Was it the immediate steep downward dip in the stock markets on the first business day after he announced 25 per cent tariffs on everything Canada and Mexico export (except for energy, which would be taxed at a rate of 10 per cent)?
Was it the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and Financial Times (FT) vigorously condemning tariffs against allies? The WSJ called them the dumbest tariffs ever, more than once. The FT said Trump’s ill-advised tariffs were a gift to U.S.’s biggest rival, China.
Or did Trump decide, at the 11th hour, to pause tariffs for 30 days because the Canadian government followed Mexico in announcing enhanced border security measures?
In Mexico’s case, such measures at least have the merit of being connected to actual facts on the ground. Large quantities of illegal drugs and a good many asylum seekers (whom the Americans call “illegal migrants”) enter the U.S. through Mexico.
That is not the case for Canada – not with regard to asylum seekers, nor with regard to drugs. In the case of fentanyl, to which Trump has specifically made reference many times, Canada is the source of far less than one per cent of that drug seized at U.S. borders.
The truth is that, for Canada, Trump’s drugs and migrants’ rationale for punitive tariffs has always been a smoke screen.
In the U.S., tariffs fall constitutionally within the purview of the legislative branch of government, the Congress. Presidents only have the right to unilaterally impose tariffs in wartime or for national security reasons.
Trump claims the flow of so-called illegal migrants and of fentanyl are matters of national security. Thus, he reasons, he has the authority to use tariffs as a defensive countermeasure. (It is doubtful there are many courts which would see it that way.)
Drugs and migrants are not why Trump threatens Canada
The current U.S. president might be impulsive, pathologically self-centred, and brimming with bile and anger. But he is not stupid. He knows full well his stated reasons for tariffs against Canada are pure hokum.
Trump has clearly stated, multiple times, his true motive for declaring economic war on Canada: He has ambitions to expand the borders of the U.S. as a kind of personal legacy project.
He said so in his inaugural address. And he keeps talking, obsessively, about annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal zone, and making Canada the 51st state.
The tyrant-in-the-making in the White House – and his chief henchman, multi-billionaire Elon Musk – are both not-so-secret admirers of authoritarian rulers, dictators, and conquerors, present and past.
Those admired rulers include Russia’s Putin, of course. But they also appear to include the fascist dictators of the first half of the 20th Century.
At a victory rally following the November election Musk gave Trump what very much looked like a straight-arm Nazi salute – twice. Musk and his supporters have tried to deny it, but the visual is pretty compelling.
On top of that visible gesture, Musk is an active supporter of the German far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party.
To rapturous applause Musk recently told an AfD rally that Germans of today should not have to feel guilty for what their forebears did during Hitler’s regime. And he added that Germans should resist multiculturalism and be proud of their pure, ethnic German culture and heritage.
Elon Musk’s father, a pro-Apartheid, white supremacist South African, named him after “the Elon”, the ruler of Mars in a novel by one of Hitler’s favourite scientists Wernher von Braun (later head of the U.S. space program).
Musk, even more than Trump (if that is possible), displays unmistakable characteristics of megalomania. The dictionary definition of megalomania is: “the obsession with the exercise of power, especially in the domination of others.”
Right now, Musk is running rough-shod over the entire U.S. public service, summarily firing officials willy-nilly, accusing them all of being deep-state, woke, radical leftists.
Musk even used yellow police tape to prevent employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from accessing their offices.
When you have enough money to finance your own, private space program – Musk’s is called SpaceX – and harbour ambitions of colonizing the moon and other planets, conquering Canada can seem like a minor challenge.
Collaborators such as Musk serve the role not only of enablers to authoritarian leaders; they egg-on such leaders, encouraging their most egregious and excessive characteristics.
The current aggressive talk about taking over Canada has Musk’s fingerprints all over it. To Musk and Trump Canada’s mere existence as a very different sort of society, which, nonetheless, still very much resembles the U.S. is a major irritant.
Canada is a window to an alternate version of the U.S.
Canada is what the U.S. could be if the Trump gang’s hated Radical Left had their way.
Canada has universal, single-payer health care. One result of that: the average lifespan for Canadians is almost five years longer than for Americans.
Canada is an officially bilingual country, and it has written multiculturalism, a Musk-Trump bête noire, right into its constitution.
Canada maintains strict control over non-hunting firearms, especially handguns. The U.S. is the source of most illegal guns in Canada. That grim fact poses a significant challenge for Canadian law enforcement.
This country provides significant subsidies to make higher education affordable. Few Canadians need to incur crippling debt to get a university degree.
Canada has a publicly-owned coast-to-coast-to-coast broadcasting system, CBC/Radio-Canada, which operates in multiple languages (French, English and a number of Indigenous languages). Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, promises to defund the CBC if he becomes prime minister, but according to one recent poll a majority of Canadians, including a majority of Conservatives, value the public broadcaster.
Same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in Canada, while the death penalty has not been used in Canada since 1962, and was outright abolished in 1976.
The Gini coefficient, which measures economic inequality, is far less skewed for Canada than for the U.S. That means the gap between rich and poor, while still unacceptably large, is significantly smaller in Canada than in the U.S.
Overall, the Canadian poverty rate, especially for children, is significantly lower than that of the U.S.
Mind you, Canada is no social democratic paradise.
Our country faces significant economic and social challenges. Not the least of those is our excessive economic integration with the U.S. economy, which has dampened our productivity and entrepreneurship – and, it is now obvious, threatens our very existence as a free, independent country.
Our shameful treatment of Indigenous peoples has been as bad as that of the United States. It will be decades, maybe generations, before we succeed in righting those many wrongs.
But as long as there is a Canada, flawed and unfinished as it is, Americans will have a window to the many ways in which their society could be more humane, compassionate, diverse, egalitarian and environmentally responsible.
The U.S.’s pain threshold
Trump, Musk, the active and noisy U.S far-right blogosphere, and, now, to a greater extent than ever, the New Gilded Age’s billionaire class all want to close that window tight. They also want unimpeded access to our abundant natural resources, especially water.
That’s why Trump has been louder and more insistent in his tirades against friendly and innocuous Canada than against Mexico or China – or any other country the U.S. has, in recent decades, considered to be an adversary.
Even as he paused the tariffs for 30 days Trump again evoked his 51st state proposition. He insisted annexation of Canada could still be possible.
Trump believes that his planned economic warfare measures would inflict so much pain on Canadians that we would, collectively, cry uncle and willingly surrender our freedom and independence.
The spanner in the works is something Trump does not seem to have considered.
Given the high degree of integration between our two countries, Trump’s punishing economic measures (of which tariffs would only be the first step), while utterly devastating for Canada, would also entail significant pain for the U.S.
Trump wistfully admitted the other day that a good many Americans, including some who have his ear, are not ready to endure that kind of pain, whatever the ultimate, beneficial pay-off for the U.S.
That does not mean Trump – or Elon Musk – are giving up.
The 30-day pause on 25 per cent tariffs is not the end of this story.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill: It is not even the beginning of the end; it is merely the end of the beginning.
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