Trump LOST in 12 Months — Carney's QUIET Victories Just REWROTE Canada's Future

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

[00:00:09]>> I want you to remember one number from this video. Just won. 35.4 billion. Let that sit for a second because that number changes everything you've been told about who's winning and who's losing in the trade war that was supposed to crush us 12 months ago. The headlines were brutal. A 25% tariff slammed across the Canadian border. then steel, then aluminum, then autos, then lumber. The forecasts coming out of Ottawa, Washington, every major desk in North America, they were grim. Canada is going to fold. Canada is going to bend.

[00:00:43]Canada is too accelerated with political script. That was the consensus.

[00:00:50]And then three months ago, something happened that I genuinely had to read twice to believe. The US Supreme Court in a six-to3 ruling on February 20th struck down the entire emergency tariff regime that the White House had built its trade war on. Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority said something that I want to read to you almost word for word because it matters. He wrote that tariffs are taxes and the US Constitution expressly reserves the power of taxation to the legislature.

[00:01:18]Translation: The president doesn't get to invent a global tariff regime on his own. Congress does and Congress didn't.

[00:01:25]This isn't politics. This is constitutional law from the highest court in the country that started this fight. And it hits your wallet, your mortgage, your job, your business, whether you live in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, or anywhere in between. So stay with me because by the end of this, you'll see this story completely differently from how it was sold to you a year ago. Here's what nobody's talking about. The ruling didn't kill every tariff. the so-called section 232 tariffs, the ones on steel, aluminum, autos, lumber, those are still in place.

[00:01:55]The White House is now scrambling to rebuild the rest using different legal tools, section 122, section 301, anything they can find. But the constitutional foundation of the trade war, that's gone. And the US Treasury has collected more than $175 billion in tariff revenue that is now legally subject to refund claims. That's not a forecast. That's a documented figure.

[00:02:19]Now, to understand why this moment lands the way it does, you have to step back and look at what Canada actually walked into in February of 2025. For decades, our trade has been overwhelmingly concentrated in one direction. Roughly 75% of all Canadian merchandise exports go to the United States. That isn't a number. That is, that's a structural condition. When one country controls threearters of your export market, every tariff, every political mood swing, every speech that doesn't go well in the Oval Office hits your bottom line. And that's been the quiet vulnerability sitting underneath the Canadian economy for 40 years. The relationship looked like partnership. In reality, it was leverage. And the moment that leverage got used aggressively, the question wasn't whether it would hurt. Of course, it would hurt. The question was whether Canada had built any options to push back. For most of those decades, the honest answer was no. What changed over the past 12 months is that Ottawa stopped pretending it could keep relying on the same arrangement and started methodically building alternatives. Not just announcements, not just speeches, actual signed agreements on four continents with measurable trade volumes attached. That's the part that didn't make the front page. And that's the part that explains why the Supreme Court ruling landed in the middle of a Canadian economy that wasn't panicking.

[00:03:40]It was repositioning. This is the part that caught me off guard when I started digging into the numbers. The most recent data from Statistics Canada and the IMF tells a story that doesn't match the narrative we were all sold a year ago. The IMF is now projecting Canada will post the second fastest growth in the G7 for both 2026 and 2027. Inflation has stayed inside the Bank of Canada's 1 to 3% target band for 27 consecutive months. And this is the one that stopped me. Since the start of 2025, Canada has added nearly three times as many jobs per capita as the United States. 3.4 jobs per thousand people versus 1.2 south of the border. I know what you're thinking. How is that possible if the trade war was supposed to break us? That answer is coming, but it only makes sense after you hear the next piece because the strategy underneath these numbers wasn't reactive. It was planned months in advance. And it's the most consequential repositioning of Canadian economic policy in a generation. So stay with me. Where we left off and Canada is somehow growing faster than the US, adding three times the jobs per capita, holding inflation in target for 27 straight months, and walking out of a tariff war that was supposed to wreck the economy. How? That's where this gets interesting. Now, this next part, I had to read it twice because the playbook Carney has been running isn't improvisation. It's the kind of thing you map out for two years and then execute when the moment arrives. Here's the thing about Carney's background. He ran the Bank of Canada through the 2008 financial crisis, then ran the Bank of England through Brexit. He spent his entire career inside the machinery of global finance. When he walked into 24 Sussex, he wasn't learning the file. He was already three moves ahead. And the strategy he started executing wasn't loud. It was structural. Look at the trade map. Since taking office, Carney has signed or advanced more than 12 trade and security agreements on four continents. A strategic partnership with the European Union finalized in June of 2025. A historic Canada China agreement in principle in January, the first prime ministerial visit to Beijing in 9 years, projected to unlock close to $3 billion in new agri food, seafood, forestry, and clean tech exports.

