Kelly McParland: Bowing to Trump would betray Canada

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s post-midnight response to Washington’s latest escalation of its tariff war was calm, measured, sensible and appropriate, everything the current regime in Washington is not.

Canada, Carney said, will continue to negotiate in search of a reasonable agreement, notwithstanding the absence of any indication the U.S. is open to reasonable negotiations. What Washington wants is to continue operating what amounts to a global extortion racket, threatening all America’s best customers with dire consequences if they refuse to bow to its demands and offer up supplication to whatever notion occurs to President Donald Trump at any given moment.

It’s well and good that Ottawa should keep up the attempt, even if the odds seem set against success. There’s no use pretending this is a situation that can be handled in the traditional manner of friends and trading partners: a search for a fair-minded and equitable agreement that serves the interests of both parties. But we should keep trying, if only to demonstrate that the qualities of civility haven’t broken down altogether, despite the U.S. administration’s every apparent effort to ignore them.

From the Trump administration’s point of view, extortion has been working marvelously well to date. Japan has reportedly agreed to more than a half-trillion dollars in investments and loans in return for lowered tariffs. South Korea, according to Trump, will “give to the United States $350 Billion Dollars for Investments owned and controlled by the United States, and selected by myself.” The European Union accepted a pact to buy US$750 billion in energy and invest US$600 billion in the U.S., a deal virtually none of Europe’s leaders were happy with, and which France openly denounced.

Lesser entities have been similarly cowed. Paramount Pictures agreed to a $16 million payoff rather than risk challenging a spurious suit that threatened a much-sought US$8 billion merger. Columbia University is to pay the government US$221 million rather than lose access to federal funding. Harvard initially put up a determined effort to resist federal threats, but is said to be open to a $500 million settlement.

Many of the agreements are fuzzy and open to interpretation. All have resulted from one thing: the fear and uncertainty generated by the knowledge that the U.S. government has become a one-man operation that operates solely by the whim of a president shown unfailingly to be unpredictable, unreliable and contemptuous of the law, of accepted standards and even of his own word. There is nothing to be gained by betting the prosperity of Canadians on any assurances offered up by Washington as long as Donald Trump remains president. What must be done is to defend the country’s integrity, its sovereignty, its independence and its standing as a place where fairness, trust, honesty and dignity are still treated seriously as core values, even if other entities are willing to bargain theirs away.

The extent of the danger in bowing to Washington was underlined in the last hours before the supposed Aug. 1 negotiating deadline. Upset that Ottawa would join France and Britain in declaring plans to recognize a Palestinian state, Trump declared it would make it “very hard” to finalize a trade deal, effectively seeking to control Canada’s foreign policy in addition to its economic practices.

Trump has been president for just seven months and has been fortunate thus far in avoiding the forecast consequences of his policies. The stock market has been up, overall growth has been reasonable, and his targets have been capitulating rather than retaliating. But it’s early days, and no winning streak lasts forever. It takes time for the impact of bad ideas to filter through. Already, the decline in tourism is being felt as people avoid the U.S. “Where Did All the Las Vegas Tippers Go?” the Wall Street Journal wondered , noting that visits to the gambling mecca have fallen so drastically that Trump’s “no tax on tips” law has had little benefit.

The rise in stock prices has been credited largely to Wall Street’s belief that Washington wouldn’t follow through on its tariff threats — Trump was the TACO president, as in Trump Always Chickens Out. Except this time, he didn’t. The latest economic figures aren’t encouraging: hiring has slowed, unemployment has risen, imports fell sharply in the second quarter after increasing in the first, sales are struggling, and second quarter growth figures still leave the economy at less than half the rate of a year ago.

The U.S. dollar is weakening, the spiralling debt and burgeoning deficit are a direct threat to health and pension benefits many Americans depend on, and which have already been cut back under Trump’s “big, beautiful” mega-bill. The Brookings Institute notes that federal debt is at the highest level since the Second World War, and warns that spending at this level is unsustainable.

MAGA world, meanwhile, shows signs of splinters. America being what it has become, the discord arises not from tariffs, economics, or the brutalizing of immigrants, but from anger at Trump’s handling of the Epstein affair and his obvious reluctance to share full details of his involvement in it. The U.S. position on Israel is causing similar ructions. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, MAGA to her soul, denounced Israel’s actions, asserting that while the October 7 Hamas attack was “horrific… so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

Trump has been forced to backtrack on his relations with Israel’s prime minister, his reluctance to ship weapons to Ukraine, his relations with Russian president Vladimir Putin, and on numerous pledges and threats that ran into spirited pushback. Bullying and bluffing are central to his demeanour, but he doesn’t recoil from retreat when required; he just insists it’s another success.

He’ll be gone in three years or so. He has effectively humiliated the Republican party, turning it into a personal vehicle of the sort common in the autocracies he admires. It’s far from certain whoever succeeds him will manage a similar level of control. Republican heavyweights are frightened of Trump, debasing themselves in their willingness to cower before him, but no one likes to be humiliated, and it’s just as likely his departure sets off both an ugly battle to replace him and a determination to ensure no other figure ever gains a similar ability to dictate their actions.

Carney is correct in stating that Canada’s job now is to focus on “what we can control.” Our dependence on the U.S. has long been recognized as overdone and dangerous; it’s just been too easy to resist. Trump has shown us the consequences of our own lethargy.

Caving to Washington now buys us nothing. Trump’s unpredictability means nothing he agrees to can be treated with certainty. No one wants to invest in a country whose economy is controlled by a foreign renegade who operates by whim. Canada’s task is to set our own course and deal with the short-term consequences, as Ukraine has done in a far deadlier conflict, but one bearing the same choice: to stand by its independence as nation, protect its sovereignty, its pride and its heritage. It will be painful, but a country that values itself too little to withstand temporary distress soon risks being a country at all.

National Post

• Irwin Cotler & Noah Lew: We support a two-state solution. But not this way
• Michael Higgins: Mark Carney abandons Canadian principles for pinky promises on Palestine

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