Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt
One of Donald Trump’s former chiefs of staff passed along a tip this week to a high-powered Canadian audience on how to deal with the president. Basically it amounted to this: Trump wants friends.
“The president’s a one-on-one guy, and he’s personable. He likes to be friends with the people that he’s talking to,” Reince Priebus, who served as Trump’s first chief of staff after his 2016 election victory, told a Canada-U.S. summit in Toronto.
“I would call the president often. I would go play golf with the president. I would do whatever you could to strike up a personal relationship with the president and talk about other things. Talk about Wayne Gretzky! The president loves talking about sports and golf.”
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Priebus was framing this as a tip but also as a warning to Mark Carney or anyone who is trying to manage the Canada-U.S. relationship in these fraught times. Don’t enter fighting. Don’t be antagonistic.
Earlier in the day, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also offered Canadians a glimpse into what this U.S. administration expects of this country, and it also could be summed up as: shut up and smile through whatever Trump is throwing this way.
Although Lutnick had been hoping his remarks would remain private, he was talking to a roomful of chatty people and the Star managed quickly to confirm his provocative words as they reverberated through the corridors of the conference.
“America is first, and Canada can be second,” Lutnick said at one point, also advising that this country should be braced to see its auto industry migrate south. Moreover, he said, Canada should just get used to the idea that the trade relationship of the past three decades is over.
“If you look at it where Canada was to where it will be, you’ll be disappointed.”
This is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, a time when people often take stock of the friendships they enjoy and for which they’re grateful. It also lands after a week in which the Canada-U.S. relationship was front and centre, with Carney’s visit to Trump in Washington on Tuesday and the big summit in Toronto the day afterward.
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So this is the perfect time to ask what kind of friend the United States is to us now, or even if it’s a friend at all. Do real friends ask us to shut up and accept what’s being hurled in our direction — no matter what — with a smile? Is it real friendship when it has to be constantly couched in flattery and genuflection?
This week’s Canada-U.S. summit was the third one hosted by the Eurasia Group and the Bank of Montreal, and from its inception it has been a marquee event for anyone in the business of navigating relations between the two countries. It attracts top leaders in business, current and former premiers, and twice has featured the prime minister as the keynote speaker: Justin Trudeau in 2023 and Carney in 2025.
The people who attend this conference, whether they are politicians or business leaders, lobbyists or even journalists, are acutely aware that their jobs often require them to navigate between the professional and the personal.
That, in sum, is where the Canada-U.S. relationship stands now under Trump — in an existential struggle to define how to manage what feels like an affront to the professional and the personal. It’s about where to draw the line.
Even Trump acknowledged that this line is in flux when he was sitting with Carney in the Oval Office. “It’s a complicated agreement, more complicated maybe than any other agreement we have, on trade because, you know, we have natural conflict,” he said. “We also have mutual love.”
Premier Doug Ford, who’s pretty good at buddy politics, is exhibiting some impatience about how buddy-buddy things have become in the face of Trump’s belligerence with this country’s economy.
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Judging from the correspondence I’ve received about Carney at the White House this week, Ford isn’t alone. Sure, it’s become common practice for world leaders to cloak their dealings with Trump in praise and flattery, but does Canada’s prime minister have to indulge the president that much?
“I wore red for you,” Carney told Trump at the White House.
Ford heard Lutnick’s remarks at the Canada-U.S. summit and while he couldn’t take a run at them directly (again, that privacy rule) his exasperation showed when he took to the stage.
“You aren’t going to annihilate manufacturing in Ontario, and you sure the heck aren’t going to annihilate the auto sector,” Ford said. How he proposed to ward off Trump’s ambitions on this score was less clear, but the premier was probably talking more with his Ontario audience in mind.
Then, Ford confronted the elephant in the room — why he is taking a harder tack against Trump than Carney. “You know something? I’m in support of the prime minister, but I think we have to be tougher,” the premier admitted. “I will not roll over.”
As many at the conference observed, it may serve Canada well to have this good-cop/bad-cop thing going on right now with Trump, since that’s the way the president is playing it. One minute he’s talking up his admiration for Carney and all things Canadian, and the next minute the White House is throwing more tariffs up against our industries. One of his old advisers tells a Canada-U.S. summit to strike up a friendship with Trump; the commerce secretary warns the same group that our auto industry is going down the drain.
Carney knows he wasn’t elected to become chums with Trump. Twenty-four or so hours after he was hanging out with the president at the White House, he appeared remotely from Ottawa at the Canada-U.S. summit for an interview with Gerald Butts of the Eurasia Group.
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The format itself, incidentally, was an interesting display of the straddled line between the professional and personal. Butts, once a friend and adviser to Justin Trudeau, has somehow reprised this double duty with Carney, albeit at somewhat more of a distance. He advised Carney through his leadership campaign and although he’s now back at Eurasia, the two chatted as friendly familiars.
Carney repeatedly returned to this whole business of how Canada can be a friend and a business competitor to Trump’s America.
“We also understand it’s America first, not America alone. So the question is where does it go from there?” Carney told Butts, saying how the ground was shifting under Trump.
“Nostalgia isn’t a strategy. Our relationship will never again be what it was. In terms of that aspect of it, that’s and that’s not a criticism,” he said. “It doesn’t lessen the ties between us as a people,” the prime minister said, but it does alter the economic ties, irreversibly.
As Carney’s predecessor, Trudeau had what I thought was a good rule for dealing with Trump: react to what the president does, not what he says.
But as I listened to Priebus, I realized Carney is not going to have that luxury. Priebus talked about what has changed between the first Trump administration and the second one.
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“The big difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0 is (in the first term) we were running and building the plane while we were flying,” he said.
“In the first term, we fought with each other before decisions were made. And I think now the president just makes the decision because he knows what he wants to do, and he just does it. So there’s, to the extent there isn’t any fighting, it would be active decisions made because the president is confident enough to make a decision and say, ‘This is what we’re doing. Go figure it out.'”
In other words, what Trump says now is what he does. “He floats out a tweet or a Truth Social post, he’s measuring. He puts it up, and he’s watching the reaction,” Priebus said. “That’s how he makes the decisions.”
That’s a pretty shaky ground on which to navigate a personal or a professional relationship, no matter what business you’re in, let alone the colossal and complicated ties between Canada and the United States. The audience at the Canada-U.S. summit was all ears when any speaker gave them glimpses into how Trump works. Little wonder. It’s ever-shifting terrain.
All over the country this weekend, Canadians will be sitting down with friends and family for Thanksgiving dinner. As often happens when people gather around the table, the conversation may take an unexpected turn. Someone may say something outrageous. Some may realize that a relationship they thought of one way has changed, maybe for the worse, maybe for the better. People will weigh whether to say things out loud or opt for diplomatic silence.
This week in Canada-U.S. relations has very much been an exercise in that same realm, unfolding in front of us at the top levels — Trump and Carney in Washington; top business leaders and players on the field of politics between the two nations, absorbing it all at the summit in Toronto.
It all comes back to one man — Trump, who reportedly just wants to make friends. But Canadians at all levels are asking whether the friendship even works any more and more importantly, what it is going to cost this country.
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