While we’re all waiting for something resembling a Team Canada approach to materialize in the looming U.S. trade-war catastrophe, let’s begin with a quick account of just how close Canada has come to failed-state status.
The House of Commons has been padlocked since Jan. 6. The successor to Canada’s disgraced prime minister will not be known until the Liberal party’s leadership vote on March 9. Within days of the House of Commons’ March 24 return, an anticipated non-confidence vote would officially dissolve Parliament, triggering an election campaign that can legally carry on for 51 days.
Our prime-minister-in-waiting is Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, but for now we’re all obliged to play along with the idea of Justin Trudeau as our PM, which is a true thing only in the strictest constitutional sense. In the meantime, American president-elect Donald Trump has pledged to sabotage Canada’s economy by imposing a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian exports to American markets upon his inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20.
This will immediately threaten hundreds of thousands of Canadian jobs. It won’t be until some time in May that we’ll have a genuine prime minister and a functioning Parliament, giving Trump a four-month advantage in his declared objective of exerting “economic force” to annex Canada as the 51st American state, the madhouse notion behind his pretext involving border security and drug trafficking, which Ottawa is still playing along with.
In the meantime, formulating some sort of defence falls as much to Canada’s provinces as it does to the country’s lame-duck federal government. There’s a resounding multi-partisan consensus that Trump’s grievances with Canada are concocted and contrived. That’s almost where Canadian unity ends.
A trade response would ordinarily mean retaliatory tariffs, which are constitutionally Ottawa’s prerogative, and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says everything should be on the table. But Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe says nothing should be on the table: “Any export tariffs or restriction of products that Canadians produce and provide to anyone in the world is simply not on.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, head of the Council of the Federation, says those wide-open options should include shutting off energy supplies: “Depending how far this goes, we will go to the extent of cutting off their energy, going down to Michigan, going down to New York state, and over to Wisconsin.” But Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says that any retaliation that encumbers Alberta’s ability to sell oil and gas to American buyers would incite a “national unity crisis.” Her reasoning: “Oil and gas is owned by the provinces, principally Alberta, and we won’t stand for that. I can’t predict what Albertans would do.”
It’s in Alberta that a clear Conservative claim to the mantle of national leadership against Trump’s belligerence could easily founder. Poilievre is an Albertan, and the Conservatives out-poll the Liberals in Alberta at a wider margin than in any other province — 62.4 per cent to 12.9 per cent. Poilievre’s response to Trump’s provocations has been measured, clear and unequivocal: “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period. We are a great and independent country. We are the best friend to the U.S.” At the same time, Poilievre has made it plain that whatever Smith or Moe say, as prime minister he would definitely retaliate, and Canada’s energy should be on the table.
Canadian oil and gas already sells at a discount in American markets, so it makes no sense even from an American perspective to get into a tariff war, Poilievre points out: “I would say to President Trump, I will retaliate with trade tariffs against American goods that are necessary to discourage America (from) attacking our industries. I’d rather we work together, though, because if we do, we can have a bigger, stronger economy.”
Doug Ford has adopted precisely that line. So has Ottawa. Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson is in Washington making the case for a Canada-U.S. energy and resource alliance in the face of mounting global threats, particularly from China. But it’s not at all clear that Trump can be persuaded. “We don’t need their fuel,” Trump said last week. “We don’t need their energy. We don’t need their oil and gas. We don’t need anything that they have.”
It didn’t help appearances that Smith’s travelling companion at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last weekend was the reality-television investment guru Kevin O’Leary, who calls himself a Canadian when in Canada but has recently moved to Florida from Boston, the city he calls his “hometown.” O’Leary has long been advocating for some sort of North American “economic union” with a common currency and a shared Canadian-American passport.
And Smith has been lathering up her case for an Alberta oil exemption from Trump’s tariffs on the grounds that it was because of “eastern politicians” that Alberta’s hopes for the Northern Gateway pipeline to the West Coast and the Energy East pipeline to Quebec were dashed, confining Alberta’s oil and gas expansion to American buyers in the first place. It’s “outrageous” that anyone would propose retaliating against American tariffs by scaling back or shutting down American access to Alberta’s oil, she says.
That tells only half the story. The Energy East project’s profitability was based on the presumption of oil prices at $100 per barrel. TransCanada cancelled the project in 2017. As for the Northern Gateway pipeline, which would have run twinned pipes from Bruderheim, Alta. to Kitimat on the coast, at least two-thirds of B.C’s Conservative voters wanted oil tankers banned from B.C.’s north coast and the Enbridge-led project fizzled during the Harper government’s final years. The B.C. government, led by Christy Clark at the time, was against it, too.
The NDP’s Jagmeet Singh and B.C. Premier David Eby say Canada should consider blocking American access to critical minerals and other resources. B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad says Canada should reopen trade offices in China, which is as painfully weird as Christy Clark’s claim, contradicted by the evidence of her own several public statements last year, that she’d never joined the Conservative party.
While B.C. premier, Clark signed North America’s only “Belt-and-Road” agreement with Beijing, and while her bizarre comments about her assignation with the Conservatives was what dealt her out of contention to replace Trudeau, her affection for failed Conservative leadership candidate Jean Charest, a favourite of the Chinese Communist Party, should be understood as genuine.
Lastly, as if to dispel any doubt that Trump has the market cornered on politics as infotainment, Trudeau’s personal economic adviser, Marc Carney, Team Trudeau’s pick for a successor, showed up on Comedy Central’s hipster-left The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in New York on Monday night. “I’m an outsider,” the Liberal insider’s insider told Stewart, coyly confirming his plan to take a run at it.
You’d think we were already the 51st state or something.
National Post