Prime Minister Mark Carney and his team are so over it.
From scampering in search of meetings with President Donald Trump and top U.S. aides all spring, summer and early fall — including the PM travelling twice to Washington and overseas to Egypt where he hailed Trump’s dealmaking — to now shrugging off the current suspension of trade talks, Carney is taking a different tack to Trump. And to the politics of a minority Parliament.
Not negotiating is the new black.
Where Carney was once in nearly a 24/7 texting-back-and-forth relationship with Trump (as he told Toronto Life on Oct. 16), and their negotiating teams were inching close to a deal, the prime minister and the president have had no contact on trade since the APEC summit in Korea, his office confirmed to the Star Friday.
Instead, Carney and his team are making a show of biding their time.
“We’re not going to wait around and look at our phones and turn up the notifications to make sure we don’t miss a ding because somebody sent us a text message at 9:30 at night,” said Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc this week.
“We’re going to get on with building the Canadian economy that’s more resilient, that’s more diversified, do deals with new trading partners, with long-standing trading partners in parts of the world where we can expand opportunities for Canadian businesses and Canadian workers.”
That’s in contrast to what Carney told Toronto Life before things blew up.
Back then — a whole month ago — Carney said he received texts from the president “in the middle of the night, early in the morning, all hours of the day.” The texts were written in “a lot of caps. And exclamation marks. And there is no time limit — there is a 24/7 element to it. In other words, it is not apparent how much the president of the United States sleeps.”
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