Trump’s Tariff Temper Tantrum Tells Us Which Nation-Building Projects Canada Needs

There's a big gap in PM Mark Carney's climate competitiveness strategy. Municipal leaders in the #ElbowsUp for Climate coalition have got him covered.

Oct 26, 2025

Donald Trump’s latest temper tantrum over the Ontario government’s Ronald Reagan ad is the latest proof that Canada needs nation-building projects that actually build the nation, strengthen our communities’ resilience, and drive down our climate pollution along the way.

That agenda is within our grasp if our federal and provincial governments have the courage and insight to reach for it. But it should have no time or space for the return of a zombie pipeline, the twice-rejected Keystone XL, which would make us more reliant on revenue from U.S. oil exports.

Or for a fabulously expensive new nuclear project in Ontario, using unproven technology that would leave us dependent on U.S. uranium.

Nor for a 100% foreign-owned liquefied natural gas (LNG) project that will trigger significant, new emissions of climate-busting methane if it doesn’t run headlong into a glutted global market for the product it’s trying to sell.

While Prime Minister Mark Carney works away at the one job, one job he was elected to do—protecting Canada itself from a volatile, predatory sociopath now widely believed to be suffering from dementia—the other locus of leadership is the more than 250 municipal leaders who’ve signed on to the #ElbowsUp for Climate declaration. Long before Carney released an initial list of five nation-building projects his government will prioritize for approval, the local leaders had come up with their own:

• A national East-West-North clean electricity grid;

• A national high-speed rail network;

• At least two million non-market, energy-efficient homes in “more affordable, transit-linked” communities;

• A Canada-wide program of energy retrofits and heat pump installations;

• A national resilience, response, and recovery strategy “so our communities can prepare for the climate disasters we know are coming, respond when they hit, and rebuild afterwards.”

It’s virtually certain that we won’t see those priorities in Carney’s highly-anticipated climate competitiveness strategy, now expected to be folded into the federal budget when it’s released Nov. 4. But if we really want to protect the national sovereignty and the national fabric that

Reagan Speaks, Trump Erupts

There’s something very unsettling about turning to quotes from Ronald Reagan, who held the White House from 1981 to 1988, to make the case against the U.S. president who inherited and sealed his legacy. For all that many Americans lionize Reagan as their best president ever, many of us who were there remember him as the worst—not least because he killed off a nascent clean energy transition that would have been complete by now if it had been allowed to continue.

But Trump’s overblown reaction to the Ontario government ad showed that, for better and for worse, the former B movie actor who once starred opposite a chimpanzee was the messenger for the moment. In a 1987 radio address, Reagan declared that:

When someone says, “Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,” it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time. Over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.

The ad triggered one of Trump’s semi-literate, late night rants on his “Truth Social” platform, halting trade negotiations with Canada that were supposed to yield results in time for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit beginning today. Then, when Ontario said it was too late to cancel its ad placements over the weekend—which conveniently included TV spots during the first two games of baseball’s World Series Friday and Saturday—Trump slapped a new 10% tariff on Canadian imports.

“We’re dealing here with the problem of trade policy being run by one man with no constraints,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. “He gets annoyed, he says: ‘I’m mad, we’re not talking anymore.’ Nations aren’t supposed to behave towards each other like angry couples do.”

How ironic it is that the broadside against Trump’s largely unfounded tariff mania came from the U.S. president who planted the seeds of division and raging inequalities that eventually brought Trump to power. Author Jeffrey Kass described that “disastrous legacy” on Medium earlier this year:

For some things, Reagan was wildly effective….
But on the domestic front, a look-back shows he’s also the reason behind the decimation of America’s middle class, regression on race issues, uncontrolled homelessness, increased crime, and mass income disparity.

Most notably, Kass said, when Reagan came to power in 1980, the U.S. tax rate on income over $212,000 ($781,755 in today’s dollars) was 70%--which meant the country had far fewer billionaires. In other words, far fewer oligarchs. It meant governments had a decent shot at funding the services that kept households and communities healthy and whole. So essential supports that weren’t at the mercy of fossil-funded charities that break their promises without notice or explanation.

All of that started to change in the U.S. when Reagan took a wrecking ball to the social consensus that, beyond a pretty wide margin of sufficiency, everyone had a shared duty to financially support the society that sustained them.

But there’s not much in this conversation for the rest of us if it boils down to an argument between Donald Trump and the ghost of Ronald Reagan. But a large swath of our local leaders—the elected officials who are closest to the ground, and closest to day-to-day reality—have come up with something better.

‘Nation-Building, Not Nation-Burning Projects’

The #ElbowsUp for Climate leaders originally released their five-point plan during the federal election last spring. They brought it back in a release in late September, just days after early reporting from the Canadian Climate Institute showed Canada’s emissions reductions flatlining in 2024 while climate pollution from fossil fuels accelerated. As The Energy Mix reported at the time:

Coalition co-chair and former Toronto mayor David Miller took aim at the first batch of major projects that Prime Minister Mark Carney announced earlier [in September]. “LNG Canada is both a carbon bomb and an entirely foreign-owned project: what happened to ‘Elbows Up’?” he asked. “This is a moment for investing in nation-building, not nation-burning projects.”
Instead, the municipal leaders are urging Carney and his government to take on a list of nation-building projects that will “help us build an economy that is significantly independent from our neighbour to the south and will materially help our efforts to lower our greenhouse gas emissions and our reliance on burning fossil fuels.”

