Delacourt: 'is the perfect time to ask what kind of friend the United States is to us now, or even if it’s a friend at all'

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick: He was clearly talking with Trump’s consent. Lutnick was the president and chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, a a global financial services firm that had offices on the  101st and 105th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.  He invested significantly in technology, establishing an electronic trading platform. In the September 11 attacks, Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees, including Howard’s brother, Gary. Lutnick decided to no longer pay salaries to families of deceased employees after the tower collapsed..

Several days before the column appeared  U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick offered Canadians a glimpse into what this U.S. administration expects of this country, and it also could be summed up as: shut up and smile through whatever Trump is throwing this way.

Although Lutnick had been hoping his remarks would remain private, he was talking to a roomful of chatty people and the Star managed quickly to confirm his provocative words as they reverberated through the corridors of the conference.

“America is first, and Canada can be second,” Lutnick said at one point, also advising that this country should be braced to see its auto industry migrate south. Moreover, he said, Canada should just get used to the idea that the trade relationship of the past three decades is over.

“If you look at it where Canada was to where it will be, you’ll be disappointed.”

That, in sum, is where the Canada-U.S. relationship stands now under Trump — in an existential struggle to define how to manage what feels like an affront to the professional and the personal. It’s about where to draw the line.

Even Trump acknowledged that this line is in flux when he was sitting with Carney in the Oval Office. “It’s a complicated agreement, more complicated maybe than any other agreement we have, on trade because, you know, we have natural conflict,” he said. “We also have mutual love.”

“I wore red for you,”

“I wore red for you,” Carney told Trump at the White House.

For a man of Mark Carney’s stature to have to make a comment like that has to be humiliating, unless it is part of a strategy.

At a conference the day after the White House visit Carney repeatedly returned to this whole business of how Canada can be a friend and a business competitor to Trump’s America.

“We also understand it’s America first, not America alone. So the question is where does it go from there?”

“Nostalgia isn’t a strategy. Our relationship will never again be what it was. In terms of that aspect of it, that’s and that’s not a criticism,” he said. “It doesn’t lessen the ties between us as a people,” the prime minister said, but it does alter the economic ties, irreversibly.

That’s a pretty shaky ground on which to navigate a personal or a professional relationship, no matter what business you’re in, let alone the colossal and complicated ties between Canada and the United States. The audience at the Canada-U.S. summit was all ears when any speaker gave them glimpses into how Trump works. Little wonder. It’s ever-shifting terrain.

All over the country this weekend, Canadians will be sitting down with friends and family for Thanksgiving dinner. As often happens when people gather around the table, the conversation may take an unexpected turn. Someone may say something outrageous. Some may realize that a relationship they thought of one way has changed, maybe for the worse, maybe for the better. People will weigh whether to say things out loud or opt for diplomatic silence.

Susan Delacourt, currently a 10-year veteran with the Toronto Star has worked for the National Post, a columnist and feature writer at the Ottawa Citizen and, for sixteen years, a parliamentary correspondent and editorial board member of The Globe and Mail. She is a graduate the University of Western Ontario (1982, majoring in Political Science). She is also a Masters student in the School of Political Studies at Carleton University.

This week in Canada-U.S. relations has very much been an exercise in that same realm, unfolding in front of us at the top levels — Trump and Carney in Washington; top business leaders and players on the field of politics between the two nations, absorbing it all at the summit in Toronto.

It all comes back to one man — Trump, who reportedly just wants to make friends. But Canadians at all levels are asking whether the friendship even works any more and more importantly, what it is going to cost this country.