Mark Carney once enjoyed a reputation as the smooth technocrat, the sharpest mind in the room, a central banker whose steady hand at the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England earned him deference from global elites and dewy-eyed profiles in the press. But as the former Goldman Sachs banker pivots toward the political arena, his economic instincts appear to be abandoning him. More to the point, he is being outflanked, if not outsmarted, by Donald Trump, a man Carney and his admirers have long treated as a populist ogre beneath serious economic debate.
It turns out that Trump, for all the pearl-clutching about his America First rhetoric, is not just shaping the Republican agenda; he is now setting the terms of trade policy for much of the Western world, Canada included. And Mark Carney, instead of offering a serious counterpoint to Trump’s tariff-heavy playbook, is busy validating and mimicking it.
Carney’s recent embrace of tariffs to protect Canadian industries mirrors, almost exactly, the strategy Trump pioneered and is now promising to escalate in a potential second term. Consider the irony: the man who would be Prime Minister of Canada is giving Trump his clearest proof point yet that tariffs “work.” Worse, Carney is doing so without securing anything close to the advantages Trump is extracting for the U.S. Below are five key examples where Carney has not only failed to negotiate well but has also legitimized Trump’s protectionist worldview. 
Softwood Lumber: Canada Retreats, the U.S. Escalates
The Canada–U.S. softwood lumber dispute is one of the longest-running trade irritants in North America, but under Trump it was elevated to a blunt-force economic weapon. The Trump administration imposed harsh duties on Canadian lumber imports, effectively pricing them out of large swathes of the American market. Carney and his allies in the Trudeau government reacted not with tough countermeasures but with cautious appeals to the WTO and diplomatic half-measures.
Now, rather than rethinking the effectiveness of tariff diplomacy, Carney has endorsed using similar tools against other trading partners to protect Canadian sectors like aluminum and steel. In essence, Carney is copying a Trump tactic that failed to produce results for Canada when deployed against us, and applying it in directions where Canada lacks leverage. Trump raised tariffs and got concessions. Carney raises tariffs and gets inflation.
The CBC Bailout as Cultural Tariff
Economic nationalism takes many forms, and while Carney has publicly supported maintaining federal subsidies for the CBC, he has done so under the guise of cultural protectionism. In reality, this is just another tariff by another name, protectionism not at the border but in the budget. Carney defends the taxpayer-funded broadcaster while it loses market share, relevance, and audience trust. He insists that Canadian content needs support to withstand American cultural hegemony, even as independent Canadian creators flourish on global platforms like YouTube and Spotify.
Trump, by contrast, slashed federal support for PBS and NPR and dared them to compete. While this approach provoked controversy among Democrats, it also affirmed a confidence in free markets and consumer choice. Carney’s insistence on propping up failing institutions with government aid echoes Trump’s worldview, only Carney disguises it in the vocabulary of Canadian values. The substance is the same: insulating national institutions from competition while demanding taxpayers foot the bill.
Electric Vehicle Subsidies: Caught in a Tariff Arms Race
Trump’s Inflation Reduction Act ushered in sweeping “Buy American” provisions for electric vehicles and battery production, effectively penalizing Canadian manufacturers unless they set up shop on U.S. soil. Ottawa, rather than forcefully opposing this incursion into integrated supply chains, responded with a panicked escalation. Billions of taxpayer dollars were pledged to Stellantis and Volkswagen in the form of production subsidies that function as reverse tariffs, economic punishment if you don’t build here.
Carney defended these corporate welfare schemes as necessary responses to “an evolving industrial policy landscape,” yet the deeper truth is starker: Canada entered a tariff arms race and immediately started paying the other side’s ransom demands. Trump’s policies forced our hand, and Carney’s response has been to feed the fire with public money. We are subsidizing factories to respond to American tariffs we cannot control.
Carbon Border Adjustments: A Tariff by Another Name
One of the more technical elements of Carney’s platform is his support for carbon border adjustment mechanisms—tariffs dressed up in green robes. Under such a system, imports from countries with weaker environmental policies are taxed to level the playing field for domestic producers. It is, in effect, a protectionist measure that appeals to progressive sensibilities while satisfying nationalist economic instincts.
Trump, ever the skeptic of climate policy, has nonetheless endorsed tariffs on similar grounds—protecting American workers from “unfair foreign competition.” Carney’s green tariffs are ideologically distinct, but economically indistinguishable. And once again, the Americans will control the terms: Washington will decide what constitutes “fair” environmental practice, and Canada will scramble to comply. This is not leadership; it’s mimicry without leverage.
Steel and Aluminum: Capitulation Rebranded as Policy
When the Trump administration imposed Section 232 tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, claiming national security grounds, Canada was blindsided. Though Ottawa eventually retaliated, the damage was done, and the retaliatory measures were carefully calibrated not to disrupt U.S. supply chains. Trump extracted concessions and kept his tariffs in place until it was politically convenient to lift them.
Carney’s subsequent endorsement of targeted tariffs and trade remedies in these sectors amounts to a quiet admission: the Trump model worked. Far from resisting the premise, Carney has normalized it. He’s now on record suggesting that Canada should “mirror global practices” and impose retaliatory tariffs more readily. In doing so, he is not reversing the Trump trade paradigm, he is entrenching it.
What makes all this more concerning is that Carney is not doing these things reluctantly. He is doing them with conviction. He sees in Trump’s toolkit a politically viable and rhetorically defensible approach to economic governance, tariffs, subsidies, and managed trade dressed up in nationalist language. But while Trump uses tariffs as negotiating tools to extract real-world gains for American firms and workers, Carney is using them as ideological cover to substitute state direction for market dynamism.
In this way, Mark Carney has become the most dangerous kind of politician: the one who knows better but does it anyway. He is lending intellectual legitimacy to the very economic instincts he once decried, proving that Trump doesn’t have to win elections in Canada to win the policy war.
Canadians should ask: if Mark Carney is so smart, why is he walking us straight into Donald Trump’s economic trap?
