The Prime Minister has a flair for drama. 

If he wasn’t so obviously exhausted at the press conference the morning after the midnight before, one might have suspected he’d planned the whole thing. 

“We worked as hard as we could,” he said, explaining his eleventh-hour recall of the bargaining team. 

Canada made concession after concession to try to get a deal, as the always odious JD Vance pointed out before a crowd of Young Republicans on Wednesday last week. In audio leaked to the Canadian Press, on the day President Trump claimed the deal was done, JD Vance was crowing that our PM “comes in and puffs his chest out and says: ‘I’m going to, like, out-tough Donald Trump.’

“It’s hilarious because Carney presents this as some victory for Canada when, fundamentally, like, they climb down on a lot of issues.”

But Mr. Carney did not climb down, in the end, on anything. 

“In recent days,” he explained Saturday, “the U.S. proposed new terms that were both uneconomic and unfair. 

“They asked too much and they offered too little.”

By Friday, evidence that the deal was bad for Canada in every possible way — in addition to that offered by Vance — was becoming public, bit by bit. First came the news that the Sector 232 tariffs at the center of the negotiations — at leat 25 percent on core Canadian products: aluminum, steel, lumber, and autos — were not only not going away, but would not even be reduced enough to make it viable for manufacturers to keep manufacturing. 

It’s important to keep reminding ourselves that before Trump waded into the Middle East, the strait of Hormuz was wide open. 150 ships traversed it every day, not 3.

Likewise, tariffs were not at the center of free trade “negotiations,” both the subject and the cudgel hanging over the team at the table. 

Late Friday afternoon, Canada’s Minister of Trade, Dominic LeBlanc, said tersely, with yet another arbitrary deadline hours away, “there’s more work to be done.” 

The United States was setting all the terms: the height of the tariffs, when the buzzer would go off, where negotiating happened, what the outcome would be. 

It did not go unremarked that the scene was Washington, where Canadian diplomats were said to be “huddled,”or  “camping out,” forced to stay on yet another day, through the weekend, etc. They spent hours at a time in U.S. Trade Rep Jamieson Greer’s office. In the shadow of Trump’s plane. Haunted by vampires like Vance and Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick. Far away from their Advisory Committee, prominent members of which had, by Friday, started to break ranks and speak out. 

Other key figures circled the wagons with pointed public statements. “The reason we got to a good deal [on NAFTA negotiations] was because Canadians stayed strong and united,” said former PM Justin Trudeau, in Ottawa on a minibreak from his lovelife. Former Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland weighed in on Wall Street Week. “The idea that tariffs on these sectors would be accepted by Canada. That is a really big deal.”

By dinnertime Friday, I was starting to wonder if the deal would fail. 

The same sort of whittling effect was taking its toll inside the negotiations as well. It was not any one thing that killed the deal, Mr. Carney stressed, it was the series of demands, new asks, changes, all of which added up to, not just a bad deal, but an attack on Canadian sovereignty. 

“The cumulative effect of their terms revealed the lack of commitment to a real economic partnership,” he said. Instead, it emerged the goal was to turn Canada into the 51st state. Chip away at its economy and its autonomy at one and the same time. 

Mr. Carney offered three examples of new demands that crossed the line.

The first was conditions that would erode Canadian manufacturers’ ability to compete on the U.S. market. Late in the day, the U.S. arbitrarily excluded Canadian trucks from the auto tariff deal in a way that targeted production plants in Ontario. 

The second, said a visibly incredulous Carney, was a demand that would have restricted Canada’s ability to forge trade deals with other partners. “Canada has made 20 new deals this year,” he said. “We are the partners of choice for countries around the world and the Americans wanted to restrict that — unacceptable.” 

And finally, he pointed to “continual efforts to restrict our protections, on our language, our culture, and our sovereignty.” 

While this third example was vague, it recalled the “digital alignment” Greer stressed in the “deal” Trump had announced earlier in the week. Not just right of first refusal on Canada’s critical minerals. Not just the free flow of Canada’s energy exports at preferred rates. Not just buying into the golden dome alongside major expenditures on fighter planes, but Canada had to promise not to regulate the operations of U.S. tech companies in this country. 

The Online Streaming Act, the Online News Act, and Quebec laws prioritizing French-language content were all targeted. The U.S. even complained that while the Digital Services Tax had been suspended, its enacting legislation was still on the books.

Late Friday afternoon, the Toronto Star wondered if the U.S. was demanding the repeal of the Online News Act. Passed in 2023, it requires that the major social media and internet search companies — Meta and Google —compensate Canadian news outlets for both the right to post links to their content and for lost advertising revenue.  

As we know, Meta’s response was to block news links on its platforms. Google, on the other hand, agreed to pay $100 million a year to Canada’s news organizations, including this one, in exchange for the right to post links to original news on its platform. Google controls 50 percent of the digital advertising market in this country, and 90 percent of search. 

It earned an estimated $9 billion in Canada last year. 

But, like a fly on an elephant, that $100 million has been described repeatedly by the Americans as a “trade irritant.” Nixing it would take down what remains of free and fair journalism in this country, slowly but surely. Another goal.

Whatever it was, as Carney said, it was all too much. Taken collectively, the demands revealed the real intent of the extortion the US calls negotiating: “drilling down on Canadian autonomy and sovereignty.”

And so, near midnight, the PM called the whole thing off. On Saturday he declared a trade war. 

“Because that is what happens when you are attacked.”