MACLEOD: Carney's anti-American fantasy will cost Alberta

Mark Carney’s YouTube video is being praised in the usual circles as sober, statesmanlike realism. It is nothing of the sort. It is the same old Ottawa delusion in a better suit.Carney says Canada’s close economic ties to the United States (US) have become a weakness that must be corrected. That may sound sophisticated in Toronto and Liberal campaign war rooms, but from Alberta, it sounds ridiculous. Alberta’s relationship with the US is not a policy mistake. It is the basis of our prosperity.This is the first problem with Carney’s argument. He is treating economic reality as though it were a branding issue. Alberta does not trade heavily with the US because we lack imagination. We trade heavily with the US because that is where the market is, where the infrastructure runs, where the refineries are, where the pipelines connect, and where decades of practical economic integration have led. Our energy sector, our agriculture sector, our manufacturing inputs, and our transportation links are all built around a continental economy. Only in Ottawa could proximity, reliability, existing infrastructure, and massive demand be rebranded as a strategic liability.Carney talks as though Canada can simply “diversify” its way out of geography. That is classic Laurentian fantasy. It is what people say when they have never had to sell a barrel of oil, move a grain car, or find a market for millions of tonnes of agricultural product. Our trade is built on customers, roads, ports, pipelines, contracts, legal stability, and distance. The US is not just our biggest customer. It is the customer around whom much of Alberta’s modern economy is physically organized.And what, exactly, is the alternative? China?.Albertans have already seen this movie. Beijing does not treat trade as a neutral commercial exchange. It treats trade as leverage. Canada learned that during the canola dispute, when China restricted Canadian product for political reasons. That was not a misunderstanding. It was a warning. More recently, China has shown again that access to its market can be tightened, manipulated, or weaponized whenever it suits its interests.So let us drop the childish assumption that “less America” automatically means “more independence.” In practice, it can mean more exposure to hostile, authoritarian markets with fewer shared values, less transparency, and no real loyalty to stable rules. That is not diversification. That is vulnerability.The Americans can be blunt, self-interested, and frustrating. Fine. Nobody in Alberta is naïve about that. But the US is still our closest ally, our biggest customer, our continental security partner, and the anchor of the North American economy. It is still governed by laws, commercial norms, democracy, and longstanding institutions. It is still the country with which we share the deepest infrastructure, defence, cultural, and economic ties.That matters.Canada and the US do not merely buy and sell things to each other. They defend the continent together. They share airspace security. They share supply chains. They share energy flows. They share transportation corridors. Alberta sits in the middle of that relationship. So when Ottawa politicians and would-be saviours start speaking about the US as though it were some dangerous attachment from which Canada must disengage, Albertans should pay attention. This is not just empty rhetoric. It reveals how little the Laurentian political class understands about the foundations of Alberta’s economy.Carney’s speech was not a serious plan for national strength. It was a polished expression of anti-American sentiment aimed at audiences that have long confused resentment with strategy. It flatters a fashionable belief in central Canada that this country can scold, distance, and posture its way into a new global role while still somehow living off the trade, security, and investment generated by the very relationship it looks down on..Alberta should reject that nonsense outright, firmly and loudly.We are the province with the most to lose from Ottawa’s anti-US posturing and the least to gain from its delusions of diversification. We do not need lectures from eastern elites about the dangers of relying on the one market that has actually sustained our wealth. We do not need more empty talk about pivoting to vague foreign opportunities while authoritarian powers demonstrate, again and again, that trade with them comes attached to political strings.Most of all, we do not need national leaders who sneer at the economic reality that keeps Alberta strong.If this is where Canada’s leadership class is headed, then Alberta has a bigger problem than one bad speech. It has a structural problem inside Confederation itself. If Ottawa insists on undermining Alberta’s most important economic relationship for ideological, political, or electoral reasons, then Alberta cannot afford to keep pretending this is a temporary misunderstanding.And with each passing day, Alberta’s independence looks less like a radical idea and more like basic economic self-preservation.

MACLEOD: Carney's anti-American fantasy will cost Alberta

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