Scott Bessent warns Carney to stop 'virtue signalling' amid looming trade talks
CBC
The Trump administration is once again ramping up its rhetorical pressure on Canada, with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issuing a fresh warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney over looming trade negotiations.
Bessent was at an event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to launch what U.S. President Donald Trump has dubbed "Trump Accounts," an investment vehicle for children.
In an interview with CNBC's Sara Eisen, Bessent was asked about the rift between Trump and Carney over the prime minister's headline-grabbing speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.
"I would just encourage Prime Minister Carney to do what he thinks is best for the Canadian people, not his own virtue signalling, because we do have a USMCA negotiation coming up," Bessent said, using the American acronym for the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA).
"I would not pick a fight going into USMCA to score some cheap political points."
Bessent said that Carney "rose to power on an anti-American, anti-Trump message, and that's not a great place to be when you're negotiating with an economy that is multiples larger than you are and your biggest trading partner."
After slapping tariffs on a range of Canadian exports to the United States in 2025, the Trump White House has of late been threatening significant changes to CUSMA as the deal comes up for review this year.
Those threatened changes run all the way up to Trump suggesting the U.S. doesn't need the agreement at all, despite widespread support for it among American industries.
At Wednesday's event, Bessent also took a swipe at Carney's transition to politics after serving as governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.
"In my investment career, I've seen what happens when a technocrat tries to pivot and become a politician. It never really works out well," he said.
Bessent's latest comments come on the heels of claiming that Carney walked back what he said in Davos during a phone call on Monday with Trump.
On Tuesday, Carney denied recanting his message. "To be absolutely clear, and I said this to the president, I meant what I said in Davos," Carney told reporters on Parliament Hill.
Trump and his officials have made Carney a frequent target of scorn in the week since he spoke in Davos of "American hegemony" and warned that "great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage."
Last Thursday, Trump withdrew his invitation to Carney to join his newly created "Board of Peace," a collection of some three dozen leaders from such countries as El Salvador, Hungary, Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, with Trump as its chairman for life.
New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt says health care won’t be exempt from her efforts to cut spending — even though her health minister says big spending increases will be unavoidable in coming years.
Pierre Ny St-Amand, the man who drove a bus into a Laval daycare in 2023, killing two young children and injuring six others, has been declared a high-risk accused.
A former CTV and CBC reporter hired to serve as Manitoba’s trade envoy to the United States is taking home more than $480,000 Cdn a year in consulting fees, according to his contract with the province.
The teen who lit her classmate on fire at a Saskatoon high school returns to court on Monday to learn the judge's decision on her sentence.
On a July morning in 2024, Dwayne Cardinal was packing up his tent outside the Bissell Centre when a police cruiser pulled up and two officers got out.
The City of Revelstoke and the Columbia-Shuswap Regional District have passed motions formalizing their intention to push the provincial government to protect an old-growth forest.
The province will once again decide who will hold Niagara’s top municipal post after the sudden resignation last week of Bob Gale, but exactly when the next regional chair will be announced isn’t clear just yet.
A wind warning is in place for Windsor-Essex, Chatham-Kent and Sarnia-Lambton on Monday with gusts as high as 90 km/h possible, according to Environment Canada.
Just a year after the Alberta government made a big splash unveiling its new border security team to the public with an announced $29-million investment, its latest budget shows the province only spent a third of the total it earmarked for the work over its first year.
Following several fatal collisions in northern Ontario this winter, a Sudbury, Ont., resident has created a website to track incidents across the region.
A Cambridge endometriosis advocate’s petition calling for change in how the disease is treated and recognized in Canada has received sponsorship by a member of Parliament.
While it may be expected to see crowded bars on a Friday or Saturday night, one Charlottetown pub is drawing in customers at a different time of day.
AI-generated Indigenous language dictionaries, elders’ teachings and history circulating online could be harming culture and language revitalization efforts, say experts.