U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on April 18.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
Was John Turner right? Is Donald Trump’s weaponization of Canada’s dependence on trade with the United States vindication of the Liberal leader’s dire prophecies during the 1988 election campaign? Is this the bitter fruit of the Mulroney government’s decision, all those years ago, to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States?
No, actually. Mr. Turner’s argument wasn’t “someday, decades hence, the U.S. will be taken over by a madman who will reintroduce the tariffs it has just eliminated and use them to beat us into submission.” It was that free trade itself, our growing closeness with our neighbours, would steadily, ineluctably sap our independence; that American companies would take over vast swaths of Canadian industry; that Canada would have to harmonize our social and environmental policies with the United States to remain competitive; and so on.
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None of these things came to pass. In the years just prior to the FTA, Canada sent about 75 per cent of its exports to the United States, the same or better than it has done in recent years. U.S. firms controlled less than 8 per cent of Canadian assets as of 2023, roughly a third less than they did in the late 1980s. Canadian and U.S. social and environmental policies have if anything diverged more sharply since then, notably with regard to climate change.
Nevertheless, what is true is that after Mr. Trump, our relationship can never be quite the same. Canadian trade dependence on the U.S. long predates the FTA, and for good reason. With the world’s richest consumer market on our doorstep, it’s logical that we would do the bulk of our trade with them.
Trade policy can lean against this, but at considerable cost. Under any normal president, the costs of diversification wouldn’t be worth the benefit of reducing our exposure to the U.S. Under Mr. Trump, it is.
Because Mr. Trump isn’t just a once-in-a-million, black-swan event. Unforeseeable his presidency may have been, unlikely it most certainly is, but now that he is President, we cannot pretend nothing else has changed.
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This argument is not universally shared. There is a critique which runs as follows: Mr. Trump is not going to be around forever. Most Americans do not wish us ill. The business community still wants to trade with us. The institutions of American government remain intact.
Once Mr. Trump leaves office, America will return to its senses. Let us not, then, make hasty and irreversible decisions, based on the delusions and predilections of one man.
This thesis – it will all blow over – treats Mr. Trump as essentially causa sui, as if he were an accident that just sort of happened to America. Somehow he became president. But in time he will be no longer. And it will be as if he never were.
But Mr. Trump didn’t just happen to America. He was elected, twice – the second time after attempting a coup. That alone should tell us that something fundamental has changed in American society, that it is so broken that one half of it could knowingly put a degenerate lunatic in the White House just to spite the other half.
He has used his time in office, what is more, to change America further – especially the second time around. The Republican Party has been utterly transformed, at every level. There is nothing left of the democratic, free-market, world-leading Republicanism of old.
Mr. Trump and his officials have not only broken every law, subverted every institution, assaulted every critic and betrayed every ally. They have normalized attitudes and behaviour that were previously beyond the pale. It will not be easy to un-normalize them.
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And he is barely a year into his term! What further damage he might wreak in the 33 months he has left is too awful even to guess at. Certainly we can have no assurance that Mr. Trump will leave office in 2029 – not willingly, at any rate. Even if he does, will his successor (JD Vance? Don Jr.? Laura Loomer?) mark any serious change in direction?
And should the Democrats be elected, how much would really change? It would take time to rebuild the institutions and rewrite the laws. Four years later, America would be as divided as ever. All it would take is a couple of hundred thousand votes in a few swing states to tip the U.S., and the world, back into the abyss.
So yes, it is a kind of “rupture.” It may not be permanent, but it’s enduring enough that we really can’t treat it as temporary. The risk is great enough that we do have to mitigate our exposure: not by closing our doors to trade with the U.S., but by opening them to the rest of the world.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Donald Trump’s term as U.S. President will end in 2028. It will end in 2029.