The book on Donald Trump is that he’s unpredictable, unreliable and untrustworthy.
Based on the recent trade talks and Friday’s last minute bust-up, it’s an unfair rap. Every move the U.S. made in the weeks of dickering was predictable and, in the end, reliably untrustworthy. You didn’t have to be an Ottawa insider or politically tuned-in pundit to suspect the negotiations were largely a waste of effort and would end badly. Ordinary Canadians certainly made clear they had little to no faith in Washington’s intentions, expected the worst and were not alarmed by it.
“I’m most useful in a crisis. I’m not that good at peacetime,” Prime Minister Mark Carney boasted in his early days as a politician. Now he has the chance to prove it. If the impact of the tariff blow-up proves as predicted, Canada is in for a financial challenge. Jobs will be lost, prices will be affected. As long as the damage of a tariff war was still theoretical it was easy enough to talk tough and thumb a nose in Washington’s general direction.”Go ahead, do your worst.” How the country reacts now will take patience, resilience and backbone, possibly for some time to come. Canadians are being challenged to show what they’re made of.
The best outcome would be to finally break our addiction to American commerce and find other customers, other suppliers, other countries that are interested in doing business on an equal basis and with more honesty than has become the American norm. There’s been much talk along those lines over the months since Carney delivered his seminal speech in Davos, but — not surprisingly — there’s a natural reluctance to undertake a rupture of that magnitude if there’s even a moderate hope of avoidance.
Carney has jetted around the world at a relentless pace, signing trade deals here there and everywhere, yet outside government hallways the sense of urgency has appeared decidedly less fervent. This month two of Canada’s biggest banks sold a jointly-owned firm to an American buyer, transferring a company that handles about a third of Canadian payment transactions to a private equity operation in San Francisco. On Friday Roots, which turned Canadian iconography into a branding empire, sold itself to New York-based Marquee Brands for about $160 million in a deal identified as “a transaction designed to preserve all that makes Roots uniquely Canadian” — except, of course, the ownership.
In just three weeks Carney will host the Canada Investment Summit, a first-ever gathering of “the world’s largest investors” in a bid to lure some of the $100 trillion they reportedly control Canada’s way. According to the prime minister, “they will find a Canadian economy that has never been more connected or more ambitious.” That would be nice. It would be real progress if all they went away with was an impression Canada has more to offer than a range of successful firms willing to be snapped up at an attractive price.
One thing Carney won’t face, at least for a time, is lack of public fervour. It’s doubtful Canadians have ever been as united in their disgust at anything as they are at the U.S. president and his underlings. If Carney was ever tempted to hold his nose and accept the U.S. proposal, Canadians made it crystal clear they had no appetite for compromise or concessions. When the time came for a final decision, it must have been obvious he’d never be able to sell the deal being offered.
Trump, on the other hand, is piling up the failures. He can’t get along with Canada, he can’t get along with Denmark, he can’t get along with Italy, he can’t get along with South Korea, he no longer gets along with Israel, he wants to bomb Oman and occupy Greenland, and his idea of forging new friendships means cozying up to North Korea, the world’s last truly Stalinist dictatorship.
While his war on Iran is a disaster, the U.S. debt now tops US$40 trillion, almost double its level when Trump first won election. His solution is to temporarily lower tariffs on imported beef in the hope 90 days of cheaper hamburgers will pacify Americans long enough to get past midterm elections that are threatening Republicans in Congress. Typically enough he upset U.S. ranchers in the process, who noted that “undercutting American farmers and ranchers with inferior product from foreign competitors does nothing to create market confidence or encourage rebuilding the herd.”
There’s nothing to gain in continuing to wonder how Americans could let all this happen to their country, or whether they’ll ever get energized enough to put a stop to it. There’s more to Friday’s blow-up than a disagreement over trade. Being friends with the U.S. has become a risky position. It’s entirely in Canada’s interest to use the moment to break from what’s become an abusive relationship. That means accepting whatever challenges emerge as well worth the drive to build a stronger, self-assured and more self-reliant country.
Donald Trump’s greatest legacy may be in uncovering the depth of the rot at the centre of American public life. It’s been there for some time, mouldering away, eating at the foundations of the values the country claims to hold as a people. Trump’s brought it all to the fore, glorying in it, putting it on a display that’s impossible to ignore.
Americans twice elected Trump, they have to put up with him. We didn’t, don’t and shouldn’t.
National Post
