Trump’s tariffs, designed to coerce Canada to provide America with a ‘better deal’ on an indeterminate array of goods, products, minerals, and petroleum products may well backfire. Canada should consider selling its products to China, and cutting off the sale of strategically valuable commodities to the United States.
The creation of new trade deals with partners that can be trusted, unlike the U.S., needs to be managed as quickly, effectively and efficiently as possible. The list of products that Canada provides to the United States is extensive, not to mention that as America’s largest purchaser of American goods, there are a lot of products to either boycott or apply tariffs on.
Just as the EU found with Russia. It doesn’t pay to put all your eggs in one basket. Canadians exported 77% of Canadian goods to the U.S. in 2023, and imported almost 50% of the goods it required from the United States. Irrationally, Trump says ‘America subsidizes’ Canada to the tune of 200 billion to 250 billion.
There is no such thing as an American subsidy to Canada. The actual amount the trade deficit for the U.S. to Canada is approximately $41 billion and if you include oil, $63 billion. The total irrationality of Trump’s argument is so mind boggling that it’s hard to fathom. American has a population of 340 million, while Canada has a population of 41.4 billion. How is Canada supposed to purchase an equal amount of products and materials with 12% of the U.S. population?
Canada should have been diversifying the sale of its exports long before now, but America’s demand for goods is such that spending significantly more to export long distances to Europe or the orient made that proposition irrational, — until now.
I argued exactly for diversification of our export market for twelve years as a business instructor in management studies at a local college, but the argument for diversification was always that to do so was fiscally detrimental to Canada.
Well, the relationship that Canada has had with the United States has been mutually beneficial to both parties for a hundred years, but apparently, if you can coerce a better deal from your neighbour by threatening them, even though there are agreements in place, all the better.
The lunacy is that it took the complete lies of a pathologically lying sociopathic leader of American to attempt to do just that.
This is the second time in the tenure of America’s President’s that the United States has threatened Canada, and torn up a multinational trade agreement, because the President of the U.S. blatantly lied about a situation and Americans were asinine enough to believe him, — even when the World Trade Organization, GATT and NAFTA found that no breeches of the trade agreements had occurred.
Is this Trump’s business model?
Now Trump lies about fentanyl, even though less than 1% of fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Canada, and less than 1% of illegal immigration comes from Canada.
However this ends. Canada will find new trade partners and new trade agreements.
America will find that the loss of strategic minerals, oil and gas, and water, in the future, will significantly affect America. In addition, Canadians will buy the vast majority of goods that it has purchased from America in the past, from other countries.
You don’t put a gun to the head of your neighbour and then knock on the door to borrow a cup of sugar.
Instead, the neighbour gets a restraining order and arms himself, barring the door.
That’s how ‘the enemy of my enemy, becomes my friend.’
We will not forget, and we do not forgive, America.
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