Though US Tariff Negotiations Will Take Time, a Positive Outcome for Canada Can Be Expected

By Conrad Black

It is generally agreed that not since Franklin D. Roosevelt 90 years ago has an American president attempted so comprehensive a policy reform in so many areas simultaneously as President Trump is now attempting. A wholesale invasion across the southern border deliberately tolerated by the previous administration has been ended. Trump has torn up, root and branch, the woke leanings of the previous administration across the board, from critical race theory in the armed forces to transgender athletes in women’s sports, and from inverse discrimination in hiring and promotion to extreme environmental regulations—the latter causing great expense to the public, particularly those of modest incomes.

Tariffs are already a major element in this broad assault on the public-policy status quo, which Trump began in 2016 and whose walls he has finally broken through with last November’s presidential and congressional elections.

In these circumstances, and in keeping with the president’s customary operational technique of beginning new policy initiatives with a “shock and awe” launch, he began with an outrageous implication of equivalently unacceptable conduct from Mexico and Canada. But Canada is a fair-trading country, and the United States does not in fact have a trade deficit with this country if energy is excluded. Much of the oil that the United States buys from Canada is at a knock-down price, and it sells it on to third parties at a profit.

Mexico, on the other hand, not only fabricates Chinese parts and exports them to the United States under the trade agreement, it also incentivizes American companies to close their plants in the United States and build new ones just south of the U.S.-Mexican border, from where it can export with the benefit of cheap Mexican labour and special income tax breaks. These contraventions of existing trade agreements are greatly amplified by the immense grievance that the United States has against Mexico for its complicity in assisting what has amounted to an outright invasion of the United States by destitute people, and in many cases, dangerous criminals.

In this light, lumping Canada in with Mexico was a gratuitous insult to Canada, though it was not particularly intended by Trump to be so. It had a material and unjustified influence on the outcome of our federal election, though that too was a matter of complete indifference to the president, who does not consider Canadian politics any business of his. (He did, however, have a justified aversion to Justin Trudeau, who did not always act respectfully or in good faith towards him. This can be hazardous with American presidents, given the power they dispose.)

First published in the Epoch Times