Bessent Disses the Carney-Val: ‘He’s Doing What’s Best for Mark Carney and the Liberal Party’

My not-so-secret crush, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, is in Asheville, North Carolina, for the G20 get-together, and all anyone can ask him about is the ongoing Syrupean snit-fit.

I do have to admit, as rapier-sharp as our Treasury Secretary is, the chances of getting some pretty quotable, wickedly vicious sound bites are better than even odds, and he did not disappoint this morning when being quizzed by CNBC .

He was between meetings of the group members and the high-profile finance types who attend these things, and had just gotten out of what he termed as a ‘robust’ session with the Chinese. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.

…Bessent was speaking on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Asheville, North Carolina. Among his bilateral meetings, he said that he had a “robust meeting” with People’s Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng Sunday night.

He’s also slated to meet with his Canadian counterpart, François-Philippe Champagne. Bessent reiterated his criticisms of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, saying the US offered Canada the “best trade deal of any country on the globe” before talks broke down.

“It’s unfortunate that he’s not doing what’s best for the Canadian people,” Bessent said of Carney.

Some of the comments in his interview, besides the unfortunate exit of the Canadian trade deal negotiating team, might be a reaction to what happened during Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Warsh’s opening remarks. The very Canadian minister he was scheduled to meet in a few hours got up and walked out.

Meanwhile it looks like our Champagne- our Finance Minister is lost, late or leaving ?? 🇨🇦👇🏻🤷‍♀️ https://t.co/Gk8Y5SB8Qa

— Liz Armitage (@Armita69930Liz) August 31, 2026

Truly bizarre behavior. Just plain weird if it was a Joe Biden-ish move.

Unforgivably rude if it was a classic Canadian elbows-out gambit.

In any event, Bessent was on dismissive point after point when CNBC’s Squawk Box hit him up about the contretemps between the two neighbors, and CBC actually broadcast the segment.

ARE WE NOW IN A TIT-FOR-TAT TRADE WAR WITH CANADA

How tf did the truth get on CBC?

— Centibillionaire (@Deus_xmac) August 31, 2026

…”(Carney) came to power the on a anti American, anti Trump agenda. He was 20 points behind in the poll and then he started this.”

“And it’s unfortunate that he’s not doing what’s best for the Canadian people.  He’s doing best what is best for the Liberal party, what’s best for Mark Carney.“

“And in the long run, the Canadian people are going to see through that.” 

I DON’T THINK YOU CAN BE IN A TIT-FOR-TAT WITH SOMEONE WHO’S THIRTEEN TIMES LARGER THAN YOU ARE

(The whole interview can be found here.)

And Bessent was off.

He again made the point that the Canadians were offered the best trade deal in the world and rejected it, only in order to further Carney’s political objectives. And as every day goes by, more and more damning evidence emerges about the depth of Canadian trickery in avoiding even the tiny, lopsided tariffs they have paid, compared with what the United States has shouldered in the trade relationship over these decades.

Just a few days ago, Carney’s political machinations, as far as trying to improve the Liberals’ standing in upcoming Quebec elections, which they are now forecast to lose, by appearing tough on the U.S., were exposed as the main driver of the walkout. Additionally, inferior Chinese steel and aluminum have been transshipped as Canadian for decades in order to circumvent the favorable status that more expensive but pure-origin Canadian goods receive.

And now we find that the transshipment scandal includes Chinese lumber – specifically plywood – taking the place of  wholly Canadian wood products entering the U.S.

🚨 CBSA JUST CONFIRMED IT

Canadian plywood producers warned for months: China is dumping cheap, subsidized plywood into Canada.

Ottawa’s response? “America’s tariffs are unfair.”

Then their own agency dropped the findings:
• Dumped? Yes.
• Subsidized? Yes.
• Temporary… https://t.co/YaP1drL9c2

— Chris Ryan (@Watchdog_MP) August 30, 2026

•  Temporary duties now in effect, up to 227.5% on many Chinese exporters.

This is the second investigation. Canadian mills were already losing sales and jobs.

When your own border agency says the industry was right and China was cheating, maybe stop lecturing the Americans.

Protect Canadian workers first.

#cdnpoli #CanadaFirst

MAYBE STOP LECTURING THE AMERICANS

I don’t even want to imagine the chemicals in that crap – and it will be stamped. Product of Canada.

Some Canadians do get it.

Not insane at all. Some Liberal Party crony or another is making bank off this sort of practice and thus Canada is working as designed.

— Worm of Sligoff (@anodynamics) August 31, 2026

…Vs. no canadian jobs, no wages, and a small “processing/transhipment” fee while the rest is funneled to another country. 

Canada should want to stop this just as much as the USA.

But when you’ve got a Davos globalist in charge of your country and a virtual police state for him to operate in, you’ve kind of screwed yourselves over, elbow talk or no.

But then, the Syrupeans have been doing it to themselves for decades, because they could.

Suspicions are that ‘Canadians’ as such may be dismayed to find that they aren’t a ‘country’ after all – they’ve become a commune.

…“This country’s entire national mythos since the 1960s has only been possible because the Americans had not been a genuine military threat since at least the Civil War, and possibly not since the War of 1812.

“Additionally, given how wealthy the U.S. is, there has never been much pressure on Canada to ensure it is a business friendly country. No matter what happens, the massive market to the south allows us to have a minimum standard of living almost by osmosis. When twinned with the fact that Canada’s inherent French-English divide absorbs unending federal resources, you have the makings of an unserious country unconcerned with national defence and generating wealth and opportunity for citizens.

“So, instead of permitting competition and foreign investment, Canada protects cartels, often for regional political reasons, in banking, airlines, telecommunications and agriculture.

…How many countries elsewhere in the world have had the luxury of endless squabbling over bilingualism, identity, immigration, provincial-federal issues, relations with Indigenous peoples, and so forth. Are we European, North American, multicultural, settler-colonialist, and so on. Like the Cheshire cat, we have been disappearing into a political fog.

As Scott Gilmore, a former Canadian diplomat, warned us, in an April 19, 2018 article, Canada is not a country, in Maclean’s magazine, “And when our storm arrives, we may discover that Canada was never really a country after all.”

As a mildly interested observer from safely across the border, that could very well be true.

I don’t know that there’s a single thread that holds any of them together that can’t be argued as inferior, stolen, or appropriated by the person standing next to them.

They had their chance to boot the unelected global bank executive, chosen to be prime minister, and flubbed it. Carney was who they wanted.

The “ELB” in this alphabet soup stands for “ELBOWS”

— JudgeRedd (@RinoH8er) August 31, 2026

And, boy, are they gonna ever get it.

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