Donald Trump wants to make an example out of Canada. How will we prepare?

Open this photo in gallery:

The Prime Minister’s speech at Davos was on Jan. 20. In the days since then, Donald Trump or his officials have:

• claimed, without evidence, that the Prime Minister had retracted the speech in a private conversation with the President;
• referred to the Prime Minister, for the first time, as “Governor” Carney;
• threatened to impose a 100-per-cent tariff on Canada in retaliation if it “makes a deal” with China;
• claimed that China is “completely taking over” Canada;
• threatened to send American military aircraft into Canadian airspace if we did not complete a planned purchase of F-35 jet fighters;
• publicly offered support and encouragement for the secession of Alberta from Canada, describing the province as a “natural partner for the U.S.”;
• reportedly held a series of “covert meetings” with the far-right leaders of the secessionist movement, who are seeking a $500-billion line of credit in the event the province were to vote to secede.

Perhaps you will detect a certain pattern. It is of a piece with the President’s previous declarations of his intent to make Canada the 51st state, his posts of maps with Canada as part of the United States. But it is more precise, more frequent, and more intense.

The Prime Minister’s speech, and the response it aroused, have clearly got under the President’s skin. The irritation may be as simple as his displeasure at someone else getting all the attention. But it may be something darker.

Opinion: Europe’s far right suddenly has a Trump problem

The point of the Prime Minister’s speech, after all, was to rally the world’s middle powers against domination by the world’s great powers – to urge them to stand together, rather than to allow the great powers to play them off against one another; to form new trade alliances, rather than allow the great powers to exploit their dependence on trade with them as a means of subordinating them. He never mentioned the United States, but it was clear to whom he was referring.

For the leader of a country that depends on the United States for 75 per cent of its exports to say this – one that is on the verge, moreover, of renegotiating its existing trade treaty with the Great Republic, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) – took considerable sang-froid, some would say cheek. It was not only a declaration, if you will, of Canada’s independence, but a call for other countries to reclaim their own. We know what empires think of revolts by the colonies.

So they are, at the very least, trying to make an example of us. The message is aimed, not just at Canada, but at other middle powers: This is what happens to those who try to resist American overlordship. We will not just hit you with tariffs. We will malign your leaders, give aid and comfort to seditious elements within your borders, disregard your territorial sovereignty, and beyond.

But it pretty clearly signals something of their intentions toward this country. The suggestion that we have been taken over by Communist China is in line with Mr. Trump’s earlier declarations that the border between us is “unnatural.” It is an attempt to delegitimize our existence, to imply that we are not a real country, or not one whose independence the U.S. need recognize. Add in the invocations of support for a besieged secessionist minority, the “natural” partners of Americans, and you have a chillingly familiar message.

And we are only one year into the Trump administration. They are bound to get crazier, as they have grown steadily crazier until now – literally, in Mr. Trump’s case – not only in the extremity of their ambitions but the fanaticism with which they pursue them. Domestically, they have brought the United States to the brink of civil conflict. Internationally, they very nearly provoked a shooting war with Europe over Greenland. They are halfway to establishing a dictatorship in the United States. We should not imagine they would shrink to impose their will on their neighbours.

Opinion: Carney’s speech makes Canada a threat to Trump

Indeed, they have openly declared as much. Read the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, with its talk of enforcing “American preeminence” in the Western Hemisphere, of its intent to “reward and encourage … governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy” and to “discourage” collaboration with other countries – and more broadly to “assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

This does not necessarily imply the use of military force; almost certainly it does not. But neither should we imagine that our troubles are limited to the tariffs Mr. Trump has seen fit to impose on us, or that they would be over in the event that the USMCA is successfully renegotiated. This is, remember, the treaty that Mr. Trump himself signed, and demanded we sign. The concessions we made in the last round have simply served as the base from which to make new demands in this one.

These, we may be sure, will be extravagant, and by no means limited to trade or the economy. Mr. Trump will seek to exploit our dependence on U.S. trade to extort all sorts of concessions from us, in matters ranging from defence and foreign policy to critical infrastructure to natural resources. And should we agree to pay the ransom he demands, we can have no assurance that he will honour any undertakings he makes in response – assuming he makes any.

