Canada says its friendship with the US is ‘over.’ Now what?

It’s over.

After a century and a half of building an economic and military partnership that survived two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks, the United States and Canada are breaking up.

So said Prime Minister Mark Carney in a national television address to 41 million Canadian citizens from Parliament Hill last week. And it is almost all because of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

“The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over,” Carney declared on March 27. “We must fundamentally reimagine our economy. We will need to ensure that Canada can succeed in a drastically different world.”

The striking messaging, some of which Carney’s Conservative opponent Pierre Poilievre has also begun to adopt, underlines the degree to which anger at the U.S. has taken over the current Canadian federal election campaign. In the wake of repeated threats from Trump to make Canada the “51st state,” followed by the wholesale implosion of the countries’ economic ties, there seems to be very little appetite among voters for gentle reassurance.

Carney deliberately repeated the “O” word again several times on Thursday as he gave Canada’s response to Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariff announcement from the previous afternoon. That included 25 percent counter tariffs on U.S. auto imports to Canada to counter Trump’s imposition of levies on Canadian automobiles, steel and aluminum to punish what Trump sees as a lack of progress in stopping a minuscule amount of fentanyl from illegally crossing America’s northern border.

The auto industry was the cornerstone of modern Canada-U.S. cooperation, dating back to 1965 — the year Carney was born — when they signed the Auto Pact. It created tariff-free automobile trade and helped establish the industry in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province.

Carney said the pact marked the beginning of a “60-year period of close cooperation, partnership, job growth and prosperity. That era has now ended, unless the United States and Canada can agree on a new comprehensive approach.”

Some U.S. politicians echoed Carney’s words. “[Trump] ended the several hundred year friendship between the US and Canada — our neighbor and closest ally,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on X last week.

“The tariffs on Canada are going to hurt my state. It’s going to hurt our neighbors there,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Trump’s tariffs would also cause broader harm, Carney said, predicting a “rupture” of the global economy, ending an era of U.S. dominance dating back to World War II.

“The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services, is over.”

Now what?

Carney said it was a “tragedy,” but that the “new reality” would force Canada to do two things: renegotiate the terms of its relationship with the U.S., and lead the creation of a “like-minded” new world order of countries that excluded the U.S.

First, Canada will renegotiate a new economic and security partnership with Trump after the April 28 election. Carney reiterated that he and Trump agreed on a March 28 phone call that whoever is elected prime minister would begin the negotiation.

Carney and Poilievre also agree on that fundamental point, even though they disagree on just about everything else, as they regularly trade insults on the campaign trail.

Poilievre’s pivot to attacking Trump has been the exception rather than the rule for his campaign. While he has denounced the president and the tariffs, his major campaign focus has been attacking the “lost Liberal decade” in power and trying to attach Carney to that legacy, even though he has never held office.

“On my first day on the job as prime minister, I will call the president and demand that we rapidly renegotiate the CUSMA agreement on a very tight timeline that will allow us to find certainty,” Poilievre said Thursday, using the Canadian acronym for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

But a new report this week, authored by a group that includes a former Canadian Forces vice-chief, an ex-defense minister from the Brian Mulroney era and a former national security adviser, is warning the next government to be careful about entering a renegotiation with Trump “until there is greater clarity in the current political mayhem in Washington.”

Its title reflects the mood of Canada: “Broken Trust: Managing an Unreliable Ally.”

The second thing Canada must do, Carney said, is find new best friends and build new alliances.

“Canada must be looking elsewhere to expand our trade, to build our economy and to protect our sovereignty. Canada is ready to take a leadership role in building a coalition of like-minded countries who share our values. We believe in international cooperation,” he said Thursday.

Carney’s first international trip after being sworn in as prime minister last month was to France, and then to Britain, to affirm Canada’s bonds with its two founding colonial powers. In recent days, Carney has also spoken to the leaders of Germany and Mexico, and Canada recently signed an agreement with Australia to supply a new radar surveillance system for the Arctic.

On Friday, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly was in Brussels telling every European within earshot that the relationship with the U.S. was, without using Carney’s word, over.

“We know that the relationship will never be the same again,” she said at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers. “That’s my message to Europeans: The relationship with the U.S. will never be the same.”

Echoing Carney, Joly also told her European audience that Trump was attempting “a global reset on trade” that had begun with Canada.

“We buy more from the U.S. than the U.K., France, China and Japan combined,” Joly said. “When you treat your best client the way we’ve been treated … it means that you want, fundamentally, to change the way you’re operating.”

Joly issued a similar warning last month when she hosted G7 foreign ministers in Charlevoix, Quebec.

“If the U.S. can do this to us, their closest friend, then nobody is safe,” she said ahead of the meeting, which included U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Canada is the canary in the coal mine.”

In March, and in again in Brussels on Friday, Joly reiterated that Canada was prepared to exert “maximum pressure” on the U.S. to try to end the tariffs. She said Friday that Canada’s tariff retaliation had now reached C$60 billion.

Joly said the situation was “a nightmare” but the “only people on Earth that will be able to really have President Trump change course are the Americans themselves.”

The future

Canada’s legendary bard Leonard Cohen once sang that there’s “a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

For Canada, that sliver of hope may have come in last week’s phone call between Carney and Trump. The president referred to Carney as “Mark” and the “prime minister” after months of trolling former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor” of the “51st state.”

Since then, Trump has paused his social media and Oval Office ribbing of Canada. It may be that he’s too preoccupied with the rest of the world, as the fallout from his new tariff regime reverberates around the globe.

But when it comes to the United States, Canadians are done taking anything for granted.

On Friday, Carney was back on the campaign trail, after spending two days in the prime minister’s Ottawa office. He went to Montreal, the business center of Canada’s francophone province, Quebec, to pledge more funding for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation if elected.

“French culture and language are at the center of Canada’s identity, and today that identity is being openly threatened by the president of the United States,” Carney said in French.

“President Trump wants to assimilate our culture, this culture that defines Quebec and all of Canada. But we will never let that happen. We will protect our culture.”