What Mark Carney has been doing so far hasn’t worked out well for Canada, we need a new approach with Trump. Knowing when to put your elbows up and when to put them down isn’t something you learn in business school. It seems Prime Minister Mark Carney could have used a few more lessons from the streets rather than the case studies at Harvard or Oxford.

Donald Trump is being a bully to Canada once again and Carney doesn’t know if his elbows should be up or down. Based on past performance, where they’ve been up and down like a chicken trying to fruitlessly take off, I’m not feeling confident that he’ll have the right response.

On Thursday evening, Trump released a letter he sent to Carney via his Truth Social platform. In the letter, Trump said that he’s willing to work with Canada even though Canada retaliated against the tariffs he imposed over fentanyl which he says is still flowing across the border. “Instead of working with the United States, Canada retaliated with its own Tariffs,” Trump said.

Look, having examined the evidence, Canada is the not the major supplier of fentanyl that Mexico is, but our hands aren’t clean. The superlabs and the mailing of fentanyl are real issues as is the money laundering that happens in Canada for the international crime syndicates running these operations.

The truth is somewhere between Trump’s claim that we are a huge problem and the Liberal government’s previous denial that we are even part of the problem. Carney though has said that he understands the issue; he’s committed to working on it and is taking it seriously.

Apparently, that means nothing to Trump. “Starting August 1, 2025, we will charge Canada a Tariff of 35% on Canadian products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs,” Trump said in a post that went live shortly after 8 p.m. ET.

“If Canada works with me to stop the flow of Fentanyl, we will, perhaps, consider an adjustment to this letter.”

Well, we have worked with him, and we are only getting more tariffs. These 35% tariffs are on top of the sectoral tariffs on products like aluminum and steel, and they are separate from the threatened 50% tariffs on copper that Trump announced earlier this week. This is an extension of the chaos that Trump has unleashed since being elected. He made it clear though that his job, as he sees it, is to fundamentally alter the global trading system in favour of the United States. In his view, the current system favours other countries doing business with the U.S. and that system has harmed American workers and American companies.