Trump, taunts and trade—Canada’s response is a decade out of date, says Ross McKitrick Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
We can count on Ross to have an outlier opinion that is
apart from the legacy media talking head conversation. There will be many turns to come for Canada –
USA relations in 2025.
Our focus should not be so much about what President Trump says
each day, but rather about what we are doing within our own house to clean up,
repair, and properly behave with responsibility. Canada needs to get a conservative mindset
into Ottawa as soon as possible. It
remains that far too many Canadians still buy into the leftie myths on economics,
and their lying prejudice of anti-conservatism.
In actual policy change, Canada needs to get to a balanced
budget as soon as practical. Eliminate
waste (Liberals) and unleash and open up the economy (flush NDP). These hurtful politicians only remain because
there is a significant segment of deceived voters who believe the lies, while
they resent facts, truth, and accountability for themselves.
On January 20, 2025, Professor Ross McKitrick says it differently.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/trump-taunts-and-trade-canadas-response-decade-out-date
Canadian federal politicians are floundering in their
responses to Donald Trump’s tariff and annexation threats. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a 2016
mindset, still thinking Trump is a temporary aberration who should be disdained
and ignored by the global community. But
a lot has changed. Anyone wanting to
understand Trump’s current priorities should spend less time looking at trade
statistics and more time understanding the details of the lawfare campaigns
against him. Canadian officials who had
to look up who Kash Patel is, or who don’t know why Nathan Wade’s girlfriend
finds herself in legal jeopardy, will find the next four years bewildering.
Three years ago, Trump was on the ropes. His first term had been derailed by phony
accusations of Russian collusion and a Ukrainian quid pro quo. After 2020, the Biden Justice Department and
numerous Democrat prosecutors devised implausible legal theories to launch
multiple criminal cases against him and people who worked in his
administration. In the summer of 2022,
the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and leaked to the press rumours of stolen nuclear
codes and theft of government secrets. After
Trump announced his candidacy in 2022, he was hit by wave after wave of
indictments and civil suits strategically filed in deep blue districts. His legal bills soared while his lawyers past
and present battled well-funded disbarment campaigns aimed at making it
impossible for him to obtain counsel. He
was assessed hundreds of millions of dollars in civil penalties and faced life
in prison if convicted.
This would have broken many men. But when he was mug-shotted in Georgia on Aug.
24, 2023, his scowl signalled he was not giving in. In the 11 months from that day to his fist
pump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump managed to defeat and discredit the lawfare
attacks, assemble and lead a highly effective campaign team, knock Joe Biden
off the Democratic ticket, run a series of near daily (and sometimes twice
daily) rallies, win over top business leaders in Silicon Valley, open up a
commanding lead in the polls and not only survive an assassination attempt but
turn it into an image of triumph. On
election day, he won the popular vote and carried the White House and both
Houses of Congress.
It's Trump’s world now, and Canadians should understand two
things about it. First, he feels no
loyalty to domestic and multilateral institutions that have governed the world
for the past half century. Most of them
opposed him last time and many were actively weaponized against him. In his mind, and in the thinking of his
supporters, he didn’t just defeat the Democrats, he defeated the Republican
establishment, most of Washington including the intelligence agencies, the
entire corporate media, the courts, woke corporations, the United Nations and
its derivatives, universities and academic authorities, and any foreign
governments in league with the World Economic Forum. And it isn’t paranoia; they all had some role
in trying to bring him down. Gaining
credibility with the new Trump team will require showing how you have also
fought against at least some of these groups.
Second, Trump has earned the right to govern in his own
style, including saying whatever he wants. He’s a negotiator who likes trash-talking, so
get used to it and learn to decode his messages.
When Trump first threatened tariffs, he linked it to two
demands: stop the fentanyl going into the United States from Canada and meet
our NATO spending targets. We should
have done both long ago. In response,
Trudeau should have launched an immediate national action plan on military
readiness, border security and crackdowns on fentanyl labs. His failure to do so invited escalation. Which, luckily, only consisted of taunts about
annexation. Rather than getting whiny
and defensive, the best response (in addition to dealing with the border and
defence issues) would have been to troll back by saying that Canada would fight
any attempt to bring our people under the jurisdiction of the corrupt U.S.
Department of Justice, and we will never form a union with a country that
refuses to require every state to mandate photo I.D. to vote and has so many
election problems as a result.
As to Trump’s complaints about the U.S. trade deficit with
Canada, this is a made-in-Washington problem. The U.S. currently imports $4 trillion in
goods and services from the rest of the world but only sells $3 trillion back
in exports. Trump looks at that and says
we’re ripping them off. But that
trillion-dollar difference shows up in the U.S. National Income and Product
Accounts as the capital account balance. The rest of the world buys that much in U.S.
financial instruments each year, including treasury bills that keep Washington
functioning. The U.S. savings rate is
not high enough to cover the federal government deficit and all the other
domestic borrowing needs. So, the
Americans look to other countries to cover the difference. Canada’s persistent trade surplus with the
U.S. ($108 billion in 2023) partly funds that need. Money that goes to buying financial
instruments can’t be spent on goods and services.
So, the other response to the annexation taunts should be to
remind Trump that all the tariffs in the world won’t shrink the trade deficit
as long as Congress needs to borrow so much money each year. Eliminate the budget deficit and the trade
deficit will disappear, too. And then
there will be less money in D.C. to fund lawfare and corruption. Win-win.
1 comment:
It's straight talk. In Canada, we need a Conservative government as soon as possible.
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