ESSAY: Barton predicts we will thank Trump, but trust never thanks the one who broke it

Not a thank-you

The UN podium, September 26

On September 26, from the podium of the UN General Assembly, Anita Anand defended a Canada that is a “reliable partner.” Not a grateful Canada.

She said something else too. That the great powers are moving away from global economic cooperation.

Five days earlier, another Canadian had predicted a thank-you. Not right away. In twenty years.

A factory, on a Monday

In a factory hit by tariffs, nobody counts in twenty-year spans. They count in weeks. In shifts. In orders that do not come back.

The noise of the machines drops a notch when a line stops. Everyone hears it. No one says a word.

Pay comes every two weeks. Rent, on the first of the month. Nobody lives on the scale of a generation.

Barton’s sentence is aimed at these people, without knowing it.

Twenty years is a long time for a paycheque.

Barton’s twenty years

The chair of Invest in Canada

Dominic Barton chairs Invest in Canada. He ran McKinsey worldwide. He was Canada’s ambassador to China.

On September 21, the Associated Press publishes his sentence. “Maybe in 20 years, we’ll thank Trump,” he says.

Thank him for what? For shaking us out of our complacency.

He is not saying thank you today. He is promising it for later. On behalf of our children, in effect.

Four words from a consultant

Barton is not telling us to turn our backs on the United States. We can no longer count on them out of habit, he says. The rest of the world has to be pushed, with far more ambition.

Canada has been too inward-looking, he adds. Then four words: “Let’s use the moment.”

The dispatch, picked up on September 26 by the Milwaukee Independent, is still making the rounds this week.

Barton speaks as a consultant. He sees cycles. He sees markets. He is right to see them.

But a thank-you implies a benefactor.

The sentence is clever. It has the wrong address.

Nobody thanks the jolt.

Seventy percent to one buyer

A single customer

About 70% of Canada’s exports go to the United States, the Associated Press notes.

Seventy percent to one customer.

It was geography. It was also a convenience, renewed every year without anyone signing for it.

Mark Carney admits as much himself. It was easy business, he says, but we relied too much on one partner. “That time is over.”

Complacency, named

Barton is right on one point. Complacency existed. It had its comforts. It had a number.

Stephen Harper, the former prime minister, puts it another way in the same dispatch. To keep our sovereignty, we must reduce our reliance on the United States. He finds it all sad. And just as necessary.

Two prime ministers from two parties. One diagnosis.

Complacency is not a failing. It is a habit. It costs you the day it breaks.

Access to the American market still exists, and it now comes with a price, Carney says.

Comfort had only one customer.

A commodity called trust

Champagne’s word

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said it on September 1, in North Carolina, according to Reuters. Then again to the Associated Press.

“The most sought-after commodity today is trust,” he said. The world has changed. America has changed.

He spoke then of an approach both constructive and firm. He was about to meet US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The word is right. The metaphor misleads.

What cannot be bought

A commodity is produced, stored, sold. It has a market price. It changes hands.

Trust does not change hands. It is proven. It is proven over time, by promises kept when keeping them costs something.

So I read Barton’s sentence backwards. We will not thank the one who broke trust. We may thank those who rebuilt it. And that will not be him.

We let a single relationship carry almost everything. That is what the jolt exposed. Not a gift. An admission.

Trust does not ship by the boxcar.

What a thank-you assumes

A gift, an intention

A thank-you answers a gift.

A gift assumes an intention. The intention to do the other some good.

You thank the neighbour who clears your driveway. You do not thank the storm.

The storm may teach you to buy a shovel. It does not become generous for all that.

A tariff is not a present

A tariff has no intention toward the one who pays it. It has a purpose for the one who imposes it.

That is why Barton’s thank-you rings false. It lends an intention to something that only ever had an effect.

Gratitude is a moral debt. No one owes a moral debt to a show of force.

You draw a lesson from it. Alone. And you pay for it yourself.

No storm expects a thank-you.

Anand’s case at the UN

Reliable, stable, predictable

At the UN, Anand takes up the argument of trust. In a rapidly changing world, she says, Canada is a reliable partner.

We are a stable partner, she says, at a time when predictability comes at a premium.

She adds that the great powers are dismantling economic integration. Middle powers, she says, are building the framework of the new international order, right now.

And yet a framework only holds with partners who do not change their minds every month.

More than 20 partnerships

She puts numbers on the shift. More than 20 new economic and defence partnerships in a year. Exports outside North America sharply up, she says.

