By Bruce Moncur

Trade talks between Canada and the United States broke down last night. New tariffs are already in effect, and the Prime Minister has said we’ll match them dollar for dollar. I won’t pretend I’m not angry. I was shot three times by Americans — friendly fire, in Afghanistan, fighting a war we chose to fight alongside them.

But I’ve spent a long time thinking about the history between our two countries, and I keep coming back to this: for nearly two centuries, when one of our nations went to war, the other showed up. My great-great-great-grandfather crossed the border to fight in the American Civil War. Tens of thousands of Americans crossed north to join our army in both World Wars before their own country entered. My uncle Jim was drafted by the U.S. military during Korea and served with distinction rather than come home. Twenty thousand Canadians volunteered for Vietnam — a war Canada never joined — and 134 of them didn’t come home. Windsor sent more soldiers per capita to Afghanistan than anywhere else in the country, and 158 Canadians died there, fighting next to Americans.

None of that history means anything to the current administration in Washington. I understand that. But it means something to me, and I think it should mean something to us as a country right now.

For the next ninety days, while this trade war plays out, we need to stand together — not as Liberals or Conservatives, not as New Democrats, but as Canadians. This goes beyond party politics. We can disagree about almost everything else, but we cannot afford to be divided while our closest ally is treating us like a threat.

Support Canadian businesses. Support each other. And watch what happens south of the border in November — if the midterms flip the House and the Senate, it could change the entire shape of these negotiations.

We’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with Americans through some of the worst moments of the last two hundred years. We can stand on our own for the next ninety days.

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When I researched a profile of Mark Carney for Maclean’s magazine last year, I interviewed one person who had had an unpleasant business relationship with him, and was struck by how cold he was when their interests were no longer aligned.

“He’s very resolute about what he wants,” said my confidential informant, who was obviously still smarting years after their bruising interaction. “He’s very smart. I think this is a quality you probably need to survive in the top level of politics. I think he’ll throw anyone under the bus that he needs to.”

The anecdote didn’t fit in the article, but I was left with the impression that Carney is a cold-blooded character when he needs to be, which fits with his career path. You don’t get from Fort Smith to Davos by being obliging to everyone.

My source said it would be unwise to fuck with Carney.

“I say that both in a good way and a bad way. I mean, I would quite like if I was a Canadian citizen to have a prime minister who Donald Trump couldn’t fuck with.”

I think that is what we have. We will see how the chips eventually fall, but I am inclined to think that Mark Carney set a trap for Trump and has judged, correctly, that he can beat him in a trade war.

Steve Verheul, Canada’s most experienced and effective former trade negotiator, whose unflappability is legendary, makes a few important points in a Globe and Mail article today.

Accepting tariffs against key Canadian exports in an integrated North American economy and against the fundamental obligations of our existing free trade agreement would have meant crossing a threshold that would be difficult to unwind. Canadian autos, which faced a reported 15-per-cent tariff under the terms of the proposed deal without an exemption for Canadian content, would have faced the most severe consequences. But that illustrates obstacles that would have also been faced by others.

More broadly, signing a deal heavily slanted in the U.S.’s direction would have serious implications for Canada’s long-term economic position and how we attract investment. On top of this, according to U.S. industry sources, part of the deal on the table was that Canada would match U.S. tariff levels on key products against all trading partners outside North America, including tariff-rate quotas on free-trade partners, a breach of our free trade agreements. That would take us down the path of facing the duelling pressures of a North American economy on terms slanted in the U.S.’s direction, and with our options to find alternative markets constrained.

His analysis makes me wonder why we stayed at the table as long as we did. We would have been agreeing to let the Americans take our auto industry, which has been the economic engine of Ontario, and the federation, ever since Lester Pearson and Lyndon Johnson signed the auto pact in 1965.

The basic deal has always been that the United States can sell vehicles in Canada and we get to compete for the work. That arrangement predates the free trade agreement, and if the Americans want to end that, then Canada will have no choice but to stop letting them sell cars in Canada without tariffs.

As Pierre Trudeau said to Richard Nixon in 1971:“If you were going to take a very protectionist trend, our whole economy is so importantly tied to yours, we’d have to make some very fundamental decisions.”

