As Canada debates whether to approve the latest budget or send a new government to Ottawa, there is one quiet point of agreement: the neighbour to the south now treats Canada as collateral damage.

By Carlos Taylhardat | Vancouver, Canada | November 18, 2025

“The era of frictionless, rules-based trade is over,” Carney tells business leaders. “We will not leave Canada exposed to the next shock in Washington or Beijing.”

Canada learned, the hard way, what it means to have all its trading eggs in one basket. For decades, Ottawa behaved as if what was good for the United States was also good for Canada. Provinces preferred selling south rather than to one another, and a sovereign country drifted into acting like an extension of the U.S. market. Wars, crises, even cultural moments were experienced almost as if one people lived on two sides of a long, quiet border.

Then a harsher reality arrived. A new American administration began treating its closest ally as just another target in a domestic trade agenda, slapping tariffs on Canadian goods and upending an economy built on trust. Most headlines treat this as a new chapter in a Carney-versus-Trump saga. Underneath the daily drama is an older story: Canada’s habit of tying itself to one empire at a time, then paying the price when that empire changes its mind.

This is a story of loyalty, tariffs, and a quiet Canadian realization: the neighbour you helped on its worst day can still turn around and tax your livelihood tomorrow.

Context: The neighbour Canada always showed up for

To understand today’s trade war, you have to remember that Canada has lived this kind of break-up before and not just with the United States.

For much of its early history, Canada’s economy leaned toward Britain. Imperial preference gave Canadian wheat, timber, and manufactured goods special access to British markets. Then London began looking elsewhere. By the time Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973, those old preferences had faded, and Canadian exporters suddenly faced the same European tariffs as everyone else. Quietly, Canada turned south. The United States became the new anchor.

This time, the partnership felt deeper. On September 11, 2001, as U.S. skies closed, Canada launched Operation Yellow Ribbon. Airspace was cleared, runways opened, and more than two hundred diverted flights landed at Canadian airports. Tens of thousands of stranded passengers were taken into schools, gymnasiums, churches, and private homes across the country. That same year, Canadian troops followed the U.S. into Afghanistan. Over the next thirteen years, more than 40,000 Canadians served; 158 died. It was the country’s largest deployment since the Second World War.

Economically, the bond grew tighter. In the 1960s, the Auto Pact effectively merged the auto industries of southern Ontario and the American Midwest, laying the groundwork for the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement and then NAFTA. By the 2020s, roughly three-quarters of Canadian exports went to the United States. When Washington pressed allies to harden their stance on China, Canada did it, knowing its own firms would lose business. More recently, it mirrored U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, including electric vehicles — a gesture that helped Washington strategically but left Canadian farmers and exporters to absorb Beijing’s retaliation.

It was not just trade. It was a kind of shared identity: NORAD, pipelines, cross-border families, integrated power grids and rail lines, and a border that felt less like a line and more like a seam. Again and again, Canada treated America’s problems as its own.

So when the new tariffs arrived, after years of Canada following Washington into wars, into alliances, into confrontations with China, they did not feel like a technical adjustment. They felt, to many Canadians, like a familiar story returning in a harsher form: an empire pulling away, and Canada left to rebuild.

From here, the country faces a choice it has not confronted so starkly since Britain turned toward Europe. It can continue to negotiate and hope the American neighbour becomes more reasonable, or it can deliberately strengthen trade with the rest of the world and reduce its dependence on a friend that has already shown it is not interested in Canada’s well-being.

That is where the two main narratives in this story begin. One clings to the old instinct: you do not risk angering the superpower next door. The other argues that the Trump-led administration, by treating Canada as expendable, has finally taught Canadians that economic independence is no longer optional.

In the pages that follow, we walk through both futures for Canada — and the quieter, human story running underneath them — to ask a simple question: what will Canada do now?

Narrative One: Do not risk angering the superpower next door

From this first perspective, Canada’s position is precarious. You do not casually challenge the largest economy on Earth when most of your jobs, investment, and supply chains depend on its border staying open. In that frame, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, is not just rebalancing trade; he is playing with fire.

The people who live inside this narrative remember 9/11 less as a symbol of Canadian generosity and more as proof of something else: there is only one country that will share the real defence burden with Canada, and that country is still the United States.

