We mobilized against Hitler. Now we need to mobilize against Trump

We can count on Trump being similarly menacing and ruthless towards longtime ally Canada as he ponders how to coerce us into submitting to his demand we be his 51^st state.

Canada hasn’t faced this sort of threat to our survival as a nation since we first became a nation in 1867.

Retaliatory tariffs are absolutely justified and, in forcefully announcing them on Tuesday, our much-maligned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had his finest moment.

But, beyond tariffs, the response most discussed these days seems to be removing our interprovincial trade barriers — amid hype that this will greatly enrich and strengthen our economy. That’s unlikely.

To truly strengthen our economy, we should look for inspiration to what we did in the face of the horrendous threat we confronted in the Second World War.

In 1940, with Britain forced to abandon much of its military fleet after the evacuation from Dunkirk, Canada responded by mobilizing this country on a grand scale.

Almost from scratch, Ottawa created a vast industrial operation, overseen by Canada’s wartime production minister C.D. Howe, that produced 800,000 military transport vehicles, 50,000 tanks and tons of other military supplies.

Central to this massive industrial mobilization was Ottawa’s creation of 28 Crown corporations that operated factories, shipyards, plants for machinery and aircraft production, according to Sandford Borins, professor emeritus of public management at the University of Toronto.

Many of these Crown corporations proved very impressive, says Borins. He points to Victory Aircraft, which developed expertise building British-designed airplanes, providing the groundwork for the postwar creation of the Avro Arrow, the supersonic, state-of-the-art jet.

Another huge wartime success was Research Enterprises, which produced technologically advanced radar equipment, periscopes, rangefinders and radio sets.

Sadly, after the war, Ottawa dismantled or sold off all 28 of its wartime Crown corporations. And, with anti-government ideology dominating in recent decades, we’ve sold off many other excellent Crown corporations, leaving us with an underdeveloped economy dominated by a business class that answers to shareholders, often in another country, not the Canadian public.

Today, our business leaders seem, above all, determined to use the Trump crisis to win concessions they’ve long sought from Ottawa, like more tax breaks and deregulation.

Indeed, deregulation appears to be the main impetus for removing interprovincial trade barriers, notes economist Marjorie Griffin Cohen, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University.

Cohen insists the economic benefits of removing the remaining interprovincial barriers are greatly exaggerated.

Instead, we should focus on bolstering our industrial capacity for strategic projects, as we did so well during the Second World War.

For instance, Ottawa’s planned high-speed rail link between Toronto and Quebec City should be handled by a Crown corporation, rather than relying on public-private partnerships, which leave private businesses calling the shots, driving up the costs and controlling our key infrastructure.

Crown corporations should also be charged with overseeing our transition to a green economy, rather than trying to goad the private sector with tax breaks into performing this mammoth task.

As Canada’s wartime leaders understood, when the country is truly threatened, you don’t leave its fate in the hands of shareholders with no particular loyalty to Canada.

That’s why they set up Crown corporations, which operated without a profit motive and answered only to the public through democratic governance.

We should be doing that now, if we’re serious about escaping the maw of the rapidly-self-destructing country run by a megalomaniac just to the south of us.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.