“Are Canadians offended by Trump?… Do you guys like us?”
Those were the two most heavily-loaded questions asked of Premier David Eby
It wasn’t just another TV interview. As Eby told reporters at a much lower-stakes news conference later at Ship Point, talking to Fox News is like talking directly to the president.
He spends hours a day gazing at the dominant right-wing news channel, reacting to news and sometimes creating it on the spot, so the interview was a chance for a comparatively obscure Canadian politician to possibly whisper right in his ear.
Eby kept his elbows down for most of the segment and showed a lot of restraint in his answers.
Maybe his morning yoga routine helped. Maybe there was an anger management consultant off-camera.
He has been raging for months about how stupid, ill-considered and unwarranted Trump’s tariff war and sustained attack on Canadian sovereignty is.
“I’m pissed off,” Eby said in March.
And later: “It’s hard to imagine … where our closest friend and ally turned around and stabbed us in the back.”
Followed by: “We’ve had somebody who has smacked us across the head.”
And then: “We like Americans. … They’ve just got a lousy president.”
And don’t forget: “The unique and special derogatory, insulting and targeting treatment from the president is inexcusable.”
Compared with those rage riffs, his chat with host Stuart Varney was pretty low-key.
He parried the “Do you guys like us?” query, with: “We love Americans.
“Our relationships across the border are so deep and that’s what’s heartbreaking. It’s like seeing a really good friend in a bad relationship. … We want you to do well. … It’s just hard for us to watch this.”
He said anger in Canada at Trump “is concealing a little bit of disappointment that such good partners are so far apart right now.
“I assume that Americans and Canadians just want the same thing, which is clarity about [the] relationship, so that we can regroup and move on.
“The president has the things he wants to do. He’s got his mind made up. It doesn’t matter if his approval ratings go down or the stock market tanks or bond yields go up or shelves are empty, it doesn’t matter.
“So for us, it’s about: How do we move forward?”
It had the plaintive air of someone working their way through a breakup, determined to move on, but still frustrated when they think back.
To flip the old kiss-off cliché: It’s not me, it’s you.
It obliquely confirmed the national view that things will never be the same between the U.S. and Canada. But it left a bit of room to patch parts of the relationship back up — if Trump has an interlude of common sense.
Apart from Eby’s rhetoric over the past few months, he has also pulled all U.S. booze from government liquor stores, repeatedly urged people to avoid visiting the U.S. and curbed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government business with U.S. suppliers.
After the TV appearance, Eby joined a national first ministers’ conference call where Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Tuesday sit down with Trump was dissected.
Eby told reporters: “There was a consensus among premiers that the prime minister did well to baseline a new relationship between Canada and the U.S.
“There was a sense of a different level of engagement, that the president is respectful of the prime minister and we were all grateful that the meeting went the way it did.”
Eby alluded to how Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was humiliated and insulted at a similar meeting with Trump.
The premiers were “grateful” that didn’t happen, which shows how low the bar is for getting encouraging news from the U.S. these days.
Just So You Know: Eby used the Inner Harbour as a backdrop for his news conference and noted how many U.S. tourists are visiting.
But both ferries that use the harbour — the Clipper and the Coho — have curtailed their schedules due to a traffic drop.
He said when he talks to U.S. citizens, they always start by apologizing for their government.
Right after he finished the news conference, a visitor came up and apologized to him.
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