We are at war.
It’s an economic war and not a shooting war, but it will still inflict pain. While it would have been better if the Trudeau government could have used effective diplomacy to avoid Donald Trump’s tariffs, the war has started, and we must fight back.
For those Canadians who are arguing that there should be no response, no retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa, give your heads a collective shake.
If Canada opted to do nothing in response, Trump would rightly see that as weakness. When the eventual negotiations to end this trade war do come, the terms of peace would in reality be the terms of surrender for Canada.
Can we win an all-out trade war with the United States? Absolutely not, the scale of their economy compared to ours is massive. While on a dollar-for-dollar basis, our trade with the Americans is fairly balanced – despite what Trump claims – our economy is completely dependent on theirs while their trade with us as a share of their total economy is small.
Still, when the bully hits you, you hit back.
It never should have come to this, though, and it is shocking that this is driven in part by the visceral dislike that Donald Trump and Justin Trudeau have for each other.
Being led by a man who has announced his resignation but has not left has also put Canada in a weaker position. Trudeau admitted on Saturday night that he hasn’t been able to get Trump on the phone since the inauguration, despite trying.
A Canadian prime minister should be able to connect with an American president any day of the week, but Trudeau can’t get his calls returned.
That’s the past, that’s part of how we got here. The question now is what to do going forward.
Yes, we need to fight and retaliate in a smart and strategic fashion. That means that we target products the Americans will notice, but that will have the least impact on Canadian consumers.
What we can’t do is act in rash ways.
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While it might be funny to some to suggest we turn the electricity off in the middle of the Super Bowl next week or that we block American ships from passing through the Welland Canal, doing either one of these might as well come with us declaring an actual war against the Americans.
What is needed are smart defensive and offensive actions.
Defensively, we need to clean up our border mess. Yes, there are problems, perhaps not as big as Trump claims, but we do need to clean it up. Required changes include no longer tolerating the Mexican cartels and Chinese triads that have operated their drug trade with impunity, killing many Canadians.
We also need to start negotiating with the Americans on the trade irritants they have with us. As in any relationship, they are right sometimes, and we are right sometimes, but to keep the relationship going, we need to listen to their concerns and try to find common ground.
On the offensive side, we need to start planning for the future in terms of broadening our economy. That means finding new trading partners, but even if we start taking advantage of the dozen free trade agreements with other countries that Stephen Harper signed us onto, the United States will still be our biggest trading partner.
As much as we need to start building pipelines to tidewater, we also need to restructure our economy.
It’s time for Canada to grow up and stop acting like a sullen teenager more interested in protesting about climate change than getting a job. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last decade or so, allowing the radical activists to have an ever bigger say in how our affairs are run.
We have made extracting those natural resources more costly, more difficult and less attractive. That has made us a poorer country more dependent on the American economy and yet, the same people who have tried to shackle us want to use these resources as a bargaining chip against the Americans.
Donald Trump is about to deregulate the American economy; he’s going to fast-track natural resource projects and drill baby drill.
We need to match his actions with vigour.
Canada needs a prime minister who will make it easier and not harder to build pipelines to tidewater, who will approve LNG export terminals on both coasts, who will make it attractive to invest in Canadian companies and Canadian projects, and someone who will not forever be looking for ways to punish success.
We won’t find those things in Trudeau’s Liberal Party, and it won’t come from Mark Carney, who is now advocating for a carbon tax on products imported into Canada even as he promises to scrap Trudeau’s carbon tax.
As soon as possible, we need an election to bring in a government who will put Canadians first, Canada’s economy first.
Pierre Poilievre, over to you.