What the US really wanted: One. They demanded control over who Canada trades with. This came straight from Carney on Saturday: “The U.S. introduced at the last hour, in the last hour, efforts to restrict our ability to have other trade deals.” Not tariff levels. Not quotas. The United States demanded a say in Canada’s trade relationships with the rest of the planet. That is not a term you put to a trading partner. That is a term you put to a territory. Two. They came for the French language. This is the one that should make every Canadian’s blood run cold, and Carney laid it out in detail. The Americans had “issues” with Canada’s subsidies for French culture. With the prevalence of French-language media online. And, I’m not making this up, with the requirement that products sold in Canada carry bilingual labels. Carney’s words: “It was unacceptable right from the start, but the Americans kept trying and trying and we said no.” American negotiators sat across from Canadian officials and demanded we water down the legal protections for one of our two founding languages. In a trade deal. About tariffs. Three. They tried to rig the auto sector to strip our jobs. Carney said the US wanted to treat Canadian-made parts unfairly and to exempt some cars and pickup trucks from tariffs but not others, without explaining the logic. There was a logic. The logic was to pick which assembly lines live in Michigan and which ones die in Ontario, and to write it into a treaty. Four. They demanded we dismantle our own domestic policies, right down to the provincial level. Per the Globe’s sourcing: kill the retaliatory tariffs on American autos, rewrite how dairy licences are allocated under supply management to Washington’s interpretation, force provinces to end their bans on American booze, and scrap Buy Canadian procurement rules. The United States demanded that Canadian provinces change their liquor store policies. Doug Ford’s LCBO decisions were on a term sheet in Washington. Five. The resource grab was queued up for “phase two.” The Globe reported that US negotiators raised critical minerals, oil exports, the F-35 purchase, and Golden Dome missile defence in the talks, with the understanding that Canada’s flexibility on those files would shape the deal. Translation: sign away autos, dairy, culture and procurement now, and then we’ll discuss how much of your lithium, uranium and crude you get to keep. Six. The snapback. The remote-control tariff. Sign all of the above away permanently, and in exchange receive tariff relief that Trump can revoke any afternoon he wakes up feeling “aggrieved.”