[00:06:02]a safe defense industrial agreement with the EU. In February 2026, Canada became the first non-European country to join, opening up billions in market access for Canadian defense companies. Strategic partnerships signed with Mexico, the UAE, Qatar, Indonesia, Ecuador. Active negotiations underway with India, Asian, the Philippines, Mkashure, Saudi Arabia.

[00:06:24]The EU is now Canada's second largest trading partner with 178.6 6 billion in goods and services in 2025 alone. And then in May of 2026, something happened that should have been a much bigger story than it was. The European political community summit hosted in 48 heads of state in one room. Carney attended the first time a non-European leader has ever sat at that table.

[00:06:49]Bilateral meetings with France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Ukraine, the European Council, the European Commission, the European Parliament. Now, I want to be fair here because diversification isn't easy and the numbers prove it. Even after a year of this, roughly 70% of Canadian exports still flow south. The structural dependence doesn't disappear in 12 months. But what changes is the trajectory and the leverage. And when you sit at a table with 48 European leaders without a single American present, the leverage changes whether the trade numbers have caught up yet or not. Now, let me show you the other side of this. Because credit where it's due, the messaging on the US side was strong.

[00:07:29]The argument was that tariffs would bring manufacturing home, protect American workers, force fairer terms.

[00:07:35]Politically, it made sense. But here's where the logic breaks down. The latest analysis of tariff costs to the global auto industry shows total tariff bills of at least $35.4 billion since 2025.

[00:07:48]The Detroit big three alone, Ford, General Motors, Stellantis, absorbed 6.5 billion in 2025. Stalantis posted a $2.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2025, largely tariff driven. GM cut a full billion off Q2 profits. Ford took a 1.5 billion hit to operating profit.

[00:08:08]Toyota's projecting a $9.1 billion tariff bill for fiscal 2026 alone. The Center for Automotive Research at the University of Michigan modeled the full uniform tariff scenario and arrived at a number worth pausing on. 107.7 billion in added costs across US automakers.

[00:08:27]41.9 billion of that landing directly on Detroit. Here's what people consistently miss about tariffs. They are not paid by the exporting country. They are paid by domestic importers, which means they are paid by American businesses and ultimately by American consumers. When the US places a 25% tariff on Canadian steel, it doesn't mean Canada loses money on steel, it means American manufacturers who need Canadian steel now pay a quarter more for it. That cost flows downstream into the truck rolling off the Detroit assembly line, the appliance in the Houston kitchen, the office building going up in Phoenix. The Detroit 3 temporarily laid off workers in Michigan, in Indiana, in Ohio.

[00:09:07]Stellantis halted production lines. Ford had to withdraw guidance entirely. So the question isn't whether tariffs created friction for Canada. Of course they did. The question is who absorbed the bigger share of the damage. And the documented financial reports from the automakers themselves answer that pretty clearly. But before I get to what came next, you need to understand one more thing because what Canadians did on their own without being asked may be the part of this story that made the biggest difference of all. This flew completely under the radar in the first months, and now it's one of the most studied consumer movements in modern North American economic history. In February of 2025, when the first round of tariffs hit, something organic happened.

