Trump’s threat to impose a 25 per cent tariff on Canada is a heck of a way for the US to treat its most important trading partner, greatest ally, closest neighbour and best friend.
In its efforts to protect Canada from Trump’s plan, our government continues to navigate the US president’s unpredictable temperament, a treacherous landscape of ill-informed emotion unfettered by facts or rules, a minefield where the possibility of triggering an infantile temper tantrum lurks beneath every step.
As one can only hope will be the case when our country is under threat, Canadians are rallying at every level. With the full support of almost all the provincial premiers, Justin Trudeau’s speech over the weekend was probably his finest hour as prime minister. Citizens across the country are taking up the cause, vowing to stop buying American products in favour of Canadian substitutes. Companies are seeking non-US markets for their exports.
Following two telephone conversations with Trump on Monday, the prime minister reported that Canada had won a 30-day reprieve from the threatened tariffs, news that comes as a welcome, albeit temporary, relief.
But whatever happens with Trump’s tariff agenda a month from now – whether he abandons it because we acceded to his demands, or reasserts it in his effort to make us his 51st state – we cannot afford to be complacent.
We have had a wake-up call that we must not ignore. It has been made abundantly clear that Canada’s high degree of integration in the US economy can be a source of enormous vulnerability. We have learned that the US democracy is capable of electing people with no allegiance to democratic principles, the rule of law or negotiated agreements. Our eyes have been opened to the need for us to become less reliant on the US, more self-sufficient, and with a greater diversity of trading relations around the world.
As it becomes clear that Trump’s moves are likely to hurt the very people he convinced to vote for him, it seem probable that that they were just pawns in his cynical strategy to gain power and secure a platform from which he and his coterie of clowns and billionaire sycophants could wage a much larger agenda.
The tariff plague Trump has threatened to unleash on Canada is but one of many signals emerging from the White House that are worrying to all countries with a stake in a rules-based international order. Rounding up immigrants in the night and deporting them or sending them for detention at Guantanamo, firing top government executives, freezing federal financial assistance to the States, rewriting government websites to exclude language of inclusivity, giving Musk access to what should be confidential files on US citizens, meddling in European politics, musing about annexing sovereign countries – these are among the moves that must be seen as seriously problematic by the community of nations.
While trying to protect Canadian industries from harm resulting from the Trump tariffs, larger questions must also be asked. To what extent do we want to do any business with a regime that appears to be on an authoritarian trajectory? Should we be fueling his economy with our oil, at any price? Do we want to appease and embolden an emerging tyrant by kowtowing to his pressures?
Canada is rightly reaching out to other like-minded countries to develop trading arrangements that will help Canadian companies make it through this rough patch in Canada-US relations. But we should go much further.
Countries throughout the world need to forge relationships with each other that reduce their vulnerability to the whims of this US president and stand united in the face of the burgeoning threat of authoritarian rule that appears to respect no boundaries.
Charles Dickson
