This combination of pictures shows Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and U.S. President Donald Trump in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington.DAVE CHANROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images
We in the United States don’t care about anyone else, only ourselves. That was the theme, if there was one, of Donald Trump’s state of the union address on Tuesday: how he is turning an America that once cared about the welfare of other countries into an entirely selfish enterprise.
The narcissist-in-chief spent much of his speech drenching himself – his “astronomical achievements,” as he called them – and his country in glory. Mr. Trump hardly had a positive word to say about any other country. On the contrary, as Democrats held up kiddie paddles in protest, he declared that “we have been ripped off for decades by nearly every country on Earth.”
The chaos superspreader, who peddled falsehoods and fabrications at a clip that was impressive even for him, included Canada in this appraisal. With his take on tariffs, Mr. Trump has shown himself, even more so than on other issues, to be as shallow as a birdbath.
Incredibly, the White House is still using fentanyl inflows from Canada as grounds for their law-breaking tariffs, despite Ottawa having taken pains to address the problem, and despite plenty of evidence – as per a Globe and Mail investigation – that the problem was overstated in the first place.
But Canadians watching Mr. Trump’s marathon address had reason to be less anxious than they might have been.
Strikingly, Mr. Trump did not even mention the law-breaking 25-per-cent tariffs he had just levied on Canada and Mexico to thunderous reaction – a sign that he was spooked by the intensely negative response to the levies. Reactions were swift and damning from the markets, from the media, from business leaders and from Canada, where Ottawa and the provinces immediately announced stiff retaliatory measures.
It led Mr. Trump, not even a day after implementing the tariffs, to grant automakers a one-month exemption from tariffs. The President ignorantly held to his position on fentanyl, however, diminishing prospects that other concessions could be made. The animosity between him and Mr. Trudeau was of no help, either: In his response Tuesday, the Prime Minister, quoting the Wall Street Journal, had called Mr. Trump’s tariffs “dumb.”
Mr. Trump changes his mind at such a speed that nothing is assured. There is still ample cause to worry about how this tariff fixation could trigger, as economists predict, a deep Canadian recession.
But there are also reasons to be hopeful that Canada will survive this trade war and emerge as a stronger, more independent and more unified country.
For Mr. Trump, maintaining high tariffs against Mexico and Canada risks increasing prices, an inflation spike that he well knows wreaked havoc on Joe Biden’s presidency.
Trump’s speech to Congress was a partisan spectacle with little precedent
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is up for renewal in 2026. Tariffs that come on-stream now could be of a short-term duration and have limited effect. Mr. Trudeau will be gone, too. That will help.
We recall that Canadian retaliation against aluminum and steel tariffs during Mr. Trump’s first presidency led him to drop those tariffs. The retaliation then was much smaller in scope than Canada is implementing now.
Americans are not going to want to see their allies turned into enemies for long. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre minced no words when he declared that “President Trump stabbed America’s best friend in the back.”
If Mr. Trump persists with high tariffs, Ottawa has recent experience, from the COVID-19 pandemic, in cushioning the impact by using subsidies for those most affected.
As Americans get a sense of how our measures can affect their economy, a side effect of the trade war will be that we will be taken for granted less by the megapower. This current crisis is putting more focus on Canada south of the border than anything else I can remember.
It’s been well noted how the Trump threat has spurred a new nationalism and patriotism in this country – arguably the most bristling wave since the Second World War. The Buy Canadian and Boycott American movements are growing by the day. We are now prepared to knock down interprovincial trade barriers, build up the military and be more aggressive in finding new trade markets.
Mr. Trump has sought to weaken Canada. He wants us to pay tribute to his new Rome. That’s not going to happen. Thanks to him, we are more together, more resolute, more proud, more ready to face hard times – and more ready to overcome them.