Those, prominent on social media, who urge us to “be vewy vewy quiet” in response – to say or do nothing that might irritate His Orange Majesty, lest we put the USMCA talks at risk – are therefore not only craven: They are deluding themselves. The prize on which they urge us to keep our eyes is not self-evidently a prize at all. Of course, other things being equal, we would prefer USMCA to no USMCA. But other things may not be equal: It will depend on the terms. And if we want an agreement on terms that are remotely acceptable, we have to be ready to walk away from the negotiating table – to walk away from the USMCA, if it comes to that.

But supposing we dodge that bullet. Mr. Trump will still be in power, still out of his mind, still surrounded by fanatics with dreams of hemispheric domination. Between tariffs on the one hand, and military force on the other, the U.S. has a great many coercive measures at its disposal.

Our relationship, after all, built up over many decades, extends far beyond the mere exchange of goods. An administration that wanted to cause trouble for us could start by imposing restrictions on the flow of people. Indeed it already has: tightening border screening, limiting visas, targeting particular individuals for security reviews. Imagine how much more intrusive and punitive these could become.

It could do the same to Canadian businesses: targeting them for arbitrary and aggressive regulatory enforcement; launching frivolous antitrust actions, or discovering baseless environmental or safety violations. In ordinary times, such actions would be restrained by the limits of the courts and the rule of law. But we are not in ordinary times. The Department of Justice, under Mr. Trump, is simply an instrument of his personal rule.

Or if you really want to imagine the kind of havoc they could create, suppose Canadian banks were to suddenly find themselves shut out of the U.S. dollar settlement system. Suppose our internet networks were to come under assault. Or our electricity grids. Some people in this country talk about cutting off exports of Canadian energy to the States, as a means of punishing them for actions we dislike. They forget that the U.S. has far greater ability to do the same to us.

There has been much talk of what we need to do externally to give ourselves greater bargaining power – of the need to develop options, in trade, and allies, in defence and security matters. All well and good. But we need also to pay much more attention to strengthening our own internal resilience – our capacity to endure whatever the Trump administration might throw at us.

That’s not only or even primarily about military capacity. That’s about capacity generally: state capacity, to be sure, but more broadly, societal capacity. The point of the measures described above, especially in the havoc-creating end of things, is to cause pain, to induce panic, to sow divisions and, ultimately, to force capitulation. Our exposure in this case is not only a function of our proximity to the U.S., but our own internal weaknesses.

Addressing those weaknesses will require us to face up to some hard choices that we have preferred to put off until now. We have, for example, tolerated for many decades what most democratic countries do not: the proposition that the country can be forced to negotiate its own dismemberment at any time, by a simple vote of one of the provinces – with the result that we now face the possibility of such a vote in two of them.

Given the situation we are in – given the near certainty that any such vote will be the target of massive foreign interference and disinformation campaigns – is that something we can still tolerate? Why would we hand our adversaries the tools with which to divide and destroy us?

We are already divided, economically, by hundreds of interprovincial trade barriers – barriers that do not just weaken us economically, but contribute to our political divisions. Hitherto we have relied on the provinces to negotiate an end to these, with predictably derisory results. Is this something we can still tolerate, under the circumstances? Or is it time for the federal government to do what federal governments do in most federations, and knock down those barriers unilaterally?

Our transportation, electricity and telecommunications infrastructure is stretched thin, literally and figuratively: We are, as we have been called, a horizontal Chile, with obvious choke points and obvious vulnerabilities. Protecting these is clearly an imperative – but so is improving our ability to function in the event that these come under attack.

Can we, in a crisis, rapidly mobilize the materials and manpower needed to bring it under control? Can we, in so doing, reduce the societal cost of externally imposed shocks of this kind, signal to others our ability to endure them, and so make it less likely they will be tried? And if not, what do we need to do to make this possible?

We are in a lot of trouble, and we need to move fast. We have little ability to predict Mr. Trump’s actions, and no reason to confine our imagination to what is reasonable or even practical. It is not enough to hope for the best. We have to plan for the worst.