Conrad Black: Mark Carney's coup de grâce — forcing Guilbeault out of cabinet

Readers will recall that I was censorious of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s histrionic emulation of Winston Churchill during the election campaign, lacking only the siren-suit, the cigar and the eloquence, as he promised to lead Canada with raised elbows “in the fields and in the streets,” as he engaged U.S. President Donald Trump, whom he claimed was “trying to break us.” I have since been happy to commend the prime minister for enunciating a policy of promoting the intelligent exploitation and export of the treasure trove of Canada’s natural resources, while protecting the environment.

I particularly welcome the rapprochement with the Government of Alberta, which raises the welcome prospect of returning this country to a policy of economic growth through a positive response to demand for our energy resources. The accompanying sop to the environmental extremists of a carbon-capture system is an unjustifiable squandering of taxpayer money, but that is a bearable price for the restoration of a discernible level of economic sanity in Ottawa.

But I bow low indeed before Prime Minister Carney, and emulate Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV at Canossa kneeling in the snow and humbling himself before Pope Gregory VII in 1077, on what I regard as the greatest success of any prime minister of Canada since Stephen Harper’s address to the Israeli Knesset in 2014. This, of course, is the departure from his government of Steven Guilbeault, the former minister of environment and climate change, and other departments where he festered athwart the entire process of sensible Canadian government.

Guilbeault gave new, felonious and deranged meaning to the word “activist.” His best-known paroxysms of derring-do were when he appropriated the methods of Spider-Man and climbed approximately 350 metres up the CN Tower in Toronto and unfurled a banner denouncing Canada and then-U.S. president George W. Bush as “climate killers.” He followed this up by leading a group of collaborators in orange jumpsuits like fugitives from a U.S. maximum-security prison and clambered in broad daylight up onto the roof of the home of the then-premier of Alberta of fond and vivid memory, Ralph Klein, pretending to install solar panels. This naturally discountenanced the premier’s wife, who thought the house was under potentially lethal attack from hooligans.

Guilbeault apparently thinks that the environmentally safe exportation of gas and oil is such a mortifying assault upon his evangelical mission to lead the regression of Canada back to a primeval forest that he could no longer sit with his colleagues at the cabinet table (especially as the prime minister’s elbows are frozen in horizontal mode against the long-anticipated assault from the south).

With this feather in Carney’s cap, we may dare to hope the prime minister will get down to serious efforts to stabilize our relations with the United States and Mexico. Despite all the pyrotechnics over trade matters in the last year, Mexico and Canada continued to be the two largest buyers of American goods in the first eight months of 2025, at US$226 billion (C$315 billion) and US$225 billion respectively. The Canadian number was somewhat reduced by the spontaneous boycott of American goods following President Trump’s outrageous scapegoating of this country and his nonsense about the 51st state.

American trade policy seems to have reverted to the traditional channel of the joint review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in July of next year. Hearings have just begun at the U.S. International Trade Commission. The fact is that USMCA has worked quite well for everybody. Of course, the United States has extensive grievances with Mexico, and in particular that country’s policy of inducing American manufacturers to close their American factories, subsidize their relocation just inside the Mexican border with tax holidays and cheap Mexican labour and then abuse the agreement to export back into the U.S., feeding the unpatriotic avarice of American business. The scandalous Mexican exploitation of illegal migration to the U.S. by desperate masses of people, including violent criminals, has been ended by this administration and is not, strictly speaking, a matter of international commerce.

The U.S. Trade Representative, the cabinet officer responsible for foreign trade, has already received over 1,500 submissions and proposals for amendments to the USMCA. The Business Roundtable, a group of over 200 prominent corporate chief executives, notes that trade with Canada and Mexico supports 13-million jobs in the United States and pointed out that those two countries, particularly Canada, have invested US$775 billion in the United States over the life of USMCA. This is illustrative of the flight of capital from this country because of our incompetent economic management. The same report celebrated the fact that two-way trade has increased 50 per cent, to a total of nearly US$2 trillion in goods and services.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce pointed out that American-manufactured exports to Canada and Mexico were greater than the next 12 largest export markets combined, and include one-third of all U.S. agricultural exports. The National Association of Manufacturers describes the USMCA as “the most pro-U.S. manufacturing trade agreement in history.” All this serves to illustrate what a wild and damaging shot from the hip Trump’s reflections on U.S.-Canada relations was. It is clear from these submissions that there were no serious grievances against Canada but a considerable catalogue of justified complaints about the conduct of Mexico.

The Carney government will have to develop a strategy to protect our automobile and steel industries, but Canada has no cause to apologize to the United States, except for our defence free-loading, which is being corrected. With that said, following the prime minister’s stirring rhetorical Gloriana about the new post-continental vocation for this country, he has not, as far as I can deduce, made any new commercial agreements with any country. He has earned the gratitude of the nation by sloughing Guilbeault but it’s time for some of the things that he has so theatrically promised to do.

National Post