Trump's Tariffs and the Future of US-Canada Relations

And that started to change radically during the Obama years , in fact , because the Obama years coincided to a large extent with Stephen Harper , a conservative , being Prime Minister of Canada .

So you had a lot of pro-American sentiment among progressives in Canada because you know Obama was the leader of the future and you'd see articles in newspapers with titles like where is the Canadian Obama ? And so forth .

I think it's irreconcilable to that extent , but I don't think this is something that will last beyond the next election , if the next election brings somebody who takes a more reasonable approach to their relationship to Canada . It's not really even about the United States , it's about one man , it's about Trump . Canadians don't like Trump .

I know not to turn this into a Del Boca Vista thing , but I know that my own in-laws have been trying to sell their place in Vasari , which is just north of Naples , and for several months now and it's definitely softened the market because a lot of the buyers are typically are Canadian snowbirds , as they call it .

So if anyone listening to this wants a nice two-and-a-half golf course community , very quiet , nice neighbors , double parking , just maybe call me and I'll put you in touch . It definitely is a softer real estate market in snowboard country because of this phenomenon .

S and saying , hey , I think you know , my snowbird activities are going to be in Cabo and in Mexico and outside of the United States , or Cuba could be , or Cuba right , which is a another spot that Canadians have have gone to .

Is there a positive here in that it's making Canadians think more about their own country and its own shortcomings , which we'll get into .

Unless you talk about interprovincial trade barriers and things like that , I can tell you that 10 years from now , there's an argument to be made that we will be far better off for this crisis because we're being forced to deal with a bunch of things , uh , that we have an inter-provincial trade barriers , for example .

Uh , you know , trying to get energy projects approved in this country is , it's a , it's madness . There are so many impediments to it . And then you add sort of an aboriginal uh aspect to it . That's almost like a veto in some cases . That very much is a veto , and you know that doesn't happen .

Um , uh , you know we're going to be finding new trading partners . You know like what ? Three , four years ago , four or five years ago , uh , japan and germany kept . Uh came calling to see , uh , can we sell them some LNG ?

And Justin Trudeau said , no , no , there's no business case for that , despite the fact that the request was from the face of the business case . And now you know , for example , a good example of this actually is what's happening in Quebec . Suddenly , the Quebec premier , who was kind of vetoed , anything that smells like a pipeline going through Quebec .

Suddenly the Quebec premier , who was kind of vetoed anything that smells like a pipeline going through Quebec , which would have to do a Western pipeline have to go through Quebec to get to the Atlantic , is now sounding like he's open to the idea .

We have an election that's just about to happen in Canada and looking at the candidates' platforms , it seems as though there is a distinct pro-business , pro-industry growth theme that's emerging from the Canadian elections . Is that right ? And , if so , what industries do you think are really going to be most affected by this ?

I think a key one you know the conversation we have , a morning meeting with the National Post is sort of the flagship of a chain of newspapers across the country called Post Media , and every morning we've been meeting since this , since Trump started talking about tariffs , to basically coordinate coverage .

And the thing that keeps coming up from the other editors is cars right Automobiles , is cars right Automobiles , the auto pact . A lot of our economy in certain parts of the country , especially Southern Ontario , parts of Quebec , are built around the auto pact . We have , you know , what they call just-in-time delivery of parts back and forth across the border .

You know , sometimes an auto , you know a part , can cross the border 10 times right before it's part of a finished car .

You know , canada did some very heroic things in both the First and Second World War , not so heroic more recently . So is there any change in the mentality about defense ?

You know , 0.9% of our GDP on the military . You know Iraq war , certainly , and now you know you're seeing similar things where it's like well , you know , trump is effectively on Russia's side when it comes to Ukraine . Who knows the future of NATO ? Who knows the future of NORAD ? Clearly , this is a wake-up call .

There's so many wake-up calls they're not even wake-up calls . It's one of these deals where sort of the alarm in the next room has been going for like three days and no one bothers to turn it off .

I'm very pessimistic that , no matter who wins the 2025 Canadian election , that you'll see any kind of quantum shift in military spending Because Canada there's no real practical incentive for Canada to develop its military Like the only country that we share a border with . If it did want to attack us militarily , god forbid .

It wouldn't matter if we spend 50% of our GDP on the military . It would be irrelevant . God forbid , it wouldn't matter if we spent 50% of our GDP on the military . It would be irrelevant .

