LILLEY: Canada needs a serious response to Trump's 51st state comments
Our message so far is one that Trump simply doesn't believe and won't hear
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We take pride in being the biggest trading partner of the United States of America.
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LILLEY: Canada needs a serious response to Trump's 51st state comments Back to video
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Canadian politicians love to boast about the massive flow of two-way trade between our two countries across the longest undefended border in the world.
Now that relationship, that closeness, that reliance on the United States, may end up hurting us.
Is President-elect Donald Trump serious about wanting to make Canada the 51st state? He certainly sounds like it of late, moving from what appeared to be a joke to poke at Justin Trudeau to something that he is serious about.
“Canada should be a 51st state, and that’s where we are now,” Trump said Thursday night.
In a discussion with reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump made it clear that tariffs were coming for Canadian exports to the United States.
“They’ve taken about 20% of our car business. I’d rather do it here. We could put tariffs on that. We don’t have tariffs on them yet, but they will. That will happen,” he said, noting he’d rather build cars in Detroit or South Carolina.
“We don’t need anything that they have,” Trump said while deriding Canadian energy, oil and gas and lumber.
Saying that Canada doesn’t have anything the U.S. needs and at the same time clearly wanting everything in Canada are contradictory statements. Not that Trump isn’t above contradicting himself on this or other matters.
What is our response to all of this?
For the most part, it has been to have premiers like Doug Ford of Ontario and Danielle Smith of Alberta go on American television to make the case that Canada and the U.S. are great trading partners.
On Thursday, just before Trump made his case once again to annex Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared on CNN, his first attempt at making Canada’s case since these tariff threats began, and his message was similar to the premiers in claiming that cross-border trade is good and tariffs will hurt American workers as much as Canadian.
“Anything an American president does to hurt the Canadian economy will also hurt Canadian American consumers, American workers and American growth,” Trudeau said.
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Statements like that have been orthodoxy in places like Washington, Ottawa, London or Tokyo for generations now. The idea that tariffs are bad for the economy is taken as a given, while the free flow of goods across borders is seen as an indisputable fact.
Except the problem is Trump doesn’t believe that and neither do the people around him.
Peter Navarro, a strong advocate of tariffs and opponent of free trade, has been appointed as Trump’s Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing. He was instrumental during Trump’s first term in pushing the anti-trade, tariff-forward agenda, and now he’s back for a second round.
Trump’s former trade representative Robert Lighthizer has written a book called No Trade is Free that lays out the thinking of those around Trump now. They don’t see tariffs as detrimental to the American economy and in fact see them as vital for bringing manufacturing and production back to the U.S.
They see this as a war to protect workers who have been devastated by trade deals over the last several decades.
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The reason for pointing this out is to say we are pushing a message at Trump and his team that they fundamentally don’t believe in and will never believe. What the solution is to this problem isn’t quite clear, but our current methods aren’t working.
The other problem is that Trump’s goals in using tariffs appear to have changed.
When he first mentioned tariffs, he said he wanted border changes. Giving him those changes on the border was an easy ask, but now he wants to erase the border.
What if he is serious?
Do we have an answer if he moves forward to cripple our economy? We currently send 76% of all exports to the U.S., so shutting that down would be devastating.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a functioning government with a mandate at the moment – and we won’t for several months to come. That leaves us particularly vulnerable.
The next few weeks are filled with great uncertainty about what Trump will do and what response, if any, Canada can muster.
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