The Rules Keep Changing. That's the Point.

As of this morning, the deal is off. Then it's on. Then it's a three-day pause. Then it's 25 per cent. Then 35. Then 50. Then a phone call with Prime Minister Mark Carney produces "substantial progress" and a new deadline nobody trusts.

From Peanuts: Charlie Brown tries to kick the football and Lucy keeps pulling it away, as part of the analogy of moving goalposts/moving target.

If you're a Canadian business owner right now, you know this feeling in your body: the whiplash of negotiating with someone who never intends to let you win. You do everything asked of you — you tighten border security, you appoint a Fentanyl Czar, you show up to the table in good faith — and the goalposts move anyway. Not because you failed. Because moving them was always the plan.

https://youtu.be/Mso6qUJfL-o?si=plU_k1986mXIziqs

From Peanuts: Charlie Brown wonders about the symbolism when he tries to kick the football and Lucy keeps pulling it away, as part of the analogy of moving goalposts/moving target.

I want to name something plainly: this is not new. This is not even original. It is one of the oldest tools of power there is, and Black peoples in North America have been on the receiving end of it for over 400 years.

What's Actually Happening at the Border Right Now

Let's ground this in fact, because the pattern is only visible once you line up the moves.

In February 2025, Trump opened with 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, framed around border security and fentanyl. Justin Trudeau met the conditions he was given and the tariffs landed anyway. By June, steel and aluminum duties had doubled to 50 per cent. When Mark Carney became prime minister and flew to Washington for what both sides called a "very positive" meeting, the two countries pledged at the G7 to strike a deal within 30 days. Trump abandoned that pledge less than two weeks later and announced new tariffs instead.

This week, the pattern repeated on a compressed timeline. Fifty per cent tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian goods were set to hit Wednesday morning. Two hours before the deadline, Trump paused them for three days, citing a new commitment on dairy, alcohol, and auto trade that Canada hasn't even publicly confirmed. Carney called it "substantial progress." The Canadian Chamber of Commerce called it "limbo." Both are right, because the justification shifts, the number shifts, and the deadline shifts and the one thing that never shifts is who gets to keep shifting it.

That is not chaos. That is not incompetence. That is a system working exactly as designed — to keep the other side reactive, exhausted, and never quite eligible for the deal they were promised.

We Have Seen This Playbook Before

Here is where I ask you to sit with me in the discomfort of a comparison, because I think it's an honest one, even as I want to be precise about where the analogy holds and where it doesn't.

The economic uncertainty facing Canadian manufacturers, farmers, and auto workers right now — including, and this matters, largely white Canadians — is real. Jobs are at risk. Small businesses are absorbing costs they can't pass on. That harm deserves to be named without minimizing it.

And it is nowhere near the scale of what Jim Crow did to Black Americans for a century, when moving the goalposts wasn't a trade irritant; it was the mechanism of exclusion from citizenship itself, enforced with violence. I name that difference because collapsing it would be its own kind of erasure. What I'm asking you to see isn't equivalence of harm. It's recognition of method.

After emancipation, Black Codes were passed specifically to reintroduce the conditions of slavery through new legal language the moment the old language was outlawed. When the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the vote, states responded with literacy tests whose questions and grading standards changed depending on who was answering — a Black lawyer could fail a "test" a white sharecropper passed without reading a word, because the "grandfather clause" exempted him from taking it at all. When poll taxes were challenged, the amount moved. When redlining was outlawed, the maps just got redrawn under new names. When the GI Bill promised every returning veteran a path to homeownership and education, local white administrators simply declined to process Black veterans' applications, the rule stayed the same on paper and changed completely in practice.

Ibram X. Kendi's policy-outcomes lens teaches us to stop asking whether an actor's intent was racist and start asking what the policy actually produces. Ask that question of Jim Crow, and the answer is: perpetual disqualification. Ask it of tariff terms that shift every time compliance is achieved, and you get a smaller, but structurally identical, answer: perpetual disqualification.