I don’t think it is in the interest of either country to tear up the auto pact, but we are dealing with unscrupulous, nasty people — sleazy outer borough real estate developers, people you wouldn’t have into your home, unless you were Jeffrey Epstein.

Howard Lutnick, who is cast as the villain in the breakdown of the talks, fits the part, a lupine, loud-mouthed blowhard who once said in an interview that auto makers like doing business in Ontario because there are no unions there, which show the shallowness of his thinking.

Lutnick as deal wrecker is a good story, and it may be true that he big-footed Jamieson Greer just as we were about to strike a deal that was good for Canada and the United States, but I don’t think so. I am inclined to believe Greer, who says that it was Canada who introduced last minute demands and then walked away from the table.

Carney could never have sold a permanent 15-per-cent tariff on Canadian autos to the people who punch clocks in Oshawa and Windsor. He could have walked away from the table when he realized that was the American bottom line. Instead, I think he kept poor Dominic LeBlanc and Janice Charette in talks, knowing that there was no win on the table, then blew up the whole thing on Friday night, knowing that Canadians would rally behind him while Americans would wonder why they are entering a trade war with Canada during a cost-of-living crisis.

On Saturday, Carney was relaxed and persuasive as he told his story, emphasizing the threat to French language protections, and wrong-footing the Americans, who did not manage to get much of a story out.

Trump’s response was late and lame.

And his surrogates seem not to have been equipped with fresh lines.

Meanwhile, in Canada, politicians who have previously been soft on MAGA are lining up behind Carney, as is popular opinion, which has good implications for the byelections at the end of the month and the Quebec election Oct. 5

The real test, of course, is how this will turn out for the people punching clocks in Oshawa and Windsor, and in other trade-exposed industries across Canada. We are playing chicken with the Americans.

To be clear: In my opinion Carney is doing the right thing. As Pierre Poilievre said, the Americans want to deindustrialize Canada. The American demands are entirely unacceptable, and should lead, if they insist on them, to Canadians making, in Trudeau père’s words “some very fundamental decisions.”

We have capital, a well-educated, productive workforce and extraordinary natural resources. We can do whatever the fuck we want.

The day might come when we are forced to accept deindustrialization, that we have to let down the line workers in southern Ontario, but it shouldn’t be today.

It’s much better to give Donald Trump the opportunity to explain to his voters why he wants to make them pay more to deindustrialize Canada and try to force us to take the French off our packaging. It’s better to create the opportunity for discord between him and Nutlick and Greer all the other wretched villains who look north and see weakness and opportunity where they ought to see a friend who can make them feel pain if necessary.

Trump has many problems, and does not look like a well man. Carney has given him one more big problem.

This is existential for Canada. We cannot give way. The Americans can easily back down and move on to other, softer targets.

As Carney said on Saturday, they miscalculated.

And now they can find out.

UPDATE: A anonymous Canadian source briefed on the negotiations tells me on the morning of August 24, that was all a little more complicated that I guessed here, which is often the way things go.

“One caveat: we were trapped in a losing game and the PM figured that out. But, the US did make last minute demands that gave him the exit he was already scanning the room for.”

This matches reporting that came out on Sunday night that asserts that the “U.S. negotiating team introduced an unexpected demand that Canada provide exemptions to its laws requiring big U.S. streamers to boost the discoverability of Canadian content, including French-language content.”

So the Americans helped him to the door by introducing a poison pill that he can point to as proof that they were making unacceptable demands.

CanCon is not negotiable. We can’t pretend to be a country if we can’t set cultural policy.

If you have ever been fortunate enough to spend time drinking beer with Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, you quickly learn how they see their relationship with Quebec, often using salty expressions that would be out of place here.

The Newfoundland hostility to Quebec is not based on linguistic, religious or tribal resentment. They are not triumphalist angryphones, complaining that Quebecers should learn English and stop trying to foist their language on the rest of us.

The animus is the result of a 58-year-old contract that led to the development of the massive Churchill Falls hydro-electric development in the interior of Labrador.

In 1969, the premier of Newfoundland, Joey Smallwood, agreed to a terrible contract that allowed for the development of the waterfall to the benefit of Quebec. Newfoundland agreed to take only 0.2 cents per kilowatt hour, which means Quebec has made $28 billion from Churchill Falls, compared to only about $2 billion for Newfoundland and Labrador.