They look at NORAD, at integrated air defences, at decades of joint missions, and they see a simple equation: whatever the trade arguments, Canada’s security, intelligence, and much of its prosperity still depend on the U.S. more than on any other partner. Upsetting that partner is not just impolite; it could be ruinous.

Interoperability, not independence

In this worldview, the big fear is not that Canada is too close to the U.S. — it’s that it might drift away just when the world is getting more dangerous.

That is why defence hawks in Ottawa push so hard to stay the course on the F-35 fighter purchase. The fifth-generation jet is not just a piece of hardware; it is a ticket into the American and NATO information grid, a way to “plug in” to the same cameras, sensors, and data as U.S. pilots. Carney’s government is now openly debating whether to scrap most of this deal and build fighter jets in Canada to create jobs at home and loosen U.S. control over its air force — a move that, to this camp, looks bold on paper and dangerously lonely in the skies.

“One of the greatest things about the F-35s is that they’re going to allow us to be interoperable with our allies.”

In their telling, interoperability is the point. From this angle, building something different and separate from the U.S. is not a show of sovereignty; it is a risk that Canadian pilots will be flying with less information, less backup, and less trust in the rooms where strategy is decided.

Tariffs as the price of Western unity

Their stance on trade is just as hard-edged, and just as shaped by fear.

Yes, China’s 100 percent tariffs on canola and peas are brutal. Yes, 25 percent duties on seafood and pork will hit Atlantic Canada and the Prairies. But to this camp, those are the costs of standing with other democracies against Chinese overcapacity and subsidies.

Back down on the 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs, they say, and you don’t just invite cheap cars into the market. You send a message to Washington that Canada will buckle as soon as it feels pain. And if the White House concludes that Canada cannot be relied on when things get difficult, what happens to NORAD upgrades, critical mineral deals, or the thin stream of trucks and trains that keeps factories in Ontario humming?

From this vantage point, Carney’s pledge to double non-U.S. exports sounds less like diversification and more like hedging against the only ally that has actually kept Canada safe. And “hedging against your only real ally,” they argue, is simply another way of saying “betting your future on angering the neighbour who can hurt you most.”

In their telling, the wake-up call is not that Canada relied too much on the United States. It is that the world has become harsher, and Canada cannot afford even the appearance of disloyalty to the superpower next door.

Narrative Two: “The loyal neighbour has finally learned its lesson”

The second narrative begins from a different wound.

It remembers the decades when Canada’s economic life was tied to Britain under imperial preference, with Canadian wheat, timber, and manufactured goods enjoying special access to British markets. Then, in 1973, London joined the European Economic Community. The old Commonwealth preferences faded, Canadian exporters suddenly faced the EEC’s common external tariffs, and a relationship that had felt permanent turned out to be conditional.

It remembers how the Auto Pact and later NAFTA deepened integration with the U.S., only for that access to be used as leverage once tariffs became a political weapon. For people in this narrative, the pattern is painfully familiar: Canada bets on one big partner, grows dependent, and then watches that partner change the rules.

In this story, Mark Carney is not being disloyal. He is refusing to let Canada repeat the same pattern a third time, and he is acting on the recognition that Washington has already shown, through steel, aluminum, softwood lumber and now EV-related fights, that it is willing to treat Canadian jobs as expendable when domestic politics demand a villain.

Carney’s doctrine: No more single-market Canada

Carney’s speeches, from Toronto boardrooms to Asia-Pacific summits, have a consistent theme. The old model of rules-based free trade — with Canada as a polite middle power plugged into one giant neighbour — is over. Canada will double non-U.S. exports in ten years, he says, and rebuild domestic investment and infrastructure to match.

Underneath the technocratic language is something both emotional and radical: an insistence that Canada is not just a branch plant of someone else’s economy, whether that someone is London, Washington, or Beijing.

Carney’s allies map it out in three moves:

• “De-risk” the U.S. dependence by opening trade corridors with India, Southeast Asia, and Europe, targeting sectors from critical minerals to food exports.
• Use federal procurement as industrial policy, steering big defence and infrastructure contracts toward bids that build factories and know-how inside Canada, not just import finished products.
• Force a conversation on the F-35s and other big-ticket buys: can Canada secure tech transfer and final assembly at home, as some European partners have negotiated for jets like the Gripen, rather than buying off-the-shelf and exporting the jobs?

