The Canadian election on Monday only partially confirmed the trend of the last Italian and Argentinian elections, the US election in November and the subsequent German election, of a move to the moderate Right. All was in readiness in Canada for a sharp turn in that direction when Trump, as president-elect, announced his intention to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Given that nearly half the Canadian GDP arises from trade with the United States, this was a startling as well as an unjustifiable assertion. For his own rhetorical purposes, President-elect Trump overstated the US trade deficit with Canada and continued to do this after his inauguration. There is no deficit if energy is left out of the equation and much of the oil that the United States buys from Canada is at an artificially low price and as the United States is energy self-sufficient, it sells on Canadian-produced oil to third parties at a profit to itself. This is not the stuff of a legitimate trade complaint.
Always before, and going back more than 200 years, when there were any differences between the two countries, they were resolved relatively easily by normal and discrete diplomacy. This situation is complicated because after then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had dinner with the President-elect at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, and responded to a question of Trump’s that the Canadian economy would “collapse” under such tariffs, Trump put that together with Canada’s status as a NATO freeloader as well as some of Trudeau’s previous comments that Canada had no identity and was the “first post-national country,” Trump triumphantly announced that Canada should join the United States as the 51st state and then it would not need to worry about American tariffs or its own defence budget. He was unbecomingly delighted with this gambit, and it is widely believed that he was so monstrously impolite because of his understandable distaste for Justin Trudeau.
Apart from that not being a suitable basis for foreign policy formation, the whole concept was monstrously insulting for reasons having nothing to do with the personalities involved. Canada is a G-7 country with a GDP larger than Russia, a country which President Trump has been treating with somewhat excessive deference and federal union with it should not be referred to in a cavalier manner that might be appropriate to the granting of statehood to Puerto Rico. And creating an implicit equivalence between the conduct of Canada and of Mexico was an outrage. The government of Mexico is not only complicit in the invasion of the United States in the last four years by 12 million or more destitute people including scores of thousands of violent criminals shipping slaves into the United States along with horrifying quantities of dangerous drugs. Mexico has also specialised for many years in importing various parts from China, fabricating them in factories owned by American companies induced to shut down domestic American production and relocate to Mexico where new factories are subsidised, cheap Chinese components are used, cheap Mexican labour does the fabricating, low Mexican corporate taxes are paid, and the finished goods are sent into the United States under the USMC free-trade agreement. The Mexicans are free-trade swindlers on a grand scale, fronting it for China while being the happy traffic policeman for the greatest international mass invasion since the last days of the Western Roman Empire.
Canada is a fair-trading country and is not without its own grievances about the conduct of the Americans. The Biden administration allowed so many desperate people across the southern border and the present administration is rooting them out so efficiently that large numbers of these unfortunates are pressing northwards into Canada. And as Canada does not have an unlimited right to bear arms or a revolutionary tradition and has a per capita violent crime rate just ten percent of that of the United States, it is a serious annoyance that illicit firearms are pouring into Canada from the US. Finally, though it is in the circumstances academic, Canada has 41 million people as well as one of the world’s largest GDPs and trying to entice Canada with its 3,000,000 square miles into the United States to be represented by two senators like Delaware or Alaska is a further gratuitous irritation.
Instead of taking this as the rude and unseemly remarks of a bumptious foreign leader, rather as Canada responded to General de Gaulle’s exhortation to Québec to secede from Canada when he came to Montréal in 1967, ostensibly to help celebrate the centenary of Canadian Confederation, the beleaguered governing Liberal party of Canada which was badly trailing in the polls, pushed out Justin Trudeau, replaced him with the former governor of the Banks of Canada and of England, Mark Carney, and went a long way toward turning the Canadian federal election into an argument over who would better stand up to the American ogre who was, according to Carney, ”trying to break us and then buy us up.” Of course, Trump was doing nothing of the kind; he was just amusing himself in his somewhat juvenile way, but apparently trying also to repatriate the US auto industry in Canada. But the Canadians made it easy for him by overreacting and by taking seriously this schoolyard braggadocio of the Canadian Liberal Party about “standing up to Trump.”
By this response, the government squeaked back into office in a minority Parliament with a popular vote almost equal to that of the chief opposition Conservatives, after the Canadian socialist party, the so-called New Democrats, withered, losing more than two-thirds of their votes and members of Parliament. Justin Trudeau had taken the Liberals so far Left the New Democrats were redundant, but the Conservatives picked up more votes than the Liberals and the election was almost but not quite as great a victory for them as for the government. Mark Carney, a climate change fanatic, jettisoned most of his off-the-wall ecological programme to return as prime minister by a hair’s breadth. He will have to move cautiously and assemble a majority for each major legislative initiative. It looks like a relatively short parliament, and unless Carney shows extraordinary patience and dexterity, the country will resume its move toward the moderate free-market right and remember the blunderbuss ultra-woke Gong Show of the last ten Trudeau years.
Trump is a cunning as well as a very demonstrative political leader, and difficult negotiations are ahead, but Canada is a very rich country with a talented population and this is an opportunity for it to hold its own with its neighbour that has overshadowed it since Benjamin Franklin was sent packing from Montreal in 1776 after urging Canada’s adherence to the American Revolution.
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