Labrador’s only border is with Quebec, so it needed a deal to allow it to move power to markets, and it needed capital and engineering capabilities from Montreal, but Smallwood was foolish to agree to a contract at such a low rate until 2041. The renewal clause that shagged Newfoundland was added at the last minute by Hydro Quebec, which should have led Smallwood to put on the brakes and call in the accountants and lawyers. That is not what he did.

Smallwood owned shares in Brinco, the company making the deal. John Crosbie argues convincingly that Smallwood sold out his province.

Smallwood, a mesmerizing character, the man who brought Newfoundland and Labrador into Canada, made a lot of bad deals, squandered a lot of money that his impoverished province could ill afford to lose. The pattern looks more like that of a weak state in a developing country than what happened in the rest of Canada, in particular in comparison to Quebec, where Hydro-Québec used the Churchill Falls power, and the power from James Bay, to kick start an industrial revolution on the heels of the successful political revolution in the 1960s.

In the decades since, Newfoundland governments have sued Quebec unsuccessfully, tried and failed to make new deals, ranted and roared and finally developed another project, Muskrat Falls, without Quebec, which made everything a lot worse.

Newfoundland is broke, the victim of its own bad business decisions and its political weakness as regards Quebec. I am not going to got to law school and then educate myself on the rules regarding inter-jurisdictional power transmission, but I know that no federal government should force Quebec to transmit power across its territory against the will of that province’s government.

So for decades, Newfoundland has been sullen and angry and Quebec has been frosty and indifferent to the misery of their poor neighbours.

But the clock is ticking on the contract, and it is in the interest of both provinces to make amends.

François Legault managed to make a new deal with NL Premier Andrew Furey in 2024, to sweeten the last years of the 1969 deal and expand hydro production, which would have been a great development for both provinces, if the premiers could sell it. Furey could not. Progressive Conservative Leader Tony Wakeham ran against the deal and won.

A key negotiator for Hydro‑Québec in those talks was CEO Michael Sabia, who was lured into the PMO by Mark Carney. He returned to the project as Clerk of the Privy Council and found ways to sweeten the deal for both Newfoundland and Quebec.

I wrote this week in the Toronto Star that the new deal is win-win-win, a huge opportunity to produce a massive amount of clean new power, jobs and money.

“That is more than the entire generating capacity of BC Hydro,” Mark Carney said at the announcement. “It’s more than double the output of Bruce Power, the largest nuclear plant on this continent. It is the equivalent of 18 Hoover Dams in America, at its current operating capacity.”

Even allowing for some political exaggeration, this is huge, the kind of project that could create a labour shortage in Newfoundland and bring the b’ys home from Fort Mac, produce enough low-carbon electricity to power our biggest cities and give Canada some wiggle room in dealing with the voracious Americans.

I think this deal is too good to let politics kill it, but that depends on voters in the two provinces. In my opinion, Newfoundlanders will likely eat their pride and take the money, but that is no sure thing.

The bigger political threat comes from Quebec. New premier Christine Fréchette faces voters on Oct. 5. The polls show Parti Quebecois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon is set to win, but nobody has voted yet, and Fréchette has a chance of winning.

She is arguing a PQ government will rip up the deal, which might be true. Plamondon has not said that, has complained that it is unfair, in fact.

«La réalité est que personne n’a lu l’entente et que si l’entente est positive pour le Québec, évidement qu’un gouvernement du Parti Québécois aura intérêt à maintenir cette entente. (…) Tenter de faire croire aux Québécois que nous avons besoins d’un autre quatre ans de CAQ car il s’agirait la seule manière de faire vivre une entente dont on ne sait rien à ce jour est évidemment une manoeuvre électorale grossière», a ajouté Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.

Fair enough. He can’t study the fine print since there is no fine print. But in the campaign ahead, it will be interesting to see if Fréchette can pin him down on this.

Part of his base is surely opposed.

Mathieu Bock-Côté, the Paris-based sovereignist intellectual who often sets the agenda for Plamondon, filed a blistering column opposed to the deal.

