Colby Cosh: Why Mark Carney felt comfortable spreading misinformation

Readers of the Post will notice a careful, measured column Thursday morning that discusses the U.S. government’s last-minute shakedown of Canada over the Gordie Howe International Bridge connecting the two countries; the bridge is scheduled to open Monday. Columnist Rob Breakenridge stops just short of calling the prime minister a liar, but asks why he was “making claims about the deal” just a few days ago “that would inevitably be disproven and discredited” when the details came out, as they did on Wednesday?

I am afraid I know the answer: the prime minister anticipated that flatly false statements, statements he must have known to be false, would quickly be obscured by Canadian strategic navel-gazing (“Are we being tough enough in our own defence?”) and by the usual “Conservatives pounce!” news framing of the issue. As Breakenridge says, it is difficult to see any purpose at all in the lies — but they can be easily seen as a political trap for the opposition parties. You lie; your opponents accurately accuse you of lying; and your own voters wonder why those nasty people across the floor can’t help being so negative and divisive and grouchy.

Well, if the prime minister can account for the statements he was giving out just a few days ago, we’re all waiting to hear the explanation (all he could say on Thursday was that he could have “explained it better”). He said pretty unambiguously that the toll revenue from the bridge, net of the immediate operating and maintenance costs, would go toward paying back Canada for the construction of the bridge, built entirely with C$6.4 billion of Canadian money. “Splitting of tolls, any sharing of the toll, won’t happen until all of the debt is repaid.”

The text of the agreement in principle seems equally unambiguous. We’re handing half the net toll revenue, for the first 15 years of the bridge’s life, to the United States outright. Only after that slice is deducted will revenues be available for debt repayment. (The U.S. says it intends to put the captured money into an “economic development fund.” How exciting! Maybe they can use it to build a bridge someplace!)

No one has yet generated a professional-grade assessment of how much this will cost us in the end. I expect to see treatises on this next week. Funnily enough, the hit to Canada depends on how successful the bridge is, which in turn depends on the state of U.S.-American trade relations and on Canadian willingness to use the bridge for recreational travel. The more we use the bridge to visit our friends in Michigan, the bigger the loss from the revision of the deal will be — and the more it will cost us down the road after the 15-year period elapses because the debt has been shoved forward.

Well, I guess we didn’t build it because we don’t want people to use it. The bridge was never expected to be very profitable in the early period anyway, and it was already foreseen to take about 50 years for the construction debt to be paid off. In net-present-value terms, it might be a matter of turning a $6.4 billion debt into a $7 billion debt. It’s certainly a drop in the bucket next to the external economic benefits of the bridge being built and open to traffic.

And of course it might be the case that Canadian trade negotiators are getting some secret quid pro quo back in exchange for tolerating American banditry. This is almost impossible to believe, but you never know. It is not that trade negotiations have to be conducted in broad daylight at the 55-yard-line of Taylor Field; it’s just that we must be able to expect straight truth from our prime minister about the results.

National Post