Dropping the gloves to make the point

In hockey parlance, it’s called “shedding,” the moment in a game when you are forced to deal with an instigator by dropping (shedding) your gloves for an all-out brawl.

That term is a deep cut from hockey culture that Prime Minister Mark Carney — he of the “elbows up” phenomenon — may need to not only embrace but practise more often in the face of yet another round of overly punitive tariffs imposed by United States President Donald Trump.

To be fair, under Carney’s leadership, Canada has not exactly rolled over in the face of Trump’s bully-boy tactics.

Yes, Canada has made concessions to placate Trump to further a new continental trade agreement: investing more money to combat the cross-border flow of fentanyl that isn’t actually happening, stalling efforts to tax streaming companies as most European countries already do, and — most recently — giving Trump a cut of profits from the Canadian-made, Canadian-paid Gordie Howe bridge between Windsor and Detroit.

Still, Trump maintains that Canada is one of the only countries in the world to impose countervailing tariffs. It’s also worth noting that Canadian provinces and citizens have also fought back with a boycott of American booze and a voluntary moratorium on travel to the U.S.

Has Carney done enough to legitimately claim he has kept his elbows up? Perhaps, but as new tariffs come crashing down, merely jostling in the corners of trade negotiations with our elbows up isn’t getting the job done.

Hence, the need to shed.

This week, Carney adopted a familiar stance in the face of American provocation: he promised all possible retaliatory measures were “on the table” but that his priority was to lock down a comprehensive continental trade deal that would eliminate the possibility of future opportunistic tariffs.

Unfortunately, Carney’s theory that a new trade deal would eliminate future tariff surprises is looking increasingly weak.

Trump has repeatedly broken U.S. law to impose tariffs on Canada and other countries. In fact, the smart money says a new round of legal challenges to these most recent tariffs — enacted under the authority of a only-once-before used Depression-era law — means they will be eventually struck down.

The takeaway for Carney, however, is that Trump is indifferent to concepts such as legality, fairness and the integrity of treaties with other nations.

In that context, Carney should also take note of the fact that Trump’s domestic political support is increasingly suspect.

Trump has a habit of unleashing one outrageous new initiative to draw attention away from other political predicaments. The never-ending war in Iran was designed to draw eyeballs away from his failure to release all the investigatory files on disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The tariffs, it could be argued, are at least partly designed to make Americans forget he has resumed the war with Iran, contrary to his pledges to end the conflict quickly and without U.S. casualties.

The reality for Trump is that all his moves — tariffs, the botched handling of the Epstein files, the war with Iran — have backfired in spectacular fashion. More than two-thirds of Americans are fed up with tariffs and the higher-than-necessary inflation they produce. Meanwhile, the public largely believes Trump is still hiding details about Epstein and the war in the Middle East rages on without end.

Add it all up and you have a president with a historically low approval rating and an endless capacity to make bad situations worse.

Carney should not capitulate to get a new trade deal, but nor should he back away from opportunities to bloody Trump’s nose so that the president understands the consequences of his actions.

Specifically, that we will shed if we have to.