Nous passons ainsi, selon l’expression de Karima Brikh, d’Hydro-Québec à Hydro-Canada. Il fallait voir Christine Fréchette à Terre-Neuve renoncer au Maîtres chez nous pour se convertir au Building Canada Strong.

He writes that the current government failed to dispute its border with Newfoundland, taking the approach of a smiling cuckold.

Faut-il rappeler que le Québec conteste depuis des décennies la frontière du Labrador. Il aurait pu profiter pour poser cette question au cœur des négociations. Le présent gouvernement ne l’a pas fait. C’est la politique du cocu content, souriant.

Bock-Côté is a polemicist, a rabble rouser, not a politician.

Plamondon must make an assessment based on more than the urgency of a daily print deadline, listening carefully to the reasoning of Hydro-Québec executives, who, as Paul Journet explains, negotiated a deal that they believe is to the benefit of Quebecers.

Il faut mal connaître la culture d’Hydro-Québec pour la croire soumise au bureau du premier ministre. Sa réputation d’« État dans l’État » ne vient pas de nulle part…

Hydro-Québec tient jalousement à son indépendance. Cette entente concerne son plus gros projet. Il serait étonnant qu’elle se tire dans le pied pendant un demi-siècle pour sauver la face d’une politicienne qui, selon les sondages actuels, risque de ne plus être là dans deux mois.

Hydro-Québec needs more waterfalls.

I think this is a win-win-win deal, that it will finally unlock a massive amount of clean power that politics keeps blocking. But if the eventual independence of Quebec is your raison d'être, do you want to enter into a huge new arrangement that demonstrates that Canada can work?

What does PSPP want? What would he do?

Quebecers will surely have a better sense of that by the time they vote.

One summer afternoon, by a lake, in the 1970s, when I was a child, my uncle diverted us both by telling me how Odysseus used wordplay to escape from the cave of a one-eyed giant who wanted to eat him.

The story delighted me, and when I got back to school, I set aside my Superman comics and went to the library, where I found books full of Greek myths, which I devoured.

Fifty years later, I keep going back to the Odyssey, an epic poem composed for recitation, likely around 700 BC. It is without equal in world literature: vivid, exciting, complex, deep and strange — a story that has long outlived its social, cultural and religious context.

Anyone who loves it should be happy that Christopher Nolan’s movie version of the Odyssey is sending so many people to the source, but I feel sorry for those who only ever see his movie, because it is vastly inferior.

On its own terms, Nolan’s Odyssey is a great summer blockbuster, a feast for the eyes, and it is thoughtful in its way, but he left out the best part, the story my uncle told me, which is perplexing, since it is the core of the story.

Nolan says he tried to fit it in but couldn’t make it work. I don’t think I believe him. Like Odysseus, Nolan is guilty of hubris. I suspect he thought his IMAX cameras, glittering cast and vast budget would make him Homer’s equal, which he is not.

Unlike Euripides, Virgil, James Joyce, Margaret Atwood or the Coen brothers, Nolan has not remade the story, used it as inspiration for something new. He has taken Homer’s story and removed the engine that drives it.

The story of the trickster hero escaping from the cave of the giant was already old when Homer attached it to Odysseus. Scholars believe it was a pre-existing folk story, told as far away as Mongolia and North Africa.

Homer took an equally old folk story about a returning husband who has to string a bow to win back his wife, and inserted the trickster story into it. He gathered stories like threads and wove them into an epic that has proven its worth with its longevity. Do you think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones are superior? Check back in a millennium.

Like Cinderella, the stories he used were viral, travelling across cultural borders, told around fires for generations, winnowed like folk songs, so that only the most appealing versions got passed on.

The story of the Cyclops did not stop travelling when Homer’s version was recorded. It later made its way into the Sinbad the Sailor stories in Baghdad in the 1400s.

In that version, the giant is black, reflecting the preoccupation of Arab sailors, who were then travelling to the east coast of Africa, trading and taking slaves.

Like Nolan, the anonymous storyteller who created Sinbad also dropped the wordplay that Homer used, the story element that reveals Odysseus as a cunning, morally ambiguous liar.

In Homer’s version, Odysseus is on his way home from the Trojan war when a storm washes his fleet far to the west, to the island of the Cyclopes — long identified with Sicily — which the Greeks of Homer’s were then getting ready to colonize.