Seen from this angle, staying the course is the risky option. The truly conservative move, in the long sense of the word, is to make sure that the next time a U.S. president reaches for tariffs, Canada can shrug and redirect its exports elsewhere.

Rethinking the Chinese EV wall

This narrative also looks differently at the 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs. Yes, it was a show of solidarity with Western allies, but it also triggered the Chinese retaliation that is now strangling Canadian canola and food exports. Why defend an automobile industry that no longer builds cars in Canada?

Within Carney’s circle, there is talk of nuance: maintaining strong safeguards and subsidy rules, but not automatically copying every U.S. tariff line, especially when the collateral damage lands in small towns in Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island.

“We don’t need them to make our cars… We don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests. We don’t need their oil and gas. We have more than anybody.”

— Donald Trump, virtual address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Jan. 23, 2025.

Here, the wake-up call cuts in the opposite direction. It is not “don’t walk away from your only ally.” It is: don’t confuse alliance with economic dependence. NATO is not a trade contract. Loyalty is not meant to be a one-way promise. A neighbour that has already shown it will use tariffs to squeeze Canadian industries cannot be trusted to protect Canadians from poverty if interests diverge. Only Canada can do that.

In this narrative, Canada is not turning its back on the United States; it is finally behaving less like a junior partner and more like a country that learned, painfully, from the British and American chapters of its own history.

For readers who want the blow-by-blow of how this trade war escalated, see our earlier analysis: U.S.–Canada Tariff War: Carney’s First Budget vs Trump’s Second Term.

The people caught between empires

Beneath both arguments is a quieter story that rarely makes it into the press releases.

It begins with a farmer standing in a field of canola, looking at prices that suddenly no longer work. It continues in an auto-parts plant in Windsor, where managers wonder whether their next contract will be priced out by a 35 percent U.S. tariff or undercut by a subsidized factory somewhere else.

There is also the young family in Surrey, B.C., trapped between an old gasoline car they can barely afford to maintain and electric vehicles that cost more than their annual take-home pay. Chinese EVs, if allowed in, could be dramatically cheaper; if kept out, the transition will take longer and cost more.

These people are not thinking about summit communiqués or security doctrines. They are thinking about mortgage payments, diesel receipts, tuition, and whether the harvest will cover the loan.

For them, the question is less “Which empire should we stand closer to?” and more “Why does every empire’s argument end up on our tax bill?”

That is the silent narrative: the realization that Canada’s fate has too often been negotiated between capitals London, Washington, and Beijing, with ordinary Canadians treated as rounding errors in someone else’s strategy.

Carney’s promise to double non U.S. exports over a decade may prove visionary or overly ambitious. Trump’s tariffs may be rolled back or renewed. China’s 100 percent duties on canola may be lifted after a deal or hardened as a warning.

The deeper question is simpler: will Canada keep living as an adjunct to someone else’s economy, or will it finally build a life that does not end every sentence with a comma and the name of a bigger country?

That is the wake-up call not just for Ottawa, but for everyone whose job, farm, or savings depends on a trade policy they never get to vote on directly.

For a wider lens on how media frame these battles, see our piece on trust and polarization in coverage: Who Can We Trust? Legacy Media, Alternative Media, and the Case for Two Truths.

Background on Canada–U.S. relations: Global Affairs Canada; broader trade context from the International Monetary Fund.

Key Takeaways

• Canada’s long record of loyalty to the United States — from Operation Yellow Ribbon after 9/11 to the Afghanistan mission — shapes how painful today’s tariff clashes feel.
• Prime Minister Mark Carney has set a goal to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports within a decade, arguing that reliance on one market has become a strategic risk in an era of weaponized trade.
• Canada’s 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs and China’s retaliatory tariffs on Canadian canola and other foods have turned prairie farmers and coastal exporters into collateral damage in a U.S.–China confrontation.
• One camp, deeply wary of angering the world’s largest economy, insists Canada must stand firmly with the U.S., keeping tariffs aligned and defence purchases like the F-35 on track to maintain interoperability and trust.
• Another camp believes the real lesson is that no neighbour — however friendly — will shield Canadians from poverty if interests diverge, and that Canada must stop living as a single-market economy and use this crisis to build a more independent trade and industrial strategy.