You know our military contributions tend to be rounding errors in places like I mean , you know , not to take away from the often heroic and sometimes tragic sacrifices that Canadian military units have made in places like Afghanistan , but they are not large overall contributors to the cause of the defense of Western nations .

You know , if push comes to shove in Eastern Europe , that'll be the same there .

So , like I agree with a lot of what Rob has said about Canada maybe getting more energy in terms of big projects , you know , lng pipelines , getting rid of inter-provincial trade barriers , like expanding the window of what's possible because , look , this is a crisis , we need to start doing more things on our own and developing more capacity . It's possible .

Some of those big economic projects that will happen because there's a profit to be made .

But military , unfortunately , it's one of those things where there's no real profit aside from geopolitical pride and doing what's right , and I don't have a ton of confidence that that's the sort of thing that will inspire Canadians , especially our leadership class , once the first wave of bravura has passed during the current crisis .

Culturally , the conservatives are very much more pro-military than the liberals . The problem is this as I see it , there's no money , right ?

Justin Trudeau has spent everything we have and then some for probably a generation to come , and so , no matter how pro-military the conservatives are and they just , you know , announced a tax cut , which is a good thing , but it's going to tighten revenues even more . Like I just don't think there's an easy way for the money is not there ? The ?

When people have talked about how that's going to be assimilated , for instance in Mexico , one of the points that the Mexicans make is that hey , if you put these tariffs on us , we're just going to get closer to China . We're going to be exporting more to China , we'll do more trade deals with China .

We will then export cars or whatever outside of the US to other places , because it's favorable to make things in Mexico . Is there a similar story there with Canada ? Does Canada look to other places besides the United States for trading partnerships in the event of broad spectrum high tariffs ?

One problem with Canada is that a lot of our exports are bulk exports where transportation costs are an extremely high percentage of total operating costs and it's very easy to say oh you know , screw you , we're going to sell to China and Japan . If you're selling , you know say oh you know , screw you , we're going to sell to China and Japan .

If you're selling , you know wristwatches and expensive cheese and you know extremely high-tech semiconductors and stuff . You know things that can be sent through the mail in bubble-wrapped envelopes and stuff .

It's a lot more difficult when you're selling low-margin bulk commodity foods , minerals , pre-processed goods where it's just not economical to ship to the other side of the world . In many cases Now you know there are . Sometimes you can lower prices enough and it does become economical , and certainly I think with LNG there's a case for that sort of thing .

But for that reason I think it's unrealistic to think there's going to be any kind of instant quantum shift , and also for the reason that Rob specified , is that a lot of the stuff we export it's not generic widgets , time goods that , um , that have been planned , designed uh into the , uh into the supply stream years ago , like when , when people are designing

new cars they say , well , this will come from Canada's company , united States , and all of that is hardwired into the production process and so the stuff that gets produced it doesn't necessarily have any economic value outside of that very narrow supply chain . So you can't just take what's in your warehouse and turn around and sell it to China .

But over the scale of decades and generations it'd be possible . But that's not the political timeline most people are thinking of . They're thinking of months and one or two years , I think .

And of course you can see what's happened to the UK economy , which is , you know , just you know , pretty pathetic outside of London . Is there any idea of how Carney is going ? Is Carney going to have to wake up and say we can't have these policies because this is what our asset is ? Or you think he's going to stick with it the way Trudeau did ?

And in terms of the question about , like , carbon tax and environmentalism , the trend in Canada is similar to the trend in other countries , which is that when times are good and there's nothing else to worry about , if you have a center left government , they roll out an ambitious environmental policy government . They roll out an ambitious environmental policy .

Rob remembers Stéphane Dion and the so called green shift from it seems like 100 years ago , but you know , the economy was good and we had this . He's fallen into obscurity now , but we had a liberal prime minister named Stéphane Dion and around that time the liberals had this thing called the green shift .

Don't ask me how the green shift worked or how it was different from the brown shift or the black shift , but whatever it was , it was very similar ambitious plan , the same rhetoric everyone was going to profit , we were all going to get rich and we were going to save the planet and then the economy turned south and there was no more green shift .

And that's something similar is happening with the carbon tax , which is announced with much fanfare . It was going to save the planet . Oh , people don't like it . Things are tough Tariffs Okay , let's get rid of it . And so this is cyclical .

And I think Rob is correct to express agnosticism about Carney's intentions , because Carney , in terms of his policy , he's like a hole in the air , like I mean , if you look at the aphoristic policy statements he's made , many of which are just sort of meaningless .

