Mark Carney has left Davos
Donald Trump is a gnarlier bully than most, but he can still be defeated. Here’s how.
How to win against bullies? You can hit them back, hard. That was usually my favourite way of handling it. Most bullies collapse right away, the minute you hit them back. All they want is to feel big by making you feel small. If you refuse that bargain, they crumple. They have glass jaws, no confidence, and even less intelligence.
It’s a strategy that works very well against your run-of-the-mill bully. I’ve successfully executed it against several myself. Typically, all it took was one hit back. It didn’t even have to be that hard. Just well-timed and well-placed. One big slap across the face they didn’t see coming and couldn’t parry was enough to make them go bother someone else.
Yes, it would have been better if my counter-slaps had caused those bullies to stop bullying altogether. Alas, this was not in my power to do. And it’s also not the right strategy when the bully is more cunning than average and deliberately provokes you into defending yourself just so he can weaponize your self-defence against you.
That is the kind of bully currently occupying the White House.
We’ve seen how this works. Suck up to him and you get something nice for a little while — until it’s time to suck up to him some more. That is a fool’s game and Canada has, wisely, refused to play it.
Hitting him back directly is hard to do, because we’d be hurting ourselves in the process, and because he has shown a disconcerting willingness to hurt his own people in search of personal validation. Something the ayatollahs of Iran (no slouches themselves in that department) have understood perfectly and are using against him. The quagmire Trump chose to walk into over there is becoming a problem he can’t tweet his way out of. He knows it. He needs a win, and fast.
For a country of decent people trying to do the right thing, like Canada, the temptation to make Americans feel our pain is real. And we’ve done it to a good extent by refusing to drink bourbon or vacation in the USA. Which, honestly, good decent Americans understand. They don’t blame us for this one bit, even as they’re the ones hurting.
So, then, what’s left?
Patience.
Not the passive kind. The kind where you wait for the bully’s own people to turn on him — when gas prices bite hard enough, when the rats start leaving the ship, when he’s so desperate for any kind of good news that he’ll even agree to be decent with his neighbours. You don’t hit that kind of bully when he’s still standing. You wait until he’s already staggering.
We are not quite there yet. But we’re getting close and it appears Mark Carney knows it.
His recent signal that Canada isn’t fundamentally opposed to deeper integration with the United States is a pivot, or perhaps a softening, in his rhetoric. We have left Davos. But this time, Carney isn’t talking to Trump. He’s addressing the people who will have to put the pieces back together after Trump is gone, signalling that Canada will be open for business on terms that make sense for us, ready to deal with whoever inherits the wreckage.
That’s clever positioning. Almost cunning.
The whole thing feels like the final battle against Syndrome’s supermonster in the first Incredibles movie, the part where the good guys have the remote that controls the robot and Mr. Incredible demands what are you waiting for and Elastigirl yells back: “A closer target! You got one shot!” Remember that scene?
We are here now, and the man holding the remote gets it.