Susan Delacourt: When Mark Carney wants to speak to Americans, this is how he does it - Toronto Star

Carney is not the first, nor will he be the last prime minister to detour around domestic media to reach bigger audiences, Susan Delacourt writes.

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks on the sidelines of the the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 22, 2026.

Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on X: @susandelacourt

Thanks to the New York Times, Canada now knows that Mark Carney was preparing for the risk of military action arising out of Donald Trump’s 51st-state threats.

That’s a major acknowledgment for the prime minister to make — perhaps one that he might have shared first with Canadians?

The irony isn’t going unnoticed here in Canada — the same leader of a government telling citizens to put their own country first in this battle with the United States is also the one who seems more heavily invested in getting his message out to Americans.

Peter Menzies, a former Calgary Herald editor posted on social media that evidently he was going to have cancel Canadian news subscriptions and sign up for American ones to keep track of “what our ‘buy Canadian’ and ‘Canada Strong’ PM is thinking.”

The interview with the New York Times, conducted with 10 journalists there while the prime minister was in the city for United Nations meetings, is remarkable on many counts.

Acknowledging that he’d war-gamed the prospect of U.S. military action stood out, not just for the candour alone, but in how much it represented an evolution in Carney’s thinking.

In the closing days of the 2025 election campaign, Carney was specifically asked by the Star’s Alex Ballingall whether he was worried about the U.S. using military force against Canada.

Carney said he saw the threat as more of an economic one. “The U.S. is trying to put economic pressure on us to gain major concessions, to the extreme of a level of integration of our countries that would impinge our sovereignty,” he said. “That is the goal. Take what the president says literally. I take it literally. I always have.” 

In January, 2026, the Globe and Mail reported that Canada had done military modelling of a hypothetical U.S. invasion. Carney never addressed that report directly — his own speech in Davos, Switzerland the same day elbowed the story out of the top headlines.

But less than a week later, at a meeting of the House of Commons national defence committee, a Bloc MP had a chance to ask Defence Department officials about how seriously they took the prospect of the U.S. using military means against Canada.

Jonathan Quinn, a director general of continental defence policy, batted it off. “We’re not focused on a military threat from the southern border. Really, the focus continues to be on collaborating with our U.S. allies in the defence of the shared continent,” Quinn said.

But now, all these months later, Carney is saying he took things more seriously than that answer would have indicated.

“I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk,” Carney told the NYT interviewers. “That’s just risk management. That’s not a base case, but it would be irresponsible not to.”

He didn’t elaborate on what “tail-risking” was, but Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Canada’s NYT bureau chief, told CBC on Thursday that the question was raised to confirm the Globe reporting. “To have the head of government say this is next level,” she said.

As for why Carney would choose this moment and an American news outlet to make this next-level admission, she said the prime minister was obviously choosing his audience with an eye to the numbers.

“I think it reflects the prime minister’s sense of confidence in what he’s doing and the message he wants to put across,” she said. “The New York Times has 13 million subscribers. Yes, most of them are in the United States, but three million are overseas, and many, many of those are in Canada.”

Carney is not the first, nor will he be the last prime minister to detour around domestic media to reach bigger audiences. Justin Trudeau did the same thing when he won the job in 2015.

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Nor is Carney the first prime minister to display some impatience with domestic media, which has clearly surfaced as a feature of his media-management preferences, not a bug. Stephen Harper had a long-running battle with the parliamentary press gallery and declared early in his prime ministership he would look for other means to “get his message out.”

No one will accuse Carney, at least not yet, of waging war with the media as Donald Trump is doing in the U.S. this week to breathtaking levels with his ban on outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

Carney is just displaying his preference for reaching an audience beyond the Canadian one, which could be seen as a bit of a contradiction, at least when he is also leading an effort to diversify trade beyond with the U.S., and to keep Canadian institutions strong in the face of U.S. dominance.

His transparency with the New York Times was welcome. An equal measure of transparency at home would be similarly welcomed.

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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

Susan Delacourt is an Ottawa-based columnist covering national politics for the Star. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on X: @susandelacourt