Canadian leader now courts Trump but once sought to punish Americans for ‘sedition’ over protests

On the course to his improbable recent election victory, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney fashioned himself as the “Canada-first” politician ready to stand up to America and fight for middle-class jobs and a more affordable future. And he has already signaled he’ll bring that persona to his first meeting with President Donald Trump on Tuesday.

But for most of his career as a banker and bureaucrat, Carney was an unabashed liberal who led the “net zero” campaign to phase out oil, gas and coal, championed globalism at the United Nations and even derided his own country’s truckers protesting vaccine mandates as anarchists who should be prosecuted because they “terrorized” Canadians.

“This is sedition,” Carney wrote in a February 2022 newspaper OpEd about the Freedom Convoy trucker protests in Ottawa. “That’s a word I never thought I’d use in Canada. It means ‘incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.’

“They are not patriots. This is not about restoring freedom but beginning anarchy,” he added, alleging that the horn-honking truckers were “making residents’ lives hell, will bankrupt our businesses, and if left unchecked, would help achieve the convoy’s goal of undermining our democracy and the rule of law.”

But Carney went even further, suggesting that Americans who donated to support the truckers and their convoy should face legal consequences.

“Anyone sending money to the convoy should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition,” he wrote. “Foreign funders of an insurrection interfered in our domestic affairs from the start. Canadian authorities should take every step within the law to identify and thoroughly punish them.”

A globalist, Carney held three citizenships until a couple months ago when he began the process of renouncing his Irish and U.K. citizenship, saying that as prime minister, "I should only hold one citizenship."

As Carney descends on Washington Tuesday for his first official visit after winning the Canadian election, GOP lawmakers and administration officials are acutely aware of his far-left-leaning past and hoping to use it to their advantage.

“This is a far-left radical individual, very much what you see with people unhinged protesting in all of our districts today. He is not what he seems,” Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Army doctor turned GOP lawmaker, told the Just the News No Noise television show Monday night.

“You know, democracy is alive and well in the United States, as is free speech, as is freedom of association. But I’m very concerned about Canada,” she added. “So I think tomorrow's meeting is going to be extremely interesting.”

Carney has suggested he could be more moderate than Trudeau on climate policy but signaled over the weekend he will remain defiant with Trump, resisting — as he did throughout the election — any suggestion Canada should be subservient to the United States or become one of its states.

“Our old relationship, based on steadily increasing integration, is over,” he said of the United States during a Friday news conference.

White House officials and Trump advisers tell Just the News that the U.S. president is acutely aware of Carney’s hard-left positions and believes they are fodder to empower him to drive a better trade deal for Americans than if a conservative prime minister had been elected last month.

“The president believes there is a better deal to be had, that he can bring Carney to his knees as a liberal ungrateful for the United States’ contributions to Canada. He also knows Canada cannot withstand a trade war for any period of time,” a top adviser to Trump told Just the News.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick took a hard line Monday, suggesting not to expect much out of the first Trump-Carney meeting while attacking Carney for being a net-zero globalist. 

“They have their socialist regime, and it’s basically feeding off of America, I mean, the president calls it out all the time,” Lutnick told Fox News. 

Trump said nearly as much in a weekend interview where he vowed to raise with Carney having Canada become the 51st U.S. state.

“I’ll always talk about that,” Trump told NBC. “You know why? We subsidize Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year. We don’t need their cars. In fact, we don’t want their cars. We don’t need their energy. We don’t even want their energy. We have more than they do.”

Political pundits say Trump’s campaign to make Canada the 51st state likely assisted Carney to victory, as the liberal leader closed a 20-point-plus gap in the polls to win on his nationalist message even after voters had sickened of prior liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s policies.

But there are major weaknesses Carney faces at home. He was unable to win an outright majority and will govern with a minority government that relies on many of the same players as Trudeau’s unpopular administration.

And talk of secession from Canada’s energy-rich Alberta further complicates Carney’s hand. The conservative premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, made a stunning formal statement Monday about the future of her province in which she acknowledged the secession movement was mainstream and announced plans to push tough negotiations with Carney.

“We are well aware that there is large and growing number of Albertans that have lost hope in Alberta having a free and prosperous future as a part of Canada,” Smith said. “Many of these Albertans are organizing petitions to trigger a citizen-initiated referendum, as I mentioned earlier. The vast majority of these individuals are not fringe voices to be marginalized or vilified — they are loyal Albertans.

“They are quite literally our friends and neighbors who have just had enough of having their livelihoods and prosperity attacked by a hostile federal government. They are frustrated — and they have every reason to be,” she added.

Smith said she does not personally advocate for secession but that her administration would honor a ballot initiative to separate from Canada if citizens meet the threshold because the federal government under liberals “anti-energy, anti-agriculture and anti-resource development policies have scared away global investment to the tune of over a half a trillion dollars.”

“To be clear from the outset, our government will not be putting a vote on separation from Canada on the referendum ballot; however, if there is a successful citizen-led referendum petition that is able to gather the requisite number of signatures requesting such a question to be put to a referendum, our government will respect the democratic process and include that question on the 2026 provincial referendum ballot as well,” she said.

While Alberta and Ottawa battle over differences, Canada’s energy industry has begun to make aggressive plans to strike out on its own for deals with America, including a new gas pipeline, according to Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security, an influential free-market think tank for Canadian business.

“I think that Canadians really need to get the natural gas to market. And if Carney cannot get it together to build a gas pipeline or energy corridor in Canada, why wouldn't we ship it to the United States?” she told the Just the News, No Noise TV show Monday. “It's our biggest economy. It's our biggest market.”

Tronnes said Canadian companies could also open up more U.S. subsidiaries to get around Trump tariffs and build U.S. business around Carney’s administration.

She said Tuesday’s meeting at the White House will be the most watched TV event in Canada since the U.S.-Canada hockey championship game a few months back.

“I don't think Canadians have watched anything so intently since the playoff game,” she said. “You know, it's a real nail-biter, and people are really tuning in tomorrow to see how this goes. But that being said, I think the energy sector has some very legitimate concerns, particularly when it comes to the promises that Mark Carney has made, and, you know, the number of pipelines that the Liberals have canceled just over the last 10 years, the “lost liberal decade” as many refer to it.”