Time to toughen up, Canada

By Conrad Black

Those of us who confidently stated that in waving about 25 per cent tariffs against Canadian goods, U.S. President Donald Trump was just playing poker and raising the ante, appear to have been vindicated. Those who were preparing for guerrilla war, such as the Toronto Star editorial board and the worrisomely incoherent and oddly malicious Andrew Coyne, have been left to self-sedate in a quiet place and return to normal life when they are ready, without rushing it or being over-ambitious. It was outrageous, as I and others have written, for the U.S. government to treat Mexico and Canada alike. As our capable ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, pointed out on Fox News, when tourism and investment are taken into account, our trade relationship provides huge benefits for both Canada and the United States. And whatever grievances the Americans may think they have over the entry of undesirable people and dangerous drugs into their country across the northern border, we have at least as great a grievance over the flow of illegal firearms and migrants, who have fled across our border in fear of the new president’s threats to deport them. The United States has acknowledged that the flow of fentanyl from Mexico to the U.S. is nearly 500 times greater than the quantity that has come from Canada.

All of this is essentially nonsense, because it is up to each sovereign country to put whatever controls it judges appropriate on its own border. The United States and Canada are free countries that do not restrain people from leaving. One of the principal reasons for President Trump’s re-election was his predecessor’s insane decision not to take security at the southern border seriously, which allowed millions of illegal migrants to stream into the country. The number of people entering the U.S. illegally across southern border is orders of magnitude greater than those coming across the northern border; and where Mexico and China had been collaborating to entice manufacturing out of the United States and replace it with cheap labour fabrication and sell products back to the United States under the cover of the North American free-trade agreement, Canada has been a fair trading country throughout. It is no concern of ours that Trump has chosen to put Mexico and China in their place, but treating Canada as he did was unjust and seriously annoying.

Part of our problem has been Canadian sensitivity: we have, as a country, been so circumspect in our behaviour that we are not accustomed to disapproval. President Trump told me months ago that Canada had nothing to fear from the United States other than that, “Your trade negotiators are better than ours and we need to put that right.” Only a trade wonk could know if that is true, but if it is, the answer is not to wave tariffs around like six guns. Precisely because Canada is such a well house-trained country, we are acutely discomforted by aggressive treatment, particularly from a country we know as well as the United States. Not since French President Charles de Gaulle, on a state visit in 1967 to celebrate the centenary of the Confederation of Canada, took the opportunity to urge Quebec to secede from Confederation have we had such a great and legitimate grievance against the conduct towards us of a great power. On that occasion in 1967, we were for the first time left all alone to deal with what was a genuine, as well as an extremely provoking, challenge from the man who was then, along with Mao Zedong, the most eminent statesmen in the world, and one revered by the French-speaking population of this country. He said his reception in Quebec had reminded him of the liberation of France, as if the Canadian Army had not landed at Juno beach on D-Day as liberators.

First published in the National Post