She speaks of the Indo-Pacific, the Gulf, Latin America. And of renewed partnerships with major economies, such as India and China.

Reliable. Stable. Predictable. Three ministerial words, three promises to keep.

China. I read the sentence twice.

Reliable is a word you earn over years.

The July record

Statistics Canada, September 3

The best reply to my doubt comes from the numbers.

On September 3, Statistics Canada publishes the July data. Exports to countries other than the United States hit a record: C$25.6 billion. A third monthly increase in a row.

Their share: 33.7% of our exports.

Exports to the United States, meanwhile, fall 6.6%. The steepest drop since April 2025.

Our surplus with the United States shrinks, from C$10.3 billion in June to C$5.9 billion in July. Our deficit with the rest of the world falls to C$5.1 billion, the lowest since January 2021.

Barton has a case

Here is the objection in its strongest form. The jolt is already producing results. Barton could cite them. Anand does.

More than 20 partnerships. A record outside the United States. Investors showing up.

The numbers are moving. It is true. I put it in writing.

And yet a record tells you what it carries.

A record is also read by its cargo.

What the record carries

Ore, fuel, crude

Statistics Canada names the products behind the July increase.

To the Netherlands, iron ore, nuclear fuel and crude oil. To China, various products. To Germany, copper ore.

The July record: ore, crude.

Canola climbs too, up 43.2% in July, mostly to China, Pakistan and Japan. Over seven months, it is up 32.2% from 2025.

Business and commercial aircraft also head overseas. That month, aircraft exports jump 80.1%.

Same ground, other ports

We have changed addresses. Not yet trades.

A mine does not move. Its customer does. That is already a lot. It is not a different economy.

An analysis site, The Receipts, estimates that gold accounted for about a third of export gains outside the United States in 2025.

Diversifying toward Beijing also means trading one dependence for another. For a more dangerous one, if you believe, as I do, that the Chinese Communist Party remains the leading threat to the West.

We export commodities. We sell trust.

Five hundred billion promised

The Toronto summit

On September 14, the Associated Press describes some 300 leaders gathered in Toronto for Canada’s first investment summit. Together, they manage more than $120 trillion in assets.

Absences had been feared. “People are here,” Barton says.

Anand, at the UN, speaks of nearly $500 billion in financing commitments to invest in Canada.

There, Bell Canada announces it is quadrupling its artificial intelligence data centre project in Saskatchewan. More than C$50 billion. A 1.2-gigawatt facility, according to the Associated Press.

Canada is about much more than being next to the United States, Carney declares.

A fact that troubles my reading

This fact troubles my reading, and I publish it. Without the jolt, this summit might not have happened. Without the jolt, our ministers would not be crisscrossing the Gulf and Asia in such a hurry.

Commitments are not construction sites. A commitment gets signed. A project gets delivered.

Barton is right about the effect. He is wrong about the debt.

A shock can produce some good. It does not become its author.

The effect is real. The debt is not there.

Zero point nine

The OECD, September 23

On September 23, the OECD publishes its interim projections.

For Canada, growth cut to 0.9% in 2026, then 1.3% in 2027. For the United States, 2.2% in 2026, then 2.1%.

The OECD judges that the new tariffs on our exports are holding back certain industries. The overall effect remains limited, it writes, because the measures are narrow. Uncertainty over the future of the North American agreement will weigh on regional trade.

Two speeds

By these projections, the country doing the shaking would grow more than twice as fast as the country being shaken.

At home, the OECD counts on consumer spending and public investment to carry the 2027 recovery. Business investment would return only gradually.

Two speeds. One neighbour.

There is a lesson in humility here. The jolt does not cost the one who delivers it what it costs the one who takes it.

The effective tariff rate on American imports has risen only a little over one point, the OECD estimates. From 9.6% in June to 10.9% by mid-September.

And the limited effect of an average says nothing about a production line that has stopped.

An average never closes a factory.

The people who pay for the jolt

Fifty percent

Since late August, Washington has imposed 50% tariffs on about $20 billion of Canadian goods, Reuters and the Associated Press report.

Ottawa retaliated. Talks had broken down on August 21.

Behind those rows in a table, there are people. The ones who pay for the jolt before anyone draws a lesson from it.

The span of a paycheque

There is the man who sees his American order cancelled and goes looking for a customer in Germany. There is the woman learning a new market while she learns her way around employment insurance. There is the company keeping its staff by shaving its margin, one more month, then another.

