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But I didn’t write it to be a play-by-play recap, nor as a microscopic look at the business of politics. Rather, I wrote the book as a response to a line from the prime minister himself.

During the campaign, Carney repeated an idea just about every day, perhaps more than any other line in his lexicon of pat one-liners. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal,” he said, to the point where many of his die-hard supporters could sing along. “But we should never forget the lessons.”

On the campaign trail I worried, as I do now, that Carney is wrong. We’re not over the shock, and nor should we be. What’s more, I’m not sure our politicians have learned the right lessons.

For months, I’ve been writing in this column about America’s dangerous illiberal turn – of how extraordinary, destructive, and offensive Trump’s attacks on Canada were, and still are, but also of how his hijacking of America risks destabilizing the whole world. And I’ve been trying to spell out the things Canada needs to do to respond.

The core to what I’ve been arguing is that we need to view Trump as a real and existential threat. And the only way to respond to that threat is with strength.

Many heard that message coming from Mark Carney this past spring. He switched from optimism to fatalism to a realist, hard-nosed promise to keep his elbows up: It mirrored our own frenetic mixed emotions. 

But in government, Carney has opted to placate the mad king whenever possible. Carney ditched the Digital Services Tax, heaped praise on Trump in obsequious public statements and, just last month, he dropped our retaliatory tariffs — instead just matching some, not all, of Trump’s tariffs on us. This is all in service of winning favor in Trump’s court.

“There’s a time in the game when you drop your gloves in the first period and you send a message. And we’ve done that, pretty uniquely in the world,” Carney explained in August. But, he explained, now is time “to stickhandle, you want to pass.”

It’s a succinct illustration of Carney’s misapprehension, I think. His metaphor takes for granted that we’ve passed the puck to our own team. It is increasingly obvious that Trump, never keen to play by the rules anyway, has the puck and is on a breakaway.

Let’s drop the hockey metaphors: Trump doesn’t want trade deals, he wants shakedowns. He is trying to extort his ostensible allies for hundreds of billions of dollars while taxing their exports. 

It is bewildering that Canada would pursue a deal with Trump, particularly when we already have, as Carney puts it, “the best trade deal” any country has with the U.S. right now. It allows most of our goods to enter America tariff-free: So, naturally, Trump is going to try and destroy it when it comes up for review next year.

We need to abandon this mythic deal and start defending the good agreement we’ve already got. To do so, we need leverage: Unfortunately, Carney has already weakened our negotiating position for no clear benefit. Even as our constant capitulations are supposedly bringing us closer to a deal, the demands keep piling up — Republicans now want us to repeal , which would defund our news media to the benefit of American internet giants. 

Carney suggests this is all worth it because there may be a more ambitious pact to be achieved: One that encompasses not just trade, but supply chains, defence, and security — this could see us join Trump’s wild project.

But we cannot and should not sign some multi-billion dollar deal with a consummate liar and a wannabe tsar. We don’t need to deepen ties, we need to cut them. We need Americans to better understand the threat Trump poses and the consequences of their government’s actions. Our capacity to do both of those things is by fighting back, not giving in. Our ability to hinder Trump’s unhinged presidency is modest, yes, but it was being felt.

Statistics Canada reports that land travel to the United States dropped by between this July and last. Agricultural imports from the U.S. have fallen by nearly . Stories abound of Canadians finding novel and innovative ways of reorienting their dollars from America to anywhere else.

Republicans across the United States are the effects of Trump’s trade wars, and Canada’s response has been a core piece of that. Hitting America’s bourbon distilleries, shunning her tourist towns, and holding up energy exports are pushing Americans to sour on Trump. Why stop? We need the Make America Great Again movement to be exorcized from the American zeitgeist. 

Perhaps my cynicism is misplaced, and that Carney can play Trump’s fondness to get us a good deal and a reprieve from the constant threats to our sovereignty. But this whole approach asks us to see a world thrown into tumult by a mercurial president, on the warpath to remedy perceived slights and imagined grievances, but where we can be shielded by his magnanimity. 

Things are not normal, and we can’t count on a reprieve from our tormentor. We need to recognize that Trump’s promises mean nothing.

