Prime Minister Mark Carney used a meeting with Canada's premiers to send a message of resolve about the country's trade dispute with the United States. Carney said that in all circumstances, and irrespective of the outcome of the ongoing tariff negotiations, Canada will do whatever it takes to build its strength at home. He framed that effort around supporting Canadian families, workers, farmers and businesses. The message was that the country is ready, because it has been focusing on what it can control rather than on decisions made in Washington.
Part of that strategy, Carney said, is reducing Canada's reliance on any single partner. He told the premiers that the government has been diversifying the country's partnerships abroad, describing Canada as a reliable partner in a world that is anything but. According to Carney, the federal government has signed more than 20 new economic and security partnerships since he took office. He cast free and fair trade as something Canada believes in and benefits from, while positioning the country as having what the wider world wants.
Much of the meeting focused on energy, which Carney presented as a way to lower costs, increase energy security and reduce emissions at the same time. He pointed to a federal investment announced that morning in new subsea power cables across the Northumberland Strait, linking New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Carney thanked the premiers behind the project and called it the kind of work that had been needed for years, and the kind of project the country needs to build more of, and more quickly, in the years ahead.
The same push extended to how the Atlantic provinces manage their electricity. Carney said the premiers of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island had signed an agreement to plan and operate their electricity systems together, with support from the federal government. He argued that a stronger, better connected grid would increase reliability, lower costs and improve competitiveness for people across the Maritimes. The move fit his broader goal of turning Canada into what he called an energy superpower built on a connected national grid.
Carney also highlighted agreements between British Columbia and Alberta that he said would clear the path for major projects in both provinces. Those projects span clean and conventional energy, transportation and critical minerals. By themselves, Carney said, the two agreements would catalyse well over 200 billion dollars in direct investment in Canada and create almost 200,000 new jobs across the country. He stressed that the benefits should be shared wisely, and shared with Indigenous peoples as full partners, while helping to fund the social programs Canadians rely on.
Beyond new construction, Carney turned to the barriers that Canada has built within its own economy. He said the governments had agreed to work toward an agreement in principle to adopt model mutual recognition, with the aim of building a single Canadian market. The Committee on Internal Trade would begin that work over the summer. Carney said that if it is done right, a nurse licensed in Ontario who moves to Nova Scotia would be able to start caring for patients right away, rather than waiting for a fresh approval.
He offered a similar example from manufacturing, saying a producer in British Columbia already approved to sell engineered wood for homes in Alberta should be able to sell it anywhere in Canada, instead of waiting years for further clearance. Carney described the announcements as examples of what he called cooperative federalism at work, and said the governments were only getting started. Taken together, the energy investments and the drive to dismantle internal trade barriers formed his answer to the pressure created by the tariff dispute with the United States.