Was Mark Carney's Davos speech a mistake if it upset Trump?

In an interview with an American television network this week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent volunteered some advice to Mark Carney.

"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 name for the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement.

"He 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."

The cause of Bessent's concern was apparently Carney's widely lauded speech in Davos, Switzerland, last week. And the treasury secretary's comments came after U.S. President Donald Trump's suggestion that Canada needed to be more "grateful." 

"I would not pick a fight going into USMCA to score some cheap political points," Bessent said. 

If a fight is currently being had, one might ask whether Carney — or Canada — can really be said to have picked it. Canada was largely minding its own business a year ago when the United States launched tariffs against Canadian products.

One might also ask whether Carney's speech in Davos was really motivated by a mere desire to score political points — or, for that matter, whether those political points were particularly cheap.

But if Bessent thinks Carney would have been better off not delivering that speech, he is not entirely alone. 

"Carney is a really smart guy and he said in the United Kingdom during Brexit, it's really dangerous for the United Kingdom to separate itself from its No. 1 trading partner," Goldy Hyder, president of the Business Council of Canada, told Bloomberg News this week. "And yet that's exactly kind of the narrative that came out in Davos."

The Business Council represents the chief executives of some of the biggest companies operating in Canada.

Lucy Hargreaves, co-founder of Build Canada, a think-tank launched last year by figures in Canada's tech industry, wrote in an op-ed for the Toronto Star that Carney's speech was "poorly judged."

"This is why Carney's behaviour … is so concerning — it suggests that we are back where Trudeau left us: political leaders scoring anti-American points for partisan gain, at the country's enormous detriment," Hargreaves wrote, referencing both Carney's Davos speech and his framing of a new agreement with China.

It's not unreasonable, of course, to think — or worry — about how any action by a Canadian government might impact relations with Canada's largest trading partner. And it's perhaps unsurprising that corporate interests in Canada are particularly inclined to think about such things.

At the same time, allowing the American president's potential for anger and retribution to dictate the behaviour of Canadian leaders risks ceding a great amount of power. It is also worth remembering that the president has shown a willingness to get upset over relatively innocuous remarks, as in the aftermath of the G7 summit in 2018.