[00:09:48]Canadians, without coordination from Ottawa started cancelling US trips, pulling American wine off restaurant menus, returning Florida condo bookings, switching streaming subscriptions, filling shopping carts only with products marked product of Canada. The hashtag elbowsup movement was born on social media. A Facebook group hit 1.4 million members. Apps were downloaded millions of times that helped shoppers identify and avoid American products and grocery aisles. This wasn't a government campaign. This was a civic reflex. And then the numbers started rolling in.

[00:10:23]Canadian arrivals to the United States dropped 21% in 2025. 4.2 million fewer visitors. The US Travel Association calculated $4.5 billion in direct lost spending and roughly 28,000 American jobs put at risk. New York City lost an estimated $600 million in Canadian visitor spending. Palm Springs lost 300 million. Vermont border duty-free shops, upstate New York outlet malls, Buffalo restaurants gutted. By February of 2026, return trips from the US were down 31.5% compared to two years earlier, the 13th consecutive month of year-over-year drops. Vehicle border crossings down 30%. WestJet cut USbound capacity by 19%. Air Canada cut 7%. Flair slashed its US seats by 58%. One industry veteran with 37 years in travel called it the largest sustained pullback from a single country in modern US tourism history. Okay, this is where my jaw dropped. The money didn't disappear, it just moved. Destination Canada projects 4.4 billion in reshored tourism spending between 2025 and 2027. Canadian domestic tourism GDP grew at an annualized 4.8% In the fourth quarter of 2025, while the broader Canadian economy contracted 0.6%.

[00:11:47]Accommodation and dining spending inside Canada rose 5.6% for the year. BA Whistler, Mont Trromblant, Newfoundland full booking calendars. Manitoba alone added $4.5 million to its tourism budget to capture the redirected flow. The dollars Canadians chose not to spend in Miami got spent in Muscoa. The vacation that was supposed to be Disney World became drumheller. And that money compounds inside our own economy, generating tax revenue, supporting wages, fueling local businesses. The kind of economic loop that strengthens rather than drains. To understand what's happening here, look at what Mexico did after 2018. When faced with similar tariff pressure during the first Trump administration, Mexico didn't try to win the trade war on the trade war's terms.

[00:12:34]Instead, it accelerated parallel agreements, modernizing its EU deal, deepening its Pacific Rim ties, building options. The result, when the next round of pressure arrived years later, Mexico had alternatives. Compare that to the European Union. Already diversified, already plugged into Merkashure, already finalizing deals with Indonesia and reopening talks with India, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Europe walked into this trade war with 20% dependence on US exports. Canada walked in with 75%.

[00:13:07]The lesson from both diversification works, but only if you start before the pressure peaks, and only if you commit hard once the pressure arrives. What Canada is now executing, 12 agreements, four continents, defense, and trade tracks running in parallel, is the fastest, deepest version of that playbook that any G7 country has ever attempted in a 12-month window. Whether it fully succeeds in 5 years or 10 years is a fair debate. But the playbook itself is sound, and the early data on jobs, growth, and inflation suggest the foundations are holding. Now, I want to give you the other side here because it's important, and it's real. Some US economists make a fair point. They argue that the Canadian boycott, while damaging to specific US sectors, was offset by domestic American tourism, which grew last year and absorbed most of the shock. They argue Canada's growth advantage is partly explained by Bank of Canada rate cuts, currency effects, and population dynamics, not just policy.

[00:14:06]Those are legitimate counterarguments, and the data on them is mixed. I'm not telling you the US economy is collapsing. It isn't. What I am telling you is that the specific predictions made 12 months ago about Canada that we would be crushed, isolated, forced to capitulate, those predictions have not aged well. And the documented evidence doesn't lie. Keep that thought and because the next part is where the real payoff of this 12-month story lives and it touches your daily life in ways the headlines never bothered to translate.