I mean , a lot of his appearance as the liberal heir is kind of an inoffensive , broadly likable sort of liberal template for what a liberal leader should look like and sound like , because everyone realized that they were kind of sick of the Justin Trudeau social justice clown show and they wanted somebody who looked like a functional adult to take over .

And he's the functional adult and he's going to say and do things that his pollsters tell him are the sort of things that functional adults are supposed to say and do , including , like , some things he said that are very bizarre . They sound like they're written by AI , but that's what Canadians want . Right now , in times of crisis .

People are looking for comfort food , and that's who he is , and I agree with Rob that it's hard to say what he's going to say or do next , because I'm not convinced .

He's a guy with extremely strong convictions , maybe some things to do with like money and numbers , because that's his professional past , but I'd be very careful about making predictions about where he's going to take the Canadian economy .

You know there are , there are less considerations . Not , they're not entirely gone because there's uh , it's .

Forget about equity , inclusion and diversity , if that's the extreme side of things . Where is Canada in that ? Is it just dipping its toe in anti-woke ism ? And you're talking about the cabinet being just under 50% female . It wouldn't even be a consideration here , Rob . So so where do you guys think this is is going in terms of the rejection of woke ism ?

use that word anymore is ridiculous because it was dumb , not because somebody in political power started issuing top-down decrees telling people to stop implementing DEI stuff . You know , I'm a good Canadian , I have no problem with diversity . You know , equity , inclusion they're all nice things .

When people use the epithet woke , what they mean is these things take into a ridiculous extreme , and in Canada we absolutely have had things taken to a ridiculous extreme .

And in Canada we absolutely have had things taken to a ridiculous extreme , which and , by the way , in that I'm not even including having 50-50 cabinet gender equity , which , you know , there's a lot of very smart women and I have no problem 50-50 .

What I objected to was Trudeau not shutting up about it like for the first six months of his tenure and turning it into a kind of political fetish and an end in itself , as opposed to a tool to get good , smart people leading the country . So I think a lot of Trudeau's values were broadly shared . Canada is a feminist country . We're a pro-choice country .

We're a socially progressive country . The problem with Trudeau was taking it to an extreme . Is that all of the absurd , faddish performative progressivism that you would see in kind of like an American college student council club he was kind of a manifestation of that and even many progressives thought you're the leader of a G7 country .

You really need to stop running for student council president . It's embarrassing and that was the problem .

But , like I , also have a problem , for instance , with you know , like Ron DeSantis , you know , using his political power to try and tell university professors to stop teaching gender studies or stop teaching this or stop teaching that , and tell university professors to stop teaching gender studies or stop teaching this or stop teaching that , um , like like that to me

is a sort of a classical liberal . I've problems with that too . Uh , the one problem with the woke movement is it created such a pent-up sense of disgruntlement among conservatives about the ludicrous excesses of it that as soon as conservatives come into power , they overplay their hand and they start becoming illiberal in their own right .

My problem with wokeism isn't that it's progressive . My problem with it is that it's illiberal . And when conservatives use illiberal mechanisms to try and sorry , my camera shifted there to try and go after that , to me that's just that's part of the problem to try and go after that To me that's just that's part of the problem .

To be honest with you , schools are being renamed to lose the name of the founder of the country because he was sort of tangentially associated with residential schools .

You know , in Ottawa , the capital of the country , they renamed Sir Johnny MacDonald Boulevard because he was tangentially associated with residential schools , and there was no litigation around whether this is right or wrong . It just happened , right , and nobody was given sort of the space to talk about it and debate it .

The renaming just happened and a whole bunch of people felt left behind . Um , and as a result , you know , you hardly ever saw the canadian flag around anymore . Um , you see more pride flags and that kind of stuff . Well , an interesting thing happened the last few weeks .

There's a house three or four , doubt three or four houses down from me here where they had a , a pride flag . Then it was upgraded to the , to the trans flag .

I'm sure you have your own sources of knowledge , but , like what I've written in my columns for Quillette and the National Post , you know , isn't that the underlying social justice issues surrounding Canada's Indigenous population ? That it's not real . Of course it's real .

I mean , all you have to do is look at the data around things like mortality and earnings , unemployment , you know , rate of contagious diseases . You know you have a lot of very serious social problems in Indigenous communities in Canada , many of which are directly related to a legacy of racism , including racism expressed through the residential school system .

Everyone agrees with that . I mean , people argue around the edges about you know the extent of it .

