Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday that during a phone call with President Donald Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney “walked back” some of the fiery comments he made at the World Economic Form (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, last week.
“I was in the Oval with the president today. He spoke to Prime Minister Carney, who was very aggressively walking back some of the unfortunate remarks he made at Davos,” Bessent said during an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.
Carney gave a speech at the WEF in which he said the “rules-based international order” is dead, implicitly killed by President Donald Trump’s aggressive foreign policy and use of tariffs. Carney said it was time for Canada and the other “middle powers” of the world to band together under the banner of “values-based realism” to uphold their “principles.”
Carney gave this speech only a few days after signing a package of trade deals with Communist China — a regime that practices slavery and genocide and has ruthlessly interfered with Canada’s internal politics. He reportedly agreed to stifle Canada’s criticism of China’s appalling human rights record in exchange for Beijing’s money and trade.
President Trump was sufficiently irked by Carney’s blame-America speech to rescind Canada’s invitation to join his “Board of Peace” for resolving global conflicts and he has threatened to slap Canada with 100-percent tariffs if it follows up on Carney’s sweeping trade deal with China.
“If Carney thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘drop off port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken,” Trump grumbled in a social media post on Saturday.
“China will eat Canada alive, completely devour it, including the destruction of their businesses, social fabric and general way of life,” he warned.
According to Bessent, Carney thought better of his confrontational stance after Davos and he has realized China cannot replace the United States as a trading partner, much less as a security partner.
“Canada depends on the U.S. There’s much more North-South trade than there could ever be East-West trade,” Bessent told Hannity.
“He talks about middle countries having to do their own thing, and I’m old enough to remember when French President François Mitterrand tried to go down that route. It failed back in the ’80s, it’ll fail now,” he predicted.
Bessent advised Carney to stop pushing a “globalist agenda” and focus on doing “what’s best for the Canadian people.”
Carney did seem to moderate his pugnacious stance on Sunday when he tried to forestall Trump’s 100-percent tariff threat by insisting he has “no intention” of pursuing a free trade deal with China. He also promised to formally notify the United States and Mexico if he ever does consider such a deal with China, as required by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (known as CUSMA in Canada and USMCA in the United States).
“What we have done with China is to rectify some issues that have developed in the last couple of years,” Carney said, insisting his dealings with Beijing were “entirely consistent with CUSMA.”
On Tuesday, however, Carney disputed Bessent’s account of his phone call with Trump, bluntly saying “no” when a reporter asked if he had “walked back” anything from his WEF speech.
“To be absolutely clear, and I said this to the president, I meant what I said in Davos,” Carney said on his way into a cabinet meeting.
Carney claimed Trump was satisfied with his account of his dealings with China.
“I explained to him our arrangement with China, I explained to him what we’re doing: 12 new deals on four continents in six months — he was impressed — and what we intend to do going forward,” he said.
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