Last week in the Oval Office, President Trump was asked about the upcoming visit of Chinese President Xi to Washington. He offered a familiar boast about being able to “handle” Xi, then added — almost casually — that Canada was the “worst to deal with” on trade.
It was an astonishing remark about our closest ally, especially in a season of war and threatened military and trade action across multiple fronts.
In reality, he gave Canada a compliment.
A functioning government is supposed to be difficult to move. Trade, war, borders, fisheries, oceans, and resource rights are not meant to bend instantly to the will of a single leader. They require process, negotiation, domestic consultation, and international restraint.
Democracies are designed to slow things down.
Prime Minister Carney can act quickly when time is genuinely of the essence. But even a duly elected leader is constrained by precedent, law, custom, and decency. He has a legislature, courts, provincial governments, constituents, citizens, and a national history that shapes what any Canadian government can reasonably do.
Some of Canada’s difficulty is simply Canada defending its interests. No country should be expected to surrender its economic independence or sovereign choices merely because a more powerful neighbor demands it.
But some of the difficulty is structural.
Canada is a working democracy, and working democracies are supposed to be difficult.
Authoritarian systems pride themselves on speed. One leader decides, and the state moves. There are fewer independent institutions to persuade, fewer meaningful centers of power capable of resisting, and fewer opportunities for citizens to interrupt what their government has decided to do. What looks from the outside like efficiency can simply be the absence of meaningful resistance.
Democracies pride themselves on friction.
Legislatures argue. Courts interfere. Provinces protect their prerogatives. Opposition parties object. Journalists expose things. Interest groups complain. Citizens protest. Elections loom. Laws constrain leaders.
It can be maddeningly inefficient.
That is partly the idea.
From the perspective of someone trying to make a deal, all of those institutions are obstacles. Why can’t the person in charge simply agree?
Because in a democracy, nobody is entirely in charge.
Not Carney. Not Parliament. Not the courts. Not the provinces.
And certainly not the president of another country.
That may help explain why Canada can seem more “difficult” than countries where power is concentrated more narrowly. Difficulty does not necessarily mean hostility. It may simply mean that another government cannot deliver everything being demanded of it — and should not be able to.
There is a reason democratic societies distribute power rather than merely search for the person best able to exercise it. The inconvenience is deliberate. Friction protects interests that might otherwise be ignored and people who might otherwise never be heard.
In an era when democratic constraint is increasingly treated as an inconvenience, it is worth remembering that difficulty is not a flaw.
It is the point.