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‘We Are Now Being Extorted’

It’s time for Canada to push back hard against Trump. Here’s how.

Crawford Kilian 5 Feb 2025The Tyee

Crawford Kilian is a contributing editor of The Tyee.

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
Lord Palmerston as British foreign secretary, 1848

With the return of Donald Trump, Canada is rapidly learning the wisdom of Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, best known as Lord Palmerston. He was a long-serving British politician who was the foreign secretary and was eventually elected prime minister. He died in office.

After threatening 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and then extracting promises from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Trump granted both countries a one-month reprieve.

That will give him plenty of time to dream up more demands, because he isn’t interested in fentanyl or illegal immigrants — he’s interested in showing off his power.

And the show isn’t just for us and Mexico. Trump is following an old Chinese proverb, “Kill the chicken to scare the monkeys,” the monkeys in this case being other U.S. allies and trading partners.

Trudeau, in the best speech of his career, stood up for Canada and spoke to Americans as a friend, explaining what Trump had brought down upon us all. Then, on Monday, he seemed to cave by agreeing to stricter border controls.

In reality, those controls were already there; Trudeau threw in a “fentanyl czar” to make Trump happy.

But he and his government now have at least a month to reflect on the fact that we are now being extorted by a man whose word should never be trusted.

No one can trust the US government now

Since his inauguration, Trump and his government have achieved notable levels of shock and awe through scores of executive orders, including the partial silencing of U.S. health agencies, and unleashed a great deal of backlash against Elon Musk’s takeover of government information systems that distribute $6 trillion a year.

Quite apart from the impact on Americans, the impact on the rest of the world has been enough to end the 80-year-long Pax Americana, which (for all its flaws) had kept the world free of a third world war.

No one can trust the U.S. government now, economically or militarily — not even Americans.

That is particularly true for Canada. The Americans have long made themselves the path of least resistance to our prosperous security, but no more.

For the foreseeable future we are going to be home alone, next door to a president who talks openly about converting us into a 51st state through economic force. At the very best, if Trump does eventually impose tariffs, we are looking at a recession worse than those of 2008 and 2020.

Some of us may think we’re not up to the task, or that it’s too expensive. They should remember that in 1939, when we were a nation of just 11 million people emerging from the Great Depression, we made ourselves a formidable enemy, with armed forces that grew to 1.1 million — 10 per cent of our entire population.

We trained thousands of Commonwealth pilots in Manitoba, liberated the Netherlands and built the fourth-largest air force and third-largest navy in the world. And that was with Quebec a reluctant partner and conscription a divisive policy.

Who are our friends now?

Here we should turn to the wisdom of Lord Palmerston. We have no eternal allies, least of all in the Americans. If we see Trump’s tariffs and foreseeable future demands as the existential threat that Hitler and Japan were, we could rally the vast majority of 40 million Canadians to reconsider and define our own eternal and perpetual interests. And we would find they mesh with the interests of many other countries around the world.

Let’s start in North America. The Canada-United States-Mexico trade agreement that Trump tore up still has two partners: Canada and Mexico. We should build on it.

Mexico’s top exports to us are cars, delivery trucks and motor vehicle parts and accessories. Our exports to Mexico have been motor vehicle parts and accessories (that’s the supply chain Trump’s tariffs will break), as well as rapeseed and canola oil. We can find more to trade.

Meanwhile, we have just signed a trade deal with Ecuador, and other Latin American countries will find us a less stressful trading partner than Trump’s America.

Then let’s beat Trump to the punch on Greenland, as was recently proposed in the Globe and Mail, by welcoming its 57,000 citizens to an economic partnership involving our own Inuit and other northern Indigenous Peoples.

But don’t stop there. Look at the whole European Union, which is currently under pressure by Russia while Trump could well abandon it by pulling the United States out of NATO.

We already do a lot of trade with the EU, and with the Europeans likely facing Trump tariffs soon, they could welcome us. We might be smaller in population, but we’re not crazy.

And if full EU membership won’t work, we could join the European Free Trade Association, like Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. That would give us better access to European markets.

Another possibility would be a Nordic alliance, with Canada joining Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the three frontline Baltic nations Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Such an alliance would have a total population of about 72 million. As parliamentary democracies (some of them monarchies), a Nordic alliance would be politically congenial and a counterweight to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

In a recent panel for the Canadian International Council, former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy called for a diplomatic reset that would strengthen our links to Commonwealth countries like Australia and New Zealand, as well as francophone nations like Belgium, Morocco and Vietnam.

He also suggested a more active Canadian role on the Arctic Council, which includes the United States and Russia. Even when we’re in conflict with other countries, we should be talking with them wherever we can; co-operation on Arctic issues could lead to improved relations in general.

We may find new trade opportunities in Japan, Southeast Asia and Indonesia. China might be difficult: relations have been politically abrasive for years and seem unlikely to improve.

Make Tesla a toxic brand

Still, in 2023 we sold China $30 billion worth of oil seeds, fruits, ores, oil, wood pulp and copper; we bought $89 billion worth of goods such as electrical and electronic equipment, machinery, vehicles and lighting.

If Tesla becomes a toxic brand (as it should), we might encourage China’s auto firms to start building electric vehicles here in Canada — if they agree to provide excellent pay and working conditions for Canadian employees.

Of course we should end interprovincial trade barriers and continue to reduce emissions. Renewable energy should increasingly drive every province’s economy, even Alberta’s. And regardless of the tariff suspension, we should continue to buy Canadian, or at least non-American, for the foreseeable future. Travel to the United States should be limited to dire necessity.

Trump would of course resent such measures, but so what?

As soon as our “fentanyl czar” is named, and we’ve assigned 10,000 personnel to patrol the border, he’ll cook up more grievances: our coolness to U.S. banks, our failure to invest in his crypto or our single-payer health-care system.

If we spend the next month also re-examining our eternal interests, we might find that they don’t include eternal burning of fossil fuels, whether here at home or overseas. They don’t include any more tax giveaways to the rich paid for by tax burdens on the poor.

And it is very much in our interest to build a reputation for integrity both at home and abroad.

Trump is no perpetual foe because he won’t be around forever. If we end our undue dependence on his whims, Canada will long outlast him.  [Tyee]

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