister was too shortsighted to see that.

Carney is keen on expanding to different markets and building the infrastructure. Diversity will make us stronger and more resilient, he said at a press conference Monday, and he’s right. But that is going to take time so breaking up with the U.S. now really isn’t a viable option.

Walking away from trade talks and telling Canadians that we are all in this together is marvellous political theatre that will unite the country in hatred towards the U.S. and will boost the prime minister’s ratings.

But it won’t help us economically. It will do nothing for business and will result in perhaps hundreds of thousands of job losses.

“Elbows up” was always an emotional ploy (and a very successful one) but it is not a strategy that puts food on the table or pays the rent. Carney has manipulated the zeitgeist so that we can all feel proud that we have stood up to the bully. Well, hurrah, except that doesn’t actually get us anywhere.

Patriotism is not a bad word. Love of one’s country is felt in the bones and the soul. There are those in this country who have disparaged our history, disgraced the reputations of fine and venerable men and women and who believe we should be ashamed of being so-called colonizers.

But Canada has nothing to be ashamed of and plenty to feel proud about.

Nevertheless, Canadians should be very wary when patriotism is being spouted from the mouths of politicians. An appeal to emotion is usually a form of deflection to avoid scrutiny of the facts.

One way to avoid this is for the ruling party to be subject to interrogation on those facts. Democracy is a wonderful thing in that it allows an opposition to bring to light that which the government might like to leave in the shadows.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is absolutely right in calling on Carney to reconvene Parliament.

“Parliament’s duty is to hold government accountable. That job has never been more pressing,” said Poilievre in a letter to Carney.

The prime minister needs to do more than hold press conferences. He needs to answer questions in the House of Commons, to reveal why the trade talks broke down, to disclose his plans for helping Canadians hurt by this trade war and to divulge how he intends to put negotiations back on track.

Whatever the reasons for the breakdown in talks, it is the government’s job to overcome them. The U.S. is our biggest customer and not talking to them is churlish.

No deal is better than a bad deal is fine political rhetoric but is simply BS. It’s an excuse for not putting in the work needed to govern. Yes, Trump is unpredictable. However, we elect our leaders (or we should) not to walk away from challenges but to confront them — even better to solve them.

And we can’t rule out any options. We might have to reconsider sacrosanct policies like supply management. It’s quite possible that we might have to sell American wine without the label being bilingual. But we need to be at the bargaining table to discuss the options.

Recalling Parliament is an obvious first step for the prime minister so that Canadians can get the hard facts about why things went so disastrously wrong.

The next step is to get back to the bargaining table.

National Post

• Scott Stinson: Doug Ford tells Donald Trump to ‘kiss my ass’ as trade war escalates
• Adam Pankratz: If Canada is to diversify trade, we must get rid of UNDRIP

Despite the initial feel-good moment of telling the United States to take a hike after trade negotiations broke off on Friday, Canada now finds itself staring into an uncomfortable reality. For however good it may feel to tell U.S. President Donald Trump to stuff it, it doesn’t change the fact that around 70 per cent of our exports go to the U.S. and that isn’t going to change overnight, no matter what we do. Exactly what Canada’s response should be is a matter of debate, but we must avoid our tendency to kneecap and maim ourselves at a time of maximum urgency.

The most recent example of this is the depressing case of Seabridge Gold’s Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell (KSM) Project in British Columbia. Seabridge was granted both provincial and federal environmental permits back in 2014, a full 12 years ago. Yet the mine remains unbuilt, despite the approximately $1.2 billion that Seabridge has spent developing it. After years of wrangling, the most recent news is that the hereditary chiefs of the Gitxsan Huwilp government have withdrawn their initial support for the project.

This is a larger problem than it may appear on its surface. It’s true that a few years ago the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs opposed the Coastal GasLink pipeline and that ultimately went through. But that was before the full weight of laws designed to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), including B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), had become apparent to us.

As a result of DRIPA and the federal government’s UNDRIP Act, UNDRIP has effectively become positive law in Canada, an interpretation that was upheld by the B.C. Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada .

What this means for the development of large-scale infrastructure projects in Canada is frightening given the recent actions of the Gitxsan hereditary chiefs. One of the core principles of UNDRIP is that Indigenous peoples must give their free, prior and informed consent before any action is taken that may affect them or their traditional territories.

For a while, it a was unclear what this meant in practice, but following the B.C. appellate court ruling, it is becoming ever clearer that this effectively gives First Nations a veto over mines, pipelines and other large-scale infrastructure projects — the very projects Canada must develop if we are to diversify our economy away from the United States.

The case of the KSM mine is especially troubling because it now appears that “consent” for projects can be given and then taken away. That creates a highly inappropriate “pay-to-play” system wherein the threat of consent withdrawal hangs like the Sword of Damocles over any and every company that decides it might be worth investing money in Canada.

While we like to describe ourselves as a “Tier 1” jurisdiction for resource development, creating legal mechanisms by which First Nations can dangle the threat of a veto over badly needed infrastructure projects is anything but “Tier 1.” It’s more of a red light or “Stay Away” sign for businesses. Seabridge, as a reminder, has put over $1.2 billion into the KSM Project and could well be watching it incinerated because consent has now been withdrawn.

Prime Minister Mark Carney was right when he said that Canada has what the world wants. We have critical minerals, oil, gas and experts in those fields. The real question now is whether both B.C.’s provincial government and Carney’s federal government will finally understand that they must repeal DRIPA and the UNDRIP Act, and do what is necessary to get us back to developing our resources without the fear that approved projects will suddenly be scuttled without recourse by those who would see our economy stagnate and falter at every stage.

National Post

• Kelly McParland: Trump puts America’s rot on display
• William Watson: Carney not signing trade deal was good, war talk wasn’t

Trust in legacy journalism is plummeting, and after years working inside the CBC, Tara Henley has a good idea why. The author of the new book, “The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity,” discusses with Brian Lilley how broad-mindedness in newsrooms was ruined by the emergence of an urban and elite class of group-thinking journalists combined with a revenue crisis that discouraged the risk of nonconformist perspectives. Making things worse, Henley argues, is that government subsidies have corrupted market signals that could force badly needed discipline on media owners. But the answer isn’t internet outlets that are even more one-sided, she explains: media need to relearn the tools they once used to keep themselves more honest. (Recorded July 10, 2026.)

• J.D. Tuccille: Americans no longer trust the news media. Bari Weiss is here to save it
• Terry Newman: BBC a case study in how liberal media loses trust