A message to Mark: Don’t. Back. Down.

When is a leak really a trial balloon? While Mark Carney currently enjoys huge favourability in Canada, there are nine federal byelections pending.

If he stumbles on his pledge of “Elbows up” against the U.S., votes could go against the Liberals; millions of Canadians have utterly lost patience with Trump’s madness — and with Carney appearing to pander to it.

Now we lift the booze bans? Meddle with our supply management dairy system? So say “sources” in the Carney camp.

But journalists can be manipulated — a galling truth. Set up a leak from a couple of sources. Two is standard; what’s often forgotten is that those sources, especially if the story’s a hot one, should be verifiably unconnected.

If a story is really hot, more sources must be scraped up, but the temptation to run with it regardless of that is enormous.

Many a drool-worthy story I ran across in my early days at the Free Press and later at CBC TV news was spiked because those standards could not be met. These days, it’s almost impossible to meet that bar. Everybody’s connected.

Well, appeasement doesn’t work; we all know it. We dropped the digital services tax. That achieved nothing.

American trade envoy Jameson Greer noted we don’t get credit for lifting something Trump resented from the get-go. The digital giants who imposed news-sharing bans on Canada in retaliation for the tax did not lift those bans. We still can’t share news links on Meta platforms in Canada, and we have not a penny in digital tax to show for it.

The same could be said of the counter-tariffs we imposed — then lifted in another show of obsequiousness. The Americans not only didn’t budge, Trump threw more tariffs at us.

No. It’s past time now to hit them back. An Angus Reid poll found 62 per cent of Canadians support retaliatory tariffs; 34 per cent want them to match U.S. tariffs dollar for dollar. An Abacus poll found that 69 per cent of us want the booze bans to stay put. Another 11 per cent were unsure about it.

Canadians in Alberta and Saskatchewan weren’t consulted; they never instituted bans. I wish the pollsters had asked them; I’d love to know how far out of lockstep the actual people of Alberta and Saskatchewan are with the rest of the country.

The pollsters really should examine the dairy issue next, since that’s the other anonymous-sourced concession being booted about by the media.

(A little clarification sidebar: foreign dairy enters Canada tariff-free or at low rates, under quota limits. Over the limits, tariffs from 200 per cent to nearly 300 per cent are imposed. On paper, that looks Draconian.)

In fact, Canada still buys some $1.3 billion worth of American dairy products, with cheese the most popular, taking up more than 90 per cent of tariff-free imports. Milk, cream, yogurt — Americans use up less than half their allotted quotas. Thirteen out of 16 other dairy quotas report fill rates of 10 per cent or less. American producers run dramatically under quota on almost every product they sell into Canada. There’s plenty of room for expansion without screwing up our supply management system to appease Donald Trump (who is, in any case, unappeasable no matter what).

The Trump dairy complaint is a total red herring as was his fiction that Canada was flooding the U.S. with fentanyl.

So imagine: false-flag trial balloons go up in the media, irate Canadian voters shoot them down, Canadian officials shrug helplessly at their American counterparts. Yes, it’s a conspiracy theory of sorts, but a painfully plausible one.

Extend that theory a bit. Possibly in the negotiators’ back pockets: massive federal excise taxes on oil and potash, forcing huge cost increases onto American purchasers. That would infuriate Danielle Smith and Scott Moe — but since they never imposed booze bans, it’s clear neither of them prioritize Canadian national interests as the rest of us do. Besides, Alberta and Saskatchewan vote Conservative federally. So, no loss for the Liberals.

Finally, we all (including Carney) know full well that even a renegotiated trade agreement is worthless as long as Trump is ruling the roost. He doesn’t even honour agreements that he signs.

Maybe it won’t matter.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

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A recent Bloomberg analysis shows international investors have poured $256 billion into Canadian stocks and bonds in the past year, the largest influx of foreign investment into Canada since 2007. Our GDP grew 3.4 per cent between April and June, while American GDP growth slowed to 1.5 per cent.

We scored the biggest drop in core inflation of the 21-country Eurozone. Corporate Canada’s market capitalization has soared 41 per cent, to $4.5 trillion, beating out the U.S. and the world’s eight other biggest stock markets.

Seems to me — and millions more Canadians — that we should be doing some bullying back of our own. When you push back, he backs down — hence his TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) nickname.

So … c’mon, Mark: I’ll play the game. Elbows up, damn it.

Retired Winnipeg journalist Judy Waytiuk’s regular news beats ran the gamut from agriculture to business to politics.