Musings —02.01.2025 05:32 PM
—My latest: the war begins
The Trump tariffs have arrived.
How did we get here? Simple: we – all of us, under successive governments of different political stripes – allowed our trade with the United States to balloon to 80 per cent of what we export. That was a critical mistake, and all of us went along with it. It is a mistake that has left us too vulnerable to the whims of our biggest customer. Never a good strategy.
Canadians who have been justifying Donald Trump’s bogus pretexts for imposing crippling tariffs aren’t very good strategists, either. They’ve been dutifully dancing to Trump’s tune, just like he wanted us to. The newly-returned U.S. president exaggerated the fentanyl and illegal migrant threats so he couldn’t be accused of violating the very trade agreement he himself signed with Canada and Mexico in his first term.
His fentanyl and illegal border-crossing claims were bogus pretexts to get him out of his United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) obligations. Nothing more, nothing less.
But none of that matters so much, now. What matters is changing course, and making us less dependent on trade with the U.S. What matters is getting national leadership to guide us through the difficult years ahead. And what matters now is linking arms with those who support Canada, and building new alliances.
In the United States, finding those allies is pretty hard to do, these days.
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Warren,
Here’s an interesting question: we’ve had CETA since 2017-2019. How come we signed it with The European Union and then largely let it rot out of neglect? It’s on Trudeau, this one.