Of all of Canada’s leaders, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has proven to be the best at hitting back against the United States’ increasingly enamoured views on annexation. Indeed, he’s like a father who accompanies his daughter to the car dealership to fend off the scams and slights of greedy salesmen.
Ford’s latest accomplishment: an upcoming meeting with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and a U.S. trade representative to discuss a new North American free trade agreement, as the existing treaty is up for review next year, in resolution to his standoff over surcharges applied to U.S.-bound electricity. Ford ultimately backed down after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to upgrade his tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum from 25 per cent to 50 per cent.
It’s hard to count the standoff itself as a victory. Trump is now calling Ford a “very strong man,” but any praise can easily melt away — just look at Ukraine. Putting Canada on a better footing for a renewed, though likely worse, trade deal is better than not (though Trump has proven that any trade deal can be trampled over with executive orders at a moment’s notice).
Ford, however, has faced threats against Canadian sovereignty with stalwart conviction, dutifully stepping in as Canada’s strong-man avatar when it’s needed most.
It’s hard to fault anyone who thought in December that Trump’s talk of making Canada the “51st state” was merely a joke. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that, because I was among them. But I was far from alone — even prominent Liberals, such as Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc shared my view.
“The president was telling jokes,” LeBlanc told reporters after he returned from a late-November weekend trip to Mar-a-Lago. “The president was teasing us. It was, of course, on that issue, in no way a serious comment.” He took it well, interpreting the president’s ability to joke with the Canadian dinner delegation as a sign of positive relations.
My own reasons for optimism? A public service purge in the United States seemed long overdue, and Trump was angling for one; the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives by government needed to end, and Trump was planning to do that; immigration had been untenably high for many years, and Trump had railed against that. Domestic policy-wise, these were all positives.
Internationally, Trump’s tough talk on NATO members who consistently underfund their militaries merely sounded like him giving us the spurs. Uncomfortable, rude, but perhaps the bad-cop negotiating tactic we needed to hear after 10 years of utterly languishing on the file.
But by December, Trump was claiming that “we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100 billion a year” (a completely made-up figure referencing the trade deficit between the two countries, which was around US$63 billion in 2023) and continued to suggest that “many Canadians” would want U.S. statehood for tax and military reasons.
By early January, he was telling reporters that he planned to use “economic force” rather than military force to execute his 51st state strategy, sharing a map depicting Canada under the stars and stripes as a visual guide.
And by early February, aside from complaining that Canada’s modest five-per-cent general sales tax amounted to an unjust tariff on U.S. goods, the president was discussing seriously with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau the prospect of ripping up the agreed-upon border between the U.S. and Canada. That’s at least the finding of the New York Times, which reported last week, based on four anonymous sources close to the matter, that Trump claimed the 1908 treaty demarcating the border was invalid.
Those sources also said that Trump wanted to end the longstanding Canada-U.S. agreements on the sharing of the Great Lakes.
It was around this point when Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick told LeBlanc, per the Times, that Trump’s cross-border ambitions were no joke, and that the president now believed that the agreements governing the border could be easily walked away from.
Aside from borders, Trump has taken issue with some of the most basic exercises of Canadian sovereignty: our banking regulations, with the false claim that U.S. banks are prohibited in Canada (indeed, that’s not true: Canada’s Bank Act specifically authorizes foreign banks and foreign bank subsidiaries).
All the while, “economic force” has been applied steadily to Canada in the form of on-and-off tariffs, some generalized across the whole economy at 25 per cent, with additional tariffs targeted at specific sectors.
There will be some onlookers from Canada who still believe Trump is merely employing distasteful “art of the deal” negotiating tactics. So too are there those who think that Canadian statehood via annexation is such a far-fetched prospect that to entertain it would be to cave to paranoia — a post-COVID wave of mass formation psychosis.
But it’s reasonable to take these kinds of transgressions, which have grown into a pattern of escalation over the past few months, seriously. And even if they don’t end in actual annexation — still a rather unlikely future, but one far more likely now than it was in, say, 2022 — they mark a deep violation of trust we once shared with the U.S.
If a neighbour were to joke about breaking into your house, and then follow that the next month with jokes about having sex with your spouse, then the next with killing your dog, the rational move wouldn’t be to continue along as if nothing happened. You would rightfully lose trust and respect in said neighbour, and at very least invest in some home security upgrades. You might even go as far as punching that neighbour in the face.
And so, we should take Trump’s words seriously. The odds of annexation remain low, but we have to have the self-respect to respond when our sovereignty is threatened. At very least, Canadian leaders in both the Liberal and Conservative parties seem to get this, Ford especially. And Ford’s self-appointed general status in the trade war is key, given that the country is stuck in PM purgatory, with Trudeau having yet to formally pass the baton to Liberal leader Mark Carney, and an election expected to be called not long afterward.
Though they surely know, as well as you or I, that counter-tariffs aren’t economically beneficial to Canadians, they know the value of brute force in the face of a bully.
National Post