The Greeks were then like the Europeans at the beginning of the Age of Discovery, excited by the prospect of establishing colonies in new territories, where their technology — particularly their ships — made them more productive than the indigenous inhabitants.

Many cities in Europe and North Africa were founded by the Greeks in that period. Nice, in France, is named for Nike, the goddess of victory, in celebration of a Greek military victory over the native people of that place. Odessa, in Ukraine, is named for an ancient Greek colony.

That is how we can see Odysseus as he approaches the island of the Cyclopes, like a conquistador off the coast of Yucatan. He sees the terrain with a colonist’s eye, dismissive of the people who live there.

“They put trust in gods, and do not plant their food from seed, nor plow, and yet the barley, grain, and clustering wine-grapes all flourish there, increased by rain from Zeus. They hold no councils, have no common laws, but live in caves on lofty mountaintops, and each makes laws for his own wife and children, without concern for what the others think.” *

Odysseus, like European colonists in the New World who used “terra nullius” to justify their settlements, sees an inefficiently exploited landscape, and is excited by the potential of upgrading it, writing that it could be a “fertile colony, with proper harvests.”

He is much like Christopher Columbus, two thousand years later, writing back to Europe about his first voyage to the Caribbean. Columbus wrote — falsely — that the Taino had no government, and that the land is “very suitable for planting and cultivating, for raising all sorts of livestock herds and erecting towns and farms.”

But Odysseus is not looking to conquer new land, like Columbus, but to get gifts.

Against his crew’s objections, he leads twelve men ashore, to the empty cave of Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant, where they discover lambs and cheeses.

The men want to seize some food and leave, but Odysseus insists they wait for the cave’s owner to return, hoping he will give him gifts.

Instead, when the giant returns, driving his flock before him, he frightens the Greeks, who hide in terror and watch as he rolls a huge stone in front of the cave entrance. After milking his sheep, Polyphemus catches sight of the hiding Greeks.

“Where did you come from across the watery depths?” he demands. “Are you on business, or roaming round without a goal, like pirates, who risk their lives at sea to bring disaster to other people?”

Polyphemus is correct. They are pirates. Before the storm, Odysseus and his men pillaged a town near Troy, killing the men, taking the women as slaves, and carrying away their riches, including skins full of wine, one of which he has brought to the cave.

Odysseus tells the giant that they hope he will give them gifts, as the laws of Zeus require.

The giant laughs. “My people think nothing of that Zeus with his big scepter, nor any god; our strength is more than theirs.”

He asks Odysseus where he is going. Odysseus lies, and tells him they have been shipwrecked.

At that point, the giant snatches two of the men, smashes their heads on the floor, tears their bodies apart and gobbles them raw.

Cannibalism is often a feature of stories colonizers tell, since it is a thrilling story element, and, importantly, it removes the ethical questions faced by the colonist taking someone else’s cheese, land, or person.

When Columbus and other slavers wanted to traffic in Indigenous slaves from the Caribbean, Queen Isabella forbade it on religious grounds, unless the people were cannibals, in which case it was allowed, which led the slavers to report that the islands were crawling with cannibals. The word “cannibal” comes from a Spanish mispronunciation of Carib, the people who the Spanish accused of eating human flesh.

The evidence for actual cannibalism in the Caribbean is sparse to non-existent. It seems that Columbus seized on indigenous myths — their version of the Cyclopes story — to justify his slave taking.

But the allegation was irresistible for those enslaving Indigenous people, and in 1719, two centuries after Columbus, in the novel Robinson Crusoe, cannibals became part of British imperial literature, justifying colonialism in the European mind. The logic of such stories is clear enough. It is better to be a slave to a European than to be eaten.

Crusoe overcomes the cannibals with muskets. Sinbad uses an iron spit to pierce his eye.

What makes the Odyssey more interesting is that Odysseus converses with the giant, uses guile to stay out of his stomach.

On the second day in the cave, with door blocked by a stone that is too big for he and his men to move, Odysseus offers Polyphemus wine, which the giant unwisely drinks without mixing it, drinking like a barbarian, which cunning Odysseus exploits, like a whisky trader in the western plains, taking advantage of people with no tradition of caution around alcohol.

