Politics
Canada Flies To Liverpool To Make Friends After Dumping Its Last One
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in Liverpool on Tuesday for a bilateral summit with UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, which both governments described as a landmark moment in transatlantic cooperation and which approximately no one outside of two foreign ministries and a handful of trade journalists had been waiting for.
Carney and Burnham, two men who rose to power in roughly the same twelve-month window under roughly the same set of global anxieties, shook hands in front of a building, stood beside flags, and issued a joint statement containing the phrases 'shared values,' 'deepened cooperation,' and 'the road ahead,' which has been the same joint statement since 1956 and shows no sign of retirement.
The meeting is part of Canada's broader effort to build out a new network of international relationships following the country's dramatic cooling with the United States, a relationship that deteriorated so quickly and so publicly that Canadian officials have taken to describing it using the same careful language a person uses about an ex at a work function.
'Canada is a serious country with serious ambitions and serious partners,' Carney told reporters outside the summit venue, a sentence that was clearly written to be said out loud and immediately forgotten. He did not mention the United States. Nobody asked him to. Everyone understood.
Burnham, for his part, called the summit 'a genuine moment of alignment between two nations that believe in something,' which raised the obvious question of what, specifically, they believe in, a question that was not addressed at the press conference but is presumably covered somewhere in the forty-seven-page framework document that neither government expects anyone to read.
The summit agenda included trade in clean energy, mutual recognition of professional credentials, and a working group on supply chain resilience, which is what you put on an agenda when you want the agenda to look full. There was also a lunch.
Analysts who cover the Canada-UK relationship for a living, a career path that requires either genuine intellectual passion or a very specific set of personal circumstances, described the meeting as symbolically significant. Symbolically significant is the diplomatic community's version of 'nice personality.'
What is actually happening, if you squint past the framework documents, is that Canada spent decades as America's extremely agreeable neighbor, the one who shoveled the shared driveway without being asked and never complained about the noise, and has now looked up from that arrangement to discover that the driveway is on fire and the neighbor is charging for snow removal. Liverpool seemed like a reasonable place to start making other plans.
Burnham, whose party came to power promising to restore Britain's credibility as a reliable international partner after several years of the country loudly insisting it did not need partners, was visibly enthusiastic about the meeting. He called Canada 'exactly the kind of friend Britain should be building with right now,' which is the foreign policy equivalent of texting someone back the same day they text you.
A senior Canadian official, speaking on background because apparently some things are still done that way, described the mood inside the summit as 'genuinely warm,' adding that both delegations 'found more common ground than expected,' which suggests someone on one side came in expecting very little common ground and was pleasantly surprised, and it is not hard to guess which side.
The two governments signed a memorandum of understanding on green hydrogen, a technology that has been described as transformative in eleven consecutive memorandums of understanding across nine countries over the past six years without yet transforming anything.
Carney returns to Ottawa on Wednesday. Burnham stays in Liverpool because he lives there.
A formal trade agreement is expected to begin preliminary scoping discussions sometime next year, which means both men will be retired before anything ships.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-12/carney-to-meet-uk-s-burnham-as-canada-deepens-europe-ties