A Canadian Conservative Icon Advises Carney to Pull Back From US

Stephen Harper governed Canada from 2006 to 2015. Photo by Simon Dawson /Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloom

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(Bloomberg) — Stephen Harper calls himself the most pro-American prime minister in Canadian history. But the advice he gave recently to Mark Carney’s government was to take a different path — and reduce the country’s close integration with the US.

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Harper, who led a Conservative Party government in Ottawa from 2006 to 2015, said it’s imperative for Canada to quickly diversify its export markets for energy, critical minerals, and other strategic goods in response to President Donald Trump’s hostile trade actions. 

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The relationship between the two longstanding allies simply can’t be the same after months of threats from Trump, Harper told an audience in the western city of Saskatoon.  

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“We just cannot be in a position in the future where we can be threatened in this way and not have that leverage,” Harper told the Midwestern Legislative Conference, which includes legislators from 11 US states and the province of Saskatchewan. 

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Harper said that if he’d been asked a year ago about how to handle Trump’s agenda, his advice would have been for Canada to “really deepen its economic and security partnership with the United States.”

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“However, when this government did actually ask me a few weeks ago, my advice was the opposite,” he went on. Carney needs to get a trade deal worked out with Trump in the short term, but “this really is a wake-up call for this country” on trade, he said. 

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Carney’s office did not immediately confirm the request for Harper’s advice, nor whether the conversation happened directly between the two men. Harper appointed Carney as Bank of Canada governor in 2008.

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Canada’s trade is dominated by the US for both exports and imports. The two nations exchanged more than $900 billion in goods and services last year, and US ran a trade deficit of around $36 billion with Canada, according to Commerce Department data — a gap that’s driven by US imports of millions of barrels of oil every day. 

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Earlier this year, Harper endorsed Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre during a close election race. Carney still prevailed, completing a remarkable comeback for the Liberal Party that began after Justin Trudeau retired from politics.

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Harper told the US lawmakers that Canadians are “just angry and bewildered” by Trump’s rhetoric and actions toward them. 

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“That is very real and it is very deep, and it is across the country, and it is across the political spectrum,” he said.

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During his time in office, Harper either signed or began negotiations for numerous free trade deals with the rest of the world, including with the European Union and with Asian and Latin American countries.

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But he criticized how western democracies had permitted China to dominate trade with them, allowing a situation where “they can sell to us and we can barely sell them to them.”

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He said he believes free trade will live on even as the US runs away from it under Trump. “The idea of using tariff barriers to raise revenue and comprehensively relocate industries, this is a failed economic policy where it has been tried,” he said.

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Harper expressed hope the Trump administration will eventually realize it’s unfeasible to carry out “a trade war on 200 other countries at the same time.”

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“There is a view taking hold in the present administration that I would say sees the world as: Everybody needs America, but America doesn’t need anybody,” Harper said. “I tell you, that’s not true.”

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