My issue has always been again turning this into a defining national trait , turning it into a political fetish and also overstating the case in sometimes ludicrously overblown ways , of course , the most egregious being the social panic that unfolded in Canada in 2021 , when it was falsely claimed that the bodies or the confirmed graves , the country who had been ruthlessly

dispatched , murdered even by bloodthirsty priests and nuns and ministers as part of the residential school system , and this was complete .

It proved to be complete nonsense , although political leaders still look at their shoes when the time comes to tell the truth about it , because it was a very embarrassing social panic , and walking it back has proved to be beyond the intellectual capacity of the leadership class .

But that is the sort of thing that I have written about and which I think is a disgrace and it goes to .

What Rob was saying is that you had a lot of social justice posturing in this country , not just around indigenous issues , but around gender issues and such , and a lot of it is aimed at the idea that you know , canada was like this horrible , racist , sexist , transphobic genocide state .

The word genocide started getting thrown around the last couple of years like in a very casual way , and then in the last couple of months it's like oh wait , no , sorry , we hate Trump and we're the greatest country on earth and hooray for Canada .

As recently as maybe , like two years ago , people were still just babbling on about how Canada is supposedly a genocide state , like Rwanda in in 1994 , or Nazi Germany or something , and just thousands and thousands of indigenous children , you know , ruthlessly exterminated and in these graves that no one seems to be able to find .

Those very same people , many of them journalists , many of them activists , many of them left of center politicians , now painting themselves red and white and donning the garb of like patriotic fervoror . In part it's to win elections , but in part it's just because , as was said right at the beginning of the show , canada has no fixed national identity .

Um , we're either the greatest country on earth or we're the worst country on earth , depending upon the news cycle . It's embarrassing and it it's dispiriting , but it also makes me just completely unable to offer any political predictions about this country , because it's like predicting the mood of a person , of a friend of yours . Who's manic .

You never know what they're going to wake up , how they're going to feel about themselves . That's how Canada's national identity is .

Then there'll be a return of some normalcy . But I will say this no matter how much the Americans end up wanting to normalize things again , there has been a real breach of trust , breach of friendship . We're hurt , honestly , we are hurt and we are angry in a way that I've never seen .

And so you know , when America decides it wants to be our friend again , it's going to be a challenge to make that happen .

I think Rob can attest to this that in the six months before Trump got elected there was actually like a real warming to Trump among Canadian I mean , we don't vote in US elections , but if you looked at polls people were like , yeah , he doesn't like DEI , he doesn't like this . He was , hey , you know , trump's not such a bad guy .

And then that just completely went in the toilet after he just decided he was going to destroy the North American economy because of some of his delusions , and so it was like completely gratuitous , completely destroyed his brand and also , for me , it's destroyed the brand of American conservatism .

Because watching all these , I mean there's some notable exceptions , like David Frum , who's just a very honorable exception , but watching all these like American conservatives who I used to respect , just like flipping on a dime , a dime , and it's oh yeah , canada sucks and and and protectionism is awesome and you know , screw free trade and oh yeah , in Ukraine , you

know , fuck them . Like I mean watching these people who I used to respect turn into complete babbling idiots because they're Trump cultists has been one of the most disillusioning things I've ever seen and it's one of the reasons I would never call myself a conservative now , because of their embarrassing spectacle .

circle the wagons and say , hey , this is what we're about .

To me , life is is more about , you know , getting along with people , being productive , uh , being respectful of your neighbors , um , you know , trying to live long , happy , prosperous lives . And Trump has screwed , if that's all you care , which I agree . That's a very banal formulation about what life should be about .

But even at that lowest common denominator of what life should be about , trump has still screwed that up because he's an idiot .

And it does fill me with anger , not even so much as a Canadian , but just as kind of like a rational , liberal-minded human being watching a person gratuitously destroy his own country's political order and the economies of the countries around him . It's just , it's a sad thing to watch .

So the problem is you had one group of you know just incredibly stupid policies that allowed for this guy I call Dr Demento to get back in office .

I find it hard to believe that you can create a leadership environment where people will view you as the leader if they have absolutely no trust in your policies and your policies toward them , and so this is a huge issue that I don't even think the narcissistic folks in today's , in the American cabinet or in the American government are even tuned into .

True that , true that . Gentlemen , thank you . This was really a great conversation . Thank you for me , I hope . By the way , I enjoyed talking with both of you . You are not indistinct , vaporous people . Do you actually have real substance to you ? And so thank , thank you for being Canadian and thank you for projecting that , that sense of identity , to us .