Somewhere, a supplier does not know whether his customer will still exist at Christmas. A family puts off a purchase without saying why.

Their time is not the strategists’ time. It is counted in paycheques. In layoff notices. In lost orders.

None of them asked to be shaken.

Twenty years, for them, is not a horizon. It is the age of a child.

A lesson for some, a bill for others.

A thank-you sent to the wrong address

Who will have done the work

Back to Barton’s twenty years.

If, in twenty years, Canada sells as much to Europe and Asia as it promises, who will have done that work?

Agreements, first. The Canadian Press kept the list at the end of August: Indonesia, signed in September 2025, Ecuador in July, the United Arab Emirates concluded in 47 days. India, targeted before the end of the year.

Exporters who will have changed ports. Workers who will have changed trades. Governments that will have signed agreements, then kept them. Taxpayers who will have paid for the trade corridors.

What the sentence gives away

Barton’s sentence reveals a reflex. Crediting the power that strikes with the merit of those who absorb the blow.

It is an old reflex. It turns a constraint into a lesson, and a lesson into a debt owed to the master.

I refuse it. Not out of anger. Out of accuracy. The work will be ours. Not his.

And yet I understand the temptation. Thanking the blow is a way of consoling yourself for having had to take it.

Those who absorb the blow deserve the thanks.

Montreal, October 29 and 30

The summit with Europe

The next meeting has a date. A Canada–European Union summit will be held in Montreal on October 29 and 30, the Associated Press reports.

Carney promises an alliance for the future that will strengthen our collective resilience. He wants to double trade outside the United States within ten years.

He is also pushing for an alliance of “middle powers,” Reuters reported on September 1. Barton, for his part, asks for far more ambition beyond the United States.

Our tariff-free access to 1.5 billion consumers could double within six months, according to the same dispatch.

The Associated Press also marks the limits. Associate member status does not exist yet. And Europe cannot quickly replace a market that buys nearly three-quarters of our exports.

Caution about the calendar

Six months to double access. Ten years to double trade. Twenty years to say thank you, Barton says.

Trust has no calendar. It is earned at every deadline kept.

And yet the lure of the announcement remains strong. A signature photographs better than a delivery.

Every alliance is judged in its second year.

What trust demands

Promises that cost

If trust is the most sought-after commodity, it has to be produced the way everything else is. Slowly. At a cost.

Trust cannot be decreed. It has to be kept.

Keeping a trade promise when a neighbour tries to buy it back. Respecting the rule of law when it gets in the way. Delivering on time to a distant customer who has no reason yet to believe us.

Carney told the investors gathered in Toronto as much, according to the Associated Press. A country that respects the rule of law, a country that is reliable.

Champagne, at the same summit, promised to support our industries for as long as it takes. That is a promise too. It will have to be paid for as well.

A fatigue I admit

I admit a certain fatigue. Every week, a new threat forces us to redefine ourselves. It would be restful to believe that all of this will serve a purpose. That one day, we will say thank you.

I cannot. I can believe we will come out of it stronger. I cannot believe we will owe that to the one who pushed us.

The distinction looks thin. It is not. It decides who writes the history.

Stronger, perhaps. Grateful, no.

Twenty years, counted in weeks

The sentence, turned around

In twenty years, someone will reread Barton’s sentence. They will know what we do not. Whether the July record was a beginning or an accident. Whether trust held.

They will also know who paid for the first weeks…

We will get the August number first. Statistics Canada will publish it on October 6.

The share still owed

Twenty years, in the end, is not a promise. It is a sum of weeks, and each one has someone to pay for it.

What will we owe, twenty years from now, to those who paid for these weeks: a thank-you, or a share of what they lost?

The answer does not depend on Trump. The sentence will stay a sentence. The bill will stay a number.

It depends on what we decide to give back to them.

No thanks to the only customer who shut the door.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• Global Affairs Canada — Anita Anand’s address to the UN, a reliable partner, September 26, 2026
• Statistics Canada — international merchandise trade for July 2026, September 3, 2026
• OECD — Interim Economic Outlook, growth in Canada and the United States, September 23, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Associated Press via the Milwaukee Independent — Barton, Champagne and the turn to Europe, September 26, 2026
• Reuters — Champagne on trust as the most prized commodity, September 1, 2026
• Fortune (Associated Press) — Canada’s investment summit in Toronto, September 14, 2026