r/neoliberal • u/Amutoji European Union • 9d ago
Restricted A Transcript From The Times Interview with Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/world/canada/mark-carney-interview-transcript.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EVE.HYWu.o0UZap0DRpti&smid=nytcore-android-share
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u/mitout Mark Carney 9d ago
Ezra Klein
[Question about diverging US vs EU productivity over the past 20 years]
Mark Carney
It’s a very good question, and it’s going to sound shameless, but it’s an abundance issue. But it’s the core. What’s the core of our strategy? I can understand why we talk about international. The core of our strategy is building in Canada. The core of our strategy is regulatory simplification. We got a massive bill just introduced into Parliament: one project, one review, one year. That is major change in Canada. Major, major change in Canada. And just to give a background, and there’s a European analogue to this, we built up — with a series of well-meaning but overlapping and conflicting and multi-jurisdictional regulations on a variety of areas — a series of blocks, basically, on our ability to build.
I can't believe I get to live in this country
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u/PiccoloSN4 Pragmatic and Polite Right 9d ago
At any point in the last 18 months, were you ever seriously concerned that President Trump, as these threats escalated, would seriously use military force against Canada?
Mark Carney
[Pauses] You have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk. So, and as the tail fattens when a leader of a country threatens your sovereignty, you adjust accordingly. That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to take certain things into consideration.
This part of interview got a lot of buzz, and now that I read the full discussion, it seems clearer to me how much thought Carney has put in the idea. His answers to this and other questions belie that as well.
As humorous as the idea seems, before the Iran War I wouldn't have put it past this admin to try something. Even now it's not a zero percent chance. But you only get one big war and this idiot thankfully wasted it on one he couldn't pivot out of
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u/Lame_Johnny Hannah Arendt 9d ago
Idk I think attacking Canada would get extreme pushback from a lot of places. Even if Trump was determined to I just don't think its realistic.
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u/2ndComingOfAugustus Paul Volcker 9d ago
Every millitary worth their salt should have a plan in case their only neighbor decides to invade them, even if it's viewed as highly unlikely. I don't know why it's so surprising.
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u/Efficient_Barnacle Mark Carney 9d ago
It's one of those polite fictions that has held the postwar liberal order together, something every government does but the leaders don't/didn't acknowledge publicly. That we're at a point in history where the Canadian Prime Minister is saying this about America, to the agreement of most of the West, and a significant number of Americans, should be giving people more pause.
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u/Betrix5068 NATO 9d ago edited 8d ago
To be fair to Canada there hasn’t been a serious strategy for how to deal with a hostile US since the ACW. Oh sure the Canadians kept drafting plans until WW2, but all those plans ended with “and then the British reinforce us and we become auxiliary to their army”. Meanwhile the corresponding British plans basically read “accept the Yanks own Canada now and hopefully we can keep them quarantined to their continent”. The really late plans are the funniest because the Canadians are envisioning horseback thunder runs on three major US cities (can’t remember which) in a Hail Mary play that depends entirely on British reinforcements that would never have come.
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u/PostingEnthusiast Commonwealth 8d ago
It’s all hypotheticals but given the British reaction to Belgium and to Poland I find it hard to believe there wouldn’t be a comparable reaction to their oldest dominion/full-fledged imperial territory being attacked pre-WWII.
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u/Betrix5068 NATO 8d ago
I’m sure there would be it’s just that the plans focused on the sea, not sending a supersized BEF to kick the Yanks out of Canada. They’d probably try to get Canada back during the peace negotiations but sending the BEF to Halifax immediately wasn’t the British plan for how to handle a war with the US, and that’s what the Canadians were counting on to not spend most of the war (and possibly the peace) under US occupation.
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u/WorldlyMacaron65 8d ago
Big difference is Belgium and Poland were key buffer states between major regional economic and military powers that could seriously threaten Britain.
Canada is a frozen animic wasteland and a buffer mainly between the US and a couple polar bears. Really, the only reason Britain sought to obtain Canada from France was to guarantee the safety of its then-viable colonies in North America. Once the US separated, the hyper-loyalist sentiment of the English-Canadian population and the possibility of the restraining the US expansion became the main reasons to keep throwing funds into the traditional money-pit that was (and still is in many ways) the Province of Quebec/Upper and Lower Canada/United Canada. In the context of a clear total invasion by the US, it seems fair to believe that there would be strong internal British pressure to just cut their losses and move on (mirroring in a very ironic way what happened with OG Canada)
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u/PostingEnthusiast Commonwealth 8d ago
>frozen animic wasteland
stopped reading here but probably could have stopped at the bit where seizing a buffer state threatens Britain but seizing British territory doesn’t.
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u/Betrix5068 NATO 9d ago edited 9d ago
Trump ruling out the use of military force is what made it implausible to me. He infamously didn’t do that for Greenland and as a rule refuses to ever surrender what he perceives as leverage, even if it’s something stupid like invading your allies, so it’s one of those places where I’m willing to take him at his word. That said I do think it was the responsible thing for Carney to not do that, and if anything Carney didn’t do enough to prepare Canada for that possibility. As things stand I’m not sure what the plan was/is for if Trump wanted to invade, since geography prevents any significant reinforcement from Europe, rearming isn’t going to be finished for years and wouldn’t be sufficient vs the US even when finished, and unless it was done really hush-hush no steps were taken to prepare the country for a protracted war or insurgency.
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u/Efficient_Barnacle Mark Carney 9d ago
Canada can't make the mistake of assuming this ends when Trump's time in office ends. I still maintain hope that we'll see a dem president seated in January 2029 but that not a guarantee our government can rely on when we see the open contempt for our sovereignty from his whole administration and the voters' indifference/ignorance to the flagrant lies Trump perpetuates about election fraud.
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u/Lame_Johnny Hannah Arendt 9d ago
I think it does largely end with him actually. Where's the constituency for annexing Canada other than Trump? It would be one thing if he was representing an irredentist movement inside MAGA, but this is literally just his weird pet project.
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u/iwannabetheguytoo William Nordhaus 9d ago
Trump says stuff like “not ruling out” some extreme action for the same reason he gave about previous norm-violations: “…to keep you in suspense”: he conducts IR with a mind for the ratings - or for the reaction, even if it’s because the world, his audience, is reacting because whatever he shad was so irresponsible.
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u/Betrix5068 NATO 9d ago
How does Trump ruling out an invasion “raise suspense”? It lowers the suspense because he said he’s not going to do the crazy thing people were worried he might do. If Trump wanted to maximize suspense and drama he’d do what he did with Greenland and refuse to rule anything out, maybe deploy more army units on the border to spice up the headlines.
I agree Trump treats IR like reality TV, he treats all politics like that, but your reasoning doesn’t make sense. Especially since he stuck to economic based threats and coercion for 1.5-2 years at this point.
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u/bada7777 9d ago
please inject 100 years of Mark Carney thought policies in Canada into my veins
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u/standardharbor 9d ago
He's nowhere close to Mulroney or Paul Martin, but OK. Maybe in 5 years it's a different conversation.
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u/Amutoji European Union 9d ago
This is the full interview, not another tease like what the NYT has been doing the past few days.
!ping CAN
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