At the time, the coalition said it had identified more than 200 communities and regions that dealt with specific climate impacts over the summer, not including one in seven First Nations that faced wildfires, evacuations, extreme heat, and air quality warnings.

“Leading through a climate emergency changes you,” the municipal leaders said in their original release. “You can’t witness elderly neighbours overheating in low-income apartments during a heat wave, and not recognize the critical role of well-insulated, affordable housing. You can’t comfort people who have lost everything in floods and fires, and not wonder how we will afford to rebuild. You can’t watch your kids and loved ones choke on toxic wildfire smoke without knowing the time to act boldly on climate change is right now—because later is too late.”

The good news is that the conversation isn’t ending there. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard loud and clear that the #ElbowsUp coalition is accelerating its work and reaching out to build a wider, louder network.

And that opens up an essential third front that belongs right alongside Carney’s effort to protect the country and diversify our trading relationships. It emphasizes the nation-building projects that will build Canada strong, rather than helping to tear us apart.

Hanging Tough Against Trump

We can and will debate how well they’re doing and whether they’re letting their elbows down. But Carney and his advisors seem to understand that the only way to deal with Donald Trump is to resist him like any other schoolyard bully—out loud if you can, more stolidly if necessary. And there were indications last week that the Ontario ad was just a pretext for that bully to lash out.

“The Canadians have been very difficult to negotiate with,” the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, told media in Washington Friday. “You look at all the countries around the world that we’ve made deals with, and the fact that we’re now negotiating with Mexico separately reveals that it’s not just about one ad, that there’s frustration that’s built up.”

“I’m not convinced that the ad itself is the issue here,” agreed Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, in remarks that sounded an awful lot like he’d just as soon see Carney concede as needed to get any deal at all. “There are a number of areas in which the Americans have expressed some concerns. I’d like to put the negotiators back in the room to negotiate an agreement.”

While Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc made it clear on social media that Canada’s representatives “stand ready to build on the progress made in constructive discussions with American counterparts over the course of recent weeks,” Carney brought a different nuance to the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN) meeting in Malaysia Sunday.

“We have all been reminded of the importance of reliable partners—who honour their commitments, who are there in tough times, and who engage collaboratively to fix something that isn’t working,” he said. “Canada is such a partner, a dependable partner, and I have come to Kuala Lumpur to say clearly that we want to play a bigger role in this region.”

That statement reinforced the pathway that is still Job One for the PM—hanging tough against Trump—in a forum that may have brought some progress on the second one.

Carbon Competitiveness from the Ground Up

From the time he declared for the Liberal Party leadership earlier this year—can anyone believe that wasn’t quite 9½ months ago?—Carney has been stressing the need for more reliable international trading partners and putting “carbon competitiveness” at the centre of that effort. Writing for our friends at Corporate Knights this week, Climate Institute President Rick Smith stressed that any economic diversification strategy will mean closer ties to countries that are rapidly embracing clean, lower-carbon energy.

Think of the European Union and the United Kingdom: both jurisdictions continue to see rising adoption of renewables and electric vehicles. And both are set to impose carbon tariffs on imports that don’t already price carbon to specified levels. In China, another critical market, roughly half of all new car sales are already electric—and rising fast. Renewable installations are off the charts. And the country is expanding coverage of its massive national carbon market.
In fact, the transition to clean energy is happening at a blistering pace in many countries beyond these select few.

Even in the U.S., “though Trump gets most of the news headlines, there remains significant decarbonization progress,” Smith added. “California, for instance, through a combination of policy and targeted investment, has increased its utility battery storage by 3,000% since 2020, with much more on the horizon.”

All of which points us back to the third pathway that can deliver the complete policy package that Carney and Canadians need—to stand up to Trump, protect our sovereignty, and deliver the emission reductions and clean economy jobs the country so badly needs.

So far, Carney’s priorities for “nation-building” investments have emphasized fossil fuel and nuclear megaprojects. He’s even dangled a new lease on life for Keystone XL in an ultimately failed attempt to capture and hold Trump’s attention. But the overall climate competitiveness strategy has been delayed, prompting Globe and Mail columnist Adam Radwanski to speculate that it might not be as fully-baked as it should be.

“Until now, the aim was to release it as a stand-alone document before the end of October, most likely around next week’s G7 energy and environment ministers’ meeting (and IEA forum) in Toronto,” so delaying it until the budget represents a “significant change in plans,” Radwanski wrote on LinkedIn late last week. “That suggests to me that the document is not as ready as it was supposed to be, and/or that the government isn’t confident it will be able to stand on its own merits.”

If that’s right, maybe Carney’s advisors are overdue for a conversation with the local government leaders in the #ElbowsUp for Climate coalition. Their five-point plan relies on practical, proven options that will create jobs and cut carbon in every Canadian community, while boosting the country’s physical, economic, and social resilience.

And along the way, it’ll mean relying on our own homegrown experience and insights, rather than falling back to Ronald Reagan as a voice for the Canada we want to build.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.