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TOP STORY
With U.S. President Donald Trump officially sworn in, Canada remains on tenterhooks as to whether he will follow through with threats to hit Canadian exports with ruinous 25 per cent tariffs.
Canadian officials had certainly braced for the tariffs to be a “day one” decree; Ontario Premier Doug Ford had a standing order to immediately clear U.S.-made products out of government liquor stores if the tariffs were enacted, and the cabinet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had holed up a luxury resort in the Quebec countryside to craft a response.
But amid an unprecedented stack of executive orders signed by Trump in his first hours, tariffs with Canada were not among them. In an aside to reporters gathered in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that he might get around to the Canada issue by the end of the month.
“I think we’ll do it Feb. 1,” Trump said of 25 per cent tariffs against Canada and Mexico, adding that “Canada’s a very bad abuser.”
Ottawa is still planning for a worst-case scenario in which Canada and the U.S. descend into a full-blown trade war, but given Trump’s unique record on such things, there remains a possibility that this crisis simply fizzles out. In the words of Canadian Chamber of Commerce Chief Economist Stephen Tapp, Canada would be best to take Trump “seriously but not literally” on the issue of tariffs.
Below, a quick summary of some of the times that Trump made hugely consequential pronouncements which never ended up happening.
Making Mexico pay for a border wall
In his first term, Trump did make good on a campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S./Mexico border. But he entirely abandoned a companion pledge to have Mexico pay for it.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump not only made frequent pledges to “build the wall” at Mexico’s expense, but his team even sent a detailed memo to the Washington Post outlining how a Trump administration would force Mexico to fund the wall by seizing the remittances of Mexican expats living in the U.S.
While Trump did expand fencing along the U.S. southern border, it came entirely at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said as much in 2023 during his brief attempt to challenge Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. “He couldn’t get the job done,” said DeSantis.
Jailing Hillary Clinton
This was one of the first and most dramatic political about-faces by Trump. After a 2016 presidential campaign that saw “lock her up” adopted as a frequent chant at Trump rallies, Trump had barely won the presidency before declaring that he had no intention of going after his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton.
As he told CBS shortly after his surprise 2016 win, he didn’t want to “hurt” the Clintons as they were “good people.”
Leaving NATO
This wasn’t so much a campaign pledge as a threat that Trump made often behind closed doors during his first term as president.
Trump would confirm as much in a 2018 speech, saying he told European leaders that he would withdraw the United States from NATO if they didn’t pay their “bills.”
By “bills,” Trump was referring to the trend of European NATO members underspending on defence, and he said that his threat to withdraw the United States from the alliance was mostly a negotiation tactic. “If I said, ‘No, I won’t leave you. I promise you we will always protect you.’ Then they will never pay their bills. So I said, ‘Yes, I will leave you,’” he said.
If that withdrawal never came, it’s partially because NATO members did indeed start raising their military spending — a move that really accelerated after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Demolishing NAFTA
Trump’s threat to demolish the North American Free Trade Agreement was the defining moment in U.S./Canadian relations during his first term. Trump had famously referred to NAFTA as “the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever” (the comment has since spawned its own genre of meme). As president, he would threaten on social media to “terminate NAFTA entirely,” leaving the U.S. “far better off.”
The denouement was far less dramatic than a suspension of free trade between the two nations. While the Trump Administration did end up replacing NAFTA with the USMCA, the revised agreement was similar enough that both Canada and the U.S. proclaimed it a victory.
Killing Obamacare
On Trump’s first day as president in 2017, he signed an executive order stating, “It is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” — the law popularly known as “Obamacare.”
He would then champion Republican-drafted replacement legislation, declaring in the spring of 2017 “this is a repeal and replace of Obamacare.” But the effort was voted down in the Senate.
Subsequent efforts to have the act repealed via court action (which were similarly championed by Trump) also failed.
During a presidential debate last year, Trump seemed to reverse his stand on the legislation by saying he “saved it.” “I felt I had an obligation, even though politically it would have been good to just let it rot and let it go away,” he said.
IN OTHER NEWS
Among the flurry of Executive Orders issued by U.S. President Donald Trump was one entitled “unleashing American energy.” Among other things, it abolished an “EV mandate” that set minimum sales quotas for electric vehicles in the United States. This is relevant for Canada because the Trudeau government (in concert with the Ontario, B.C. and Quebec governments) just finished signing off on tens of billions of dollars in subsidies and tax credits for foreign-owned electric vehicle factories. It’s by far the largest corporate welfare splurge in Canadian history, and it was justified in large part to keep up with a flurry of U.S mandates on electric vehicles — and to serve an anticipated market ensured by those mandates. In the unadorned words of University of Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, “Canada spent $50b + in subsidies to build unwanted products for a market that just vanished.”
It’s been more than a year that polls have been showing that Canadians no longer want Justin Trudeau anymore. Despite this, the desire for a federal election hasn’t been as strong as one might assume. Just last month, an Abacus Data poll found only 58 per cent of Canadians wanting an early election. A new Ipsos Reid poll, by contrast, finds that an immediate election is one of the most popular ideas in Canada right now. Of respondents, 77 per cent said they wanted a general election so that the next federal government would have a mandate to face down tariff threats from the U.S.
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