Trump’s New Wave of Tariffs on Canada Threaten To Upend Anew a Bilateral Relationship Once Viewed as Enviable

The latest tariffs imposed upon Canada by America are an outrage and they make no sense. From every angle this is poorly conceived public policy. Peter Navarro did his best as a guest columnist in a Canadian newspaper to invent the imaginative trade argument that fair trading meant not only equal duties on the same objects both ways but a preferential rate in bilateral trade matters for the country with a larger market as it was a larger potential profit center.This is an unworkable concept. Mr. Navarro was on better ground when he attacked the Canadian supply management system that egregiously protects Eastern Canadian farmers. If Canada can’t abandon this corrupt system, it should go to direct farm income supports rather than over-charging the country for dairy products. Yet none of that seriously affects the United States.Because the former Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, told President Trump that the Canadian economy would collapse if he imposed the tariffs that he announced as president-elect, and because Canada, like much of NATO, took a holiday on paying for its own defense from the end in 1993 of the Brian Mulroney era until last year, and because the cultural differences between Canadians and northern state Americans are subtler than those differences between New Englanders and the Deep South, the president appears to have leapt to the conclusion that there is no purpose to Canada, nor any desire for it to continue as an independent country: if it joined America, it wouldn’t have any concern for tariffs or defense spending.As I have laboriously explained to Canadians, this is not an insulting argument and the difficulty of distinguishing Americans from English-speaking Canadians is notorious. There was no reason why Mr. Trump or most other Americans would know that Canadians do not have a revolutionary tradition or, say, any historic reason for the unconditional right to bear arms, and they do not have the legacy of slavery.Most Canadians find the United States an interesting country and are impressed by its remarkable achievements in almost every field and are both proud and appreciative of the excellent relations that existed between the two countries for 150 years. Leisure travel between the two countries is enormous and generates a great deal of goodwill. And there are even today tens of thousands of Canadian families where a grandparent or a deceased forebear fought alongside Americans in many of the most decisive military campaigns of modern history including the Western Front in World War I and the D-Day landings and the Liberation of Western Europe in World War II. Canada was a cofounder of the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty and all of the international organizations that coordinated the Western victory in the Cold War and contributed proportionately even more generously than the United States to the economic recovery plans for postwar Europe known in America as the Marshall Plan. Canada is a wealthy G-7 country with a GDP larger than Russia’s. It has been a very successful country. For all these and many other reasons, Canadians were shocked when, as president-elect, Mr. Trump likened Canadian conduct to that of Mexico. As is notorious, Mexico was in close association with the most vicious gangs in the world in trafficking millions of destitute people including hundreds of thousands of violent criminals, and huge quantities of lethal drugs, into America. Mexico also conducted a campaign of subsidization of American manufacturers to close down in the United States, build plants just inside the Mexican border and exploit cheap Mexican labor and the North American Free Trade Agreement to reintroduce into the United States manufactured products that had recently been produced by Americans. Canada has always been a fair-trading country and never engaged in any of these activities.These initiatives of the Trump administration have generated unprecedented hostility to the United States and Canada has already succeeded in reducing the percentage of its exports that go to America, and of its imports that come from the country, by more than ten percent. The latest tariffs single out Canada under a never-utilized clause of the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 against countries that buy goods from other countries that exploit forced labor. This is presumably a reference to Communist China and certain African countries from which Canada’s imports are trivial compared to those of the United States. Even sophisticated American commentators have bought into the fraud that the United States has a large trade deficit with Canada. This is really Canadian oil the United States buys at a knockdown price and resells at a large profit to third parties; apart from that, the trade deficit with Canada is a fiction. For all of these reasons the American trade aggression against Canada is seen by the whole world as unflattering to the United States. The Canadian-American relationship was previously regarded throughout the world as enviable. Despite the disparity in size between the populations and economies of the two countries, Canada could cause the United States considerable inconvenience. This inexplicable hostility to a friendly country may ultimately be one of the greatest and most unnecessary mistakes of this administration.

Trump’s New Wave of Tariffs on Canada Threaten To Upend Anew a Bilateral Relationship Once Viewed as Enviable

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