Europe abandoned their fight when they rushed to sign a deal with Trump, in hopes of stopping the tariff pain. They already regret it. The terms of their deal were heavily slanted in America’s favour, and yet Trump has continued . Calls are mounting for Brussels to level their “” at Washington, but there is no escaping the fact that the block looks confused and gullible. 

So why is Carney angling towards Europe’s strategy, the same one they now seem to regret? Simple: He doesn’t think Canadians can stomach the cost of continuing to fight. If it is true, it is a failure of his own making. Carney had ample opportunity to level with Canadians about the long, bruising fight ahead of us. He could have been honest, and acknowledged that our counter-tariffs were likely to cause pain to entrepreneurs and small businesses in the years to come. Instead, he framed them as That was always fantasy.

But I don’t think it is true: I think Canadians are ready to fight. It’s why their blood boils as the prospect of sacrificing our sovereignty to the odious populist. 

Which is why a book about this election matters now. This campaign was, of course, a stark choice between Liberal and Conservative, between a man who seemed to be taking the threat of Trump seriously and one who seemed more blithe about it. But the most critical binary existed beyond the choice on the ballot paper: It was the option between independence and subservience. It was on that question that all of our leaders agreed.

It seems that Carney, a political neophyte, has failed to appreciate that he could ask for sacrifices from us. That, if he had, we likely would have still voted for it. He doesn’t seem to grasp that Canadians are not willing to be governed from afar, and that we’re willing to get a bloody nose to make that point. 

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, however, did — and found that of businesses polled supported the counter-tariffs, even as it hurt their bottom line. Leger found that of Canadians still want to go “elbows up” against America: Many others, it seems, are following Carney’s lead. So he should lead.

This battle is so much bigger than just a question about trade.

In promoting the book, I’ve been asked a few times now what I make of Trump abandoning his talk of making Canada “the 51st state.” I’ve become incredulous at the question. Trump has not mentioned Greenland in some time, either. And yet Danish broadcaster DR revealed last week that Copenhagen believes Washington is running in Greenland, aimed at tilting favor towards annexation. Are we so sure Trump won’t deploy similar tactics here?

Naysayers also said that Trump would never be able to deploy the military to America’s streets. And yet the national guard and federal agents have occupied Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — he says Chicago and New York may be next. This is a dangerous, illegal escalation that neither the Pentagon nor the courts prevented.

Canada has gone a century without facing this kind of existential threat, so we have no muscle memory on how to deal with it nor the innate sense of dread that comes with its warning signs. But we can look to Europe for good examples of countries facing off against bellicose neighbours. 

, , , , and a host of other countries have had their democracies weakened, their economies attacked, and their sovereignty violated by their neighbouring strongman, Vladimir Putin: A tyrant who finances his regime through theft and plundering. 

Europe offers us some hope, too. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn has been a role model for Trump, showing how a populist leader can weaponize nationalism and anxiety to dismantle democracy and fight the international liberal order. For years, Europe tried to appease Orbàn: They have finally grown tired, and are now trying to fight back with and stern . Many thought this would help Orbàn’s popularity — but the opposite has happened, with polls showing him far behind the opposition. Confrontation works.

I appreciate Carney’s penchant for calm, and his inclination to rouse optimism. But what we need right now is for someone to point out that the house next door is on fire, and perhaps we should decline the dinner party invitation.

All of this comes back to why I wrote this book. It will be easy, in the months and years to come, to get overwhelmed by the constant theatrics happening in America and to succumb to fear and anxiety. This is all by design. Trump’s relentless bravado is well-honed. It is capable of making smart people believe they can win if they side with him, and that things will go badly if they don’t. 

In order to resist the allure of that defeatism, it will be important to think of that image of the mountie waving the American flag, to imagine Canada as the 51st state, to conjure up the shock of the betrayal and to steel our resolve. It requires a lot of bravery to declare that the emperor has no clothes: Lucky for Mark Carney, that’s exactly what Canadians elected him to do.

If we never want to hear Canada referred to as the “51st state” again, we will need to actively do something about it.