Drunk, the giant asks for more wine.

“Tell me your name,” he says, “so I can give you a present as my guest, one you will like.”

Odysseus tops him up.

“Cyclops, you asked my name. I will reveal it; then you must give the gift you promised me, of hospitality. My name is Noman. My family and friends all call me Noman.”

The hard-hearted Cyclops responds: “I will eat Noman last; first I will eat the other men. That is my gift to you.”

He then goes to sleep, blind drunk, whereupon Odysseus and his men plunge a burning, sharpened log of olive wood into his eye, using leather straps around it to turn it like a drill.

“His blood poured out around the stake, and blazing fire sizzled his lids and brows, and fried the roots. As when a blacksmith dips an axe or adze to temper it in ice-cold water; loudly it shrieks. From this, the iron takes on its power. So did his eyeball crackle on the spear.”

Screaming in horror, Polyphemus awakes his neighbours, who call to him: “What is the matter? Are you badly hurt?”

He replies: “My friends! Noman is killing me by tricks, not force.”

“‘If no one hurts you, you are all alone,” they reply, and leave him be.

Odysseus and his remaining men still have to get past the giant, so they strap themselves under the bellies of his sheep and leave with them when he moves the stone door to let out his flock.

Back on his ship, Odysseus, in his pride, taunts the blinded giant, and tells him his real name, which is a big mistake, since Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, the god of the sea, who besets Odysseus with storms, providing the dramatic engine for the rest of the story.

The story is multi-layered, with space for the listener to be horrified at the giant’s cruelty, awed by Odysseus’s cunning and also taken aback by his arrogance. He is, as the poem’s first line says, a man of many turns, and it is his complexity, including his hubris, which makes him fascinating.

And Polyphemus, horrible as he is, has lines that show he has a worldview, motivation. Like William Shakespeare, Homer gives his villains inner lives, makes us think about how the world looks to them.

What Nolan has done, in his version, is vastly less interesting.

Instead of giving us a sexy, arrogant, smooth-talking Mediterranean, who lies ceaselessly, seduces goddesses and bursts into tears when he suffers, Nolan gives us, in Matt Damon, a stolid, stoic North American, a traumatized veteran. He is more like Rambo than like the cunning, prideful, treacherous Greek.

In place of the diabolically clever, multi-layered story of the trickster and the giant, Nolan gives us a dim-witted monster, a creature from a horror movie, and changes the story so that Odysseus’s trickery in Troy — the Trojan horse — is the sin for which he must atone.

The result is fine, in a way. I imagine it is better than the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, its rival for the biggest box office movie of the year. And perhaps in this war-weary world it is just as well the summer’s biggest film for adult audiences is an extended warning about the dangers of conquering foreign cities.

And some of Nolan’s creative choices are surely dictated by the market. The cast of a blockbuster must be diverse to appeal to diverse audiences. Penelope’s feminist lines are anachronistic, but theatre goers now would not be happy watching her meekly submit to male authority like a bronze age woman. There would be no way to include the hanging of Penelope’s maids at the end of the epic that would not repulse modern audiences.

Much of Nolan’s Odyssey — especially the first 30 minutes — feels frantic, jammed with clunky exposition, with hurried character development and little chance to calmly absorb the ancient world he has gone to such trouble to create. But he was likely afraid to slow down, because studios are worried about “second screen” viewers, who look at their phones while they watch movies. The phone-addled masses are dictating artistic choices to directors.

The people for whom Homer wrote did not have phones, or even books. They were expecting to sit and listen to a bard recite his story for four hours, and come back night after night to hear how the story ends.

You can’t watch Nolan’s Odyssey without admiring his skill as a director, and maybe it is wrong to blame him personally for his choices, as Emily Wilson does, amusingly and at length, because many of them were doubtless dictated by commercial considerations that govern Hollywood.

But he has taken the tricky, diabolical heart out of the old story and replaced it with something less thrilling, less interesting, pursuing the same obsession he has pursued in his other films, which are fine in their way, but which nobody will be talking about to children in 3,000 years.

* All quotes from the Odyssey here are from Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, which I favour. I particularly recommend the audiobook, narrated by Claire Danes.

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