Now that Canadians are finally reckoning with the prospect of becoming engulfed in an economic firestorm ignited by an American president who’s determined to terrorize us into submitting to our annexation as the 51st state, it might seem a bit much to ask that we stop for a moment and look on the bright side.
There really is a bright side, even if it’s also produced the unexpected result of throwing the expectation of a slam-dunk Conservative election victory into some serious doubt.
Recent polling data confirms everything you’ve been hearing about Canadians boycotting American goods and cancelling U.S. holidays in response to the tariff war Donald Trump is waging against us. There’s fight in us yet. We’re in no mood to acquiesce, and only four per cent of Canadians would entertain the idea of becoming Americans.
It’s going to be bitterly painful for a lot of us, no matter how this macabre drama plays out. But it looks like we’re up to it. That’s the good news.
It’s always possible that the own-goal pain Trump’s tariff war will inevitably inflict upon American importers, manufacturers and consumers will prove sufficient to curb their president’s sadism and megalomania.
Effective Canadian countermeasures can make that pain much harder to bear, and we should twist the knife as ruthlessly and strategically as we’re able, sparing what few American states or industries we may yet be able to count as friends and allies.
But we need to stop kidding ourselves. And by the looks of things, Canadians aren’t kidding. Trump’s belligerence is as serious a threat to Canadian sovereignty as anything we’ve had to face since the 1940s.
Staging conventional ambuscades in the terrain of trade reciprocity can only go so far, and all sorts of improvised-device ideas are making the rounds. Former Canadian vice-admiral Mark Norman disclosed one of his own on Tuesday.
“Like many Canadians I’ve been watching — with concern — the endless rhetoric and hyperbolic threats to our economy and sovereignty. To be blunt, our reactions to date have been tactical, reactive and transactional,” Norman wrote on X. “It’s time to ‘drop the gloves’ and get serious.
“Beyond the ongoing focus on trade issues, I strongly suggest we consider our protections under NATO Article 4.”
This would open up an interesting conversation, to say the least. Canada’s one of the skinflints among the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 32 member states. But the point of Article 4 is that it obliges the NATO leadership to consult its member states whenever “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” And that describes perfectly what’s going on here.
If nothing else, Norman’s idea highlights the gravity of the crisis Trump’s antics have brought about. In NATO’s 76 years of existence, Article 4 has been invoked only seven times, all relatively recently. Turkey has called in NATO five times since 2003 over threats from Iraq and Syria, and European countries bordering Russia have twice invoked Article 4 due to tensions involving Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Canadians aren’t exactly itching for a fight with the Americans, but the public mood is far more militant than anything Canada’s politicians are offering up. The Conservatives’ Pierre Poilievre may be the only federal leader who’s serious about rebuilding Canada’s hollowed out economy in ways that don’t depend on American civility, but it’s not doing him any good at the moment.
Only two months ago, the Trudeau Liberals’ gutting of the Canadian economy, the immigration free-for-all, the housing catastrophe and a nearly a decade’s worth of flag-lowering, knee-taking national shaming rituals had demoralized Canadians to the point that by last year, Angus Reid’s pollsters could find only 49 per cent of respondents who admitted to a “deep emotional attachment to Canada.”
Before the end of the Trudeau government’s second year in power, in 2016, only 52 per cent of Canadians said they were proud to be Canadian, a cohort eventually shrinking to 34 per cent. Since Trump declared his trade war on Canada, the “proud” respondents have grown by nine points, along with a 10-point rise among respondents professing a deep emotional attachment to the country.
That might not sound like much, but compared with Trudeau, and with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who’s been particularly offside in the public mood for a fight, Canadians are becoming downright militant.
With the possible exception of Poilievre, who prefers to stay vague on the question, Canada’s political class has united around a sort of taboo on the option of responding to Trump’s threatened tariffs with export duties on Canadian energy. But most Canadians are close to enthusiastic about ensuring that an export levy on energy stays in Canada’s arsenal.
Smith says any such move would induce a “national unity crisis,” and Trudeau says he’d never want to use it and doesn’t want to talk about it. But a Nanos Research Group poll undertaken for Bloomberg News found that eight out of 10 Canadians say they can handle the pain of a 25-per-cent American tariff on all Canadian exports to the United States, and 82 per cent said they’d go along with an additional export levy on southbound oil, to make Americans share the pain.
Even in Smith’s Alberta and in fellow taboo enthusiast Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan, 72 per cent of poll respondents favoured the idea.
Even Quebecers, who had hotly opposed the Energy East pipeline project, are warming up to the cause of regaining Canadian energy sovereignty. In November 2023, an MEI poll showed six in 10 Quebecers had come around to supporting energy corridors through the province, including pipelines. Quebec Premier François Legault is now saying he’d back a revived Energy East pipeline project if Quebecers’ concerns were satisfied, and Angus Reid’s polling this week shows support for an Energy East revival has risen from 33 per cent in 2019 to 47 per cent.
There will be pain in whatever’s coming down the pike. But there’s one senior Canadian statesman who seems to be closer to the public mood than any of the current crop of politicians. Canadians need to rediscover themselves, former prime minister Stephen Harper said Tuesday.
“And if I was still prime minister, I would be prepared to impoverish the country and not be annexed, if that was the option we’re facing. Now, because I do think that if Trump were determined, he could really do wide structural and economic damage, but I wouldn’t accept that,” said Harper. “I would accept any level of damage to preserve the independence of the country.”
Canadians need to hear more of that from their politicians. In a hypothetical scenario pitting Poilievre against prominent banker, Team Trudeau insider and Liberal leadership hopeful Mark Carney, polling shows a surprisingly tight popular-vote race. And election modeller Raymond Liu projects that scenario giving the Liberals a majority. This would have been unthinkable only a few weeks ago.
Everything is in flux. But Canadians aren’t for caving.
National Post