[00:14:36]Remember that number I asked you to hold on to at the start, $35.4 billion. That was the documented tariff bill absorbed by the global auto industry since 2025.

[00:14:46]Now layer the rest on top. 6.5 billion absorbed by Detroit's big three alone.

[00:14:52]4.5 billion lost in US tourism revenue from Canadian visitors.

[00:14:57]175 billion in US tariff revenue now legally subject to refund claims after the Supreme Court ruling. 12 trade and security agreements signed by Canada across four continents in 12 months. 27 consecutive months of inflation inside the Bank of Canada's target band, three times the per capita job creation of the United States. And the IMF projecting Canada will hold the second fastest growth rate in the G7 for the next two years running. Now, this is where it all starts making sense because what looked 12 months ago like a country about to be steamrolled has turned into something very different. Not a victory lap. I I want to be careful not to overstate it, but a quiet structural repositioning that has changed what Canada actually is in the global economy. We are no longer a one customer country. We are still heavily exposed to the US. Yes. But we are also now plugged into European defense industrial supply chains, Pacific Rim agri food markets, Indo-Pacific clean techch opportunities and the early scaffolding of trade frameworks with India, Merkashure and Asen that 5 years from now will look obvious in hindsight. Let me translate this into something concrete for your daily life because that's what actually matters. If you have a variable rate mortgage, the Bank of Canada's overnight rate is now sitting at 2.25% lower than the US federal funds rate.

[00:16:23]That means Canadian borrowing costs for homes, cars, small business loans are softer than they would be if our central bank had to follow the US up the rate ladder. If you work in the auto sector in Ontario, you've watched plants on both sides of the border take hits. But the Canadian footprint is being reinforced by new investment commitments tied to the European defense and clean tech agreements. If you're a small business owner anywhere in the country, the EA refund process now opening in the US is a real channel that Canadian importers can potentially access in the months ahead. If you're a worker, the labor market data is doing what labor market data rarely does, outpacing inflation with wages rising 4.7% over the year versus consumer prices up 2.1%.

[00:17:13]That is real purchasing power gain, the first sustained one in 5 years. And if you're a retiree on a fixed income, that 27-month run of intarget inflation means your dollar is finally not eroding the way it was during the worst of the post-pandemic shock. So, where does it go from here? Honestly, the next 6 to 12 months are going to be the most important stretch of this entire story.

[00:17:34]The section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos, and lumber are still in place. Those are the ones that hurt Canadian exporters the most, and Carney has been explicit that removing them remains the top priority. The White House is rebuilding its tariff toolkit through alternate legal pathways, and the US trade representative has signaled new sectoral actions are coming. Watch for the USMCA review window which opens through 2026 and 2027.

[00:18:01]Watch for the first wave of EA refund dispersements to US importers, which will tell us how seriously the constitutional ruling actually translates into recovered dollars. And watch for the next round of Carnese trade visits. India, Merkashure, the Saudi pact, because every one of those signed agreements quietly chips away at the 75% figure that has defined Canadian economic vulnerability for 40 years. The final analysis is this. 12 months ago, the question was whether Canada could survive the trade war. 12 months later, the question is whether the US can sustain a trade war it lost in its own Supreme Court, lost on its own balance sheets, lost in its own tourism revenue, and is now slowly losing in its own auto plants. None of that is me cheering.

[00:18:48]It's the documented record. And the most interesting part of it is that the strategy underneath wasn't built on retaliation. It was built on quiet, methodical diversification. the kind of move that looks boring on a news ticker and historic on a 5-year chart. I'll leave you with this and tell me if I'm wrong. If a country with 75% export dependence on its biggest trading partner can absorb the most aggressive tariff regime in modern history, sign 12 new agreements on four continents, hold inflation in target for 27 months, and post the second fastest G7 growth rate, all in 12 months, what does that say about who actually held the leverage in this fight? Drop your honest answer below.