This is the Four Dimensions of Racism made visible at the structural level; not a single bigoted actor, but a system where the rules themselves are the tool, redesigned continuously to ensure the outcome never changes no matter what the other party does. Beverly Daniel Tatum's moving walkway metaphor applies with brutal precision here too: you don't have to be actively hostile to keep someone moving backward. You just have to keep changing where "forward" is.

And you don't have to go back a century to watch the same mechanism operate inside a modern org chart. This is where I want to be explicit, because I think the equity connection is the point, not a footnote:

• It's the hiring bar that quietly moves from "five years of experience" to "the right culture fit" the moment a Black candidate clears the first threshold — the qualification was never really the qualification.

  
  

• It's the performance review that shifts from "exceeds expectations" to "needs more executive presence" right before a promotion decision, with no one able to name what executive presence actually means or measures.

  
  

• It's the pay equity audit committed to publicly in 2020, renamed in 2022, delayed to "next fiscal year" in 2023, and quietly shelved by 2024 once the social pressure that produced it had eased.

  
  

• It's "we need more data before we can commit to targets" from an organization that has had the data for years. Same tool as the tariff schedule. Different paperwork.

  
  

In every case, the goalpost isn't fixed and hidden; it's fixed and moving, and moving is what makes it effective. A target that never lets you close the distance isn't a target. It's a leash.

The Recipe: What Leaders Do When the Rules Keep Moving

Whether you're a Canadian executive bracing for the next tariff announcement or a leader watching your own organization redefine "merit," "readiness," or "culture fit" every time a marginalized employee gets close to the goalpost, the response is structurally the same, because the dynamic is structurally the same.

Name the pattern out loud. The first thing a moving-goalpost system depends on is that the target doesn't notice it's moving. Document the shifting terms. Say plainly, in writing, what changed and when. Power hates a paper trail.

Stop negotiating against a moving target — negotiate the target itself. In trade, that means pushing for enforceable, durable terms rather than another temporary pause. In organizational EDI work, it means refusing to let "we'll revisit the promotion criteria" become a permanent holding pattern. At Breakfast Culture, this is precisely what our Workplace Culture Assessment Tool is built to expose: not whether your policy sounds fair, but whether it produces fair outcomes, consistently, for the people it was written to protect.

Breakfast Culture's Workplace Culture Assessment Approach

Build resilience that doesn't depend on the other side's good faith. Diversify your markets. Diversify your talent pipeline. Diversify who holds institutional memory of what was promised. Systems that rely on one relationship, one deal, one gatekeeper's mood are systems designed to be exploited.

Bring in facilitation before the exhaustion sets in. Courageous Conversations work — ours or anyone's — exists because naming a moving-goalposts dynamic inside your own organization is hard to do alone, especially when the people harmed by it are the ones being asked to prove, again, that the harm is real. If your team is feeling that particular exhaustion, a facilitated space to name it changes the trajectory.

If you're an organization watching the tariff story unfold and wondering what it has to do with your EDI strategy, this is the through-line: the tactic that destabilizes a trading partner is the same tactic that has destabilized Black success in North America for four centuries. Once you can see it in one context, you cannot unsee it in the other.

The Close

I don't say any of this to score political points. I say it because pattern recognition is one of the most powerful tools any of us have: in trade policy, in the workplace, in our own lives. The goalposts move because moving them works, and it keeps working until enough people name it, document it, and refuse to keep sprinting toward a finish line that was never meant to be reached.

Canadians are learning this week what it feels like to negotiate in good faith with a system that changes the terms every time you meet them. I'd ask only that the lesson not end at the border. It's the same system. It's just wearing a different tariff schedule.

Interested in learning more? Please book a 30-minute discovery call with me today.

Let's break some eggs!

—Jefferson Darrell, Founder & CEO, Breakfast Culture Inc.™