There are no certainties when dealing with Donald Trump, but you can take this to the bank: Whether the U.S. President is on his best behaviour or his worst when meeting Mark Carney on Tuesday, the Prime Minister wins.

If the President is civil, and calls his guest “Prime Minister,” then Mr. Carney’s trip to Washington will be hailed as a success. Same thing if the confab results in a walking back of some U.S. tariffs, or even something as modest as talk of future talks about tariffs.

The PM has rightly set expectations low, saying last week that nobody should look for the meet-and-greet to produce the “white smoke” of a papal conclave. If the only result of the meeting is that nothing bad happens, Canadians will see Mark Carney as having scored.

But if Mr. Trump is at his worst – if his Oval Office walk-up music is Enter Sandman and his guest is subjected to the full Zelensky – then Mr. Carney also wins. His campaign line about the old relationship with the U.S. being “over” would be proven right. A Trump ambush of the PM would be an attack on all Canadians, who would rally ‘round the flag. Elbows up and join the donnybrook.

In the short-run, Mr. Carney is in a no-lose position.

The long run will be more challenging.

Canada’s big advantage in dealing with Mr. Trump is that, though the President is a whir of frantic action, charging off madly in all directions, he has no grand vision or big plan. Unfortunately, that is also going to be Canada’s biggest difficulty in dealing with Mr. Trump.

MAGA is like a failed Hollywood blockbuster: a slick preview filled the theatre, but the movie turned out to be $100-million in pyrotechnic special effects paired with a $5 plot-hole-filled script. It‘s 2 Fast 2 Furious with no GPS, a steering wheel facing the rear window, and a distracted driver who can’t stop going on about his William McKinley decals.

In his first 100 days in office, Mr. Trump has been the most revolutionary U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The big difference is that whereas Roosevelt built new institutions of prosperity and stability, the Trump administration has been tearing them down.

It is possible to imagine a Make America Great Again movement that identified problems with the status quo and wanted to address them thoughtfully while strengthening the U.S. economy and the U.S.-led international order. But from DOGE to DEI to NATO to tariffs and trade, what Mr. Trump has put forward are not solutions, but destructive nonsense. He has been like a plumber hired to fix a leaky pipe who drives up in a backhoe and starts gleefully demolishing the house.

Another advantage Canada has in dealing with Mr. Trump is that, as part of his action-before-thought approach, he has started a trade war against the entire world. We’ve got lots of company.

Also to Canada’s negotiating advantage is that Mr. Trump, who has no ideological moorings, is willing to change his mind, frequently and instantly. He has announced multiple rounds of trade actions, and immediately delayed, scaled back and otherwise modified most of those announcements. The stock market swoons when Mr. Trump acts, then recovers to the extent he reverses course.

Mr. Trump’s faithlessness, even to policies he touted five minutes ago, is good news for Canada. Everything is potentially up for negotiation and reconsideration. But that very faithlessness, extending of course to things he negotiated and celebrated – hey there, United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement – means that any deal made with him may not be worth the paper it‘s printed on.

If the future brings high tariffs and significantly reduced trade with the U.S., Canada can still prosper. For most of our history, tariff walls on both sides of the border were the norm, and they were often tall. We can survive and thrive if the Canadian economy is de-integrated from the U.S. And we ultimately may have no choice but to take a step back from our former friends.

But basic geographic realities – we have oceans on three sides, and a narrow strip of population huddled close to our very long border – mean that our economy will tend to be somewhat more efficient, and our prosperity a bit higher, when we do a lot of trade with the U.S.

Beyond the short-term optics of Tuesday’s meeting, that‘s the long-term challenge for Mr. Carney, and Canada.

I’ll leave you with a final thought about last week’s election, and how close the Liberals came to a majority government.

As of Monday afternoon, and pending final counts and any judicial recounts, Mr. Carney’s crew had 169 seats – three shy of a majority. The Liberals were 44 votes behind the Bloc Québécois in Terrebonne, 77 votes behind the Conservatives in Windsor-Tecumseh-Lakeshore and 77 votes behind the NDP in Nunavut. If the Liberals had found just 201 more voters across those three ridings, they would have finished one vote ahead in each.

The Liberals fell short of a majority by just 0.001 per cent of the electorate. Sometimes, every vote really does count.