After Ontario Premier Doug Ford appeared on Special Report on Fox News Wednesday night, White House advisor Peter Navarro appeared on the same show to rebuke Ford. Not on Ford’s claims that tariffs were unjustified, bad for consumers in both countries or even Ford’s threat to cut off electricity – for Navarro it was about drugs.
“The one word I didn’t hear was fentanyl,” Navarro said. “This particular action by the president is all about fentanyl.”
It’s a line they have been using since November, but even the White House can’t get their story straight on why the tariffs are being imposed. That’s understandable, they have so many different types of tariffs, so many different dates, so many different reasons.
The current set of tariffs are being justified under national security grounds due to a national health emergency caused by the large number of fentanyl deaths in the United States. This is the legal justification that allows the Americans to violate our trade agreement.
But if these tariffs are due to a national security threat, why were they lifted for the auto sector with the express message that it’s time to move production to the United States. During the daily White House press briefing, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Trump told automakers they could have a 30-day reprieve on auto tariffs but that they should get moving.
“He told them that they should get on it, start investing, start moving, shift production to here, to the United States of America, and they will pay no tariffs, that is the ultimate goal,” Leavitt said.
That’s no longer a tariff on national security grounds, that is an attempt to use tariffs to grab jobs and investments, which would violate the trade deal, not that Trump and his team seem to care.
“It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?” Trump said of the word tariff during his joint address to Congress.
He has said before that he loves the word tariff, that it is his favourite word. He’s also in love with the idea as a policy.
He’s just horrible at coherently implementing his policy.
The Dow is down 4% over the last month, the S&P 500 down 3.6% and the NASDAQ down 5.8%. That and a jobs report coming Friday that is expected to be flat, combined with persistent inflation, especially around groceries, makes Trump’s tariff moves all the more problematic for the American economy.
For Canadians, though, it’s the mixed or bizarre messaging, the constant trolling of Justin Trudeau, the man Trump still calls Governor Trudeau even as our PM exits stage left.
We won’t be getting a consistent and coherent message from the Trump White House — he and his advisors contradict themselves on the same day as they justify their actions.
What we need to do is respond to the actions of the Trump administration, not the rhetoric. That includes retaliatory measures including our own tariffs, removing American booze from the shelves or threatening to cut the electricity – Doug Ford’s threat is the only measure to have broken through in Republican Washington.
Beyond that though, we need to grow up and do the many things we should have been doing over the last decade. That includes taking the border and fentanyl seriously – not for Trump but for our own communities and the loved ones of the 49,000 people who have died from this deadly drug.
We need to begin to embrace our natural resource sectors in every part of the country and find ways to export those products around the world. We need to speed up the timelines and processes to develop these projects — be it pipelines to tidewater for Alberta, mining in Ontario’s ring of fire or shale gas in New Brunswick.
Canada has tremendous advantages, we could quickly become one of the richest countries on the planet, but not if we stay on the path we have been on.
Let’s turn the threat from Trump into the opportunity of a lifetime to fully and fundamentally change course and unleash Canada’s economy.