Like a bad ex, Donald Trump is accidentally making Canada become its best self

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Here’s the thing about awful, soul-destroying relationships: sometimes, you come out on the other end a stronger, better person.

It’s hard to see the benefits when you’re constantly being lied to, cheated on and disparaged. It’s emotionally exhausting and you know you need to get out, but you signed a lease together and you need his income to make the payments. Plus, you think you love him.

So you ride out his unpredictable mood swings and grit your teeth as you watch him smother his steak in ketchup. You don’t know how you’ll survive – but somehow, you do.

When the fog after your inevitable breakup lifts, you vow that you will never again find yourself in that position. So you delete your Tinder profile because it’s attracting the wrong type of person. You find an apartment you can pay for on your own, because you never want to be that dependent on one man again. You get that haircut, you get a dog, you start a book club, you take up running. Suddenly, you’re the best version of yourself you’ve ever been, all because of what the worst person you know taught you about yourself.

Premiers agree to lift interprovincial barriers on alcohol sales

U.S. President Donald Trump is inspiring Canada to cut its hair. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, obviously; he’s too busy starting wars he can’t finish and threatening to dramatically raise prices of everyday goods for his people. But what he is also doing – and what he has been doing since he returned to the White House – is forcing Canada to become a stronger, better country. Because we never want to end up in this sort of relationship again.

This week, Canadian premiers met in P.E.I. and finally agreed to eliminate one among many silly interprovincial trade barriers that has endured for far too long. With the exceptions of Quebec, Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, all provinces agreed to allow direct-to-consumer alcohol across the country, removing an interprovincial trade barrier that had prevented someone in Ontario, for example, from purchasing wine directly from a producer in B.C. It’s a baby step in the grand scheme of dismantling counterproductive and costly interprovincial trade barriers, which have been estimated to cost the Canadian economy roughly $200-billion per year. Indeed, this measure doesn’t even include retail sales – only direct-to-consumer sales – even though liquor stores across the country have found themselves with vacant shelf space after pulling U.S. alcohol from stores more than a year ago.

But it’s a productive step nonetheless, and one that probably would not have happened without Mr. Trump’s inadvertent influence. Discussions about dismantling Canada’s complicated network of interprovincial barriers have been going on for decades, but it wasn’t until Mr. Trump’s hostile actions accidentally highlighted the folly of our internal trade hostilities that Canada’s premiers finally decided to act.

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We’re seeing Mr. Trump’s positive effect on Canada in other areas, too. After years of kicking the can down the road on military procurement and underfunding the Canadian Armed Forces, Ottawa is finally committing to purchases and spending real money on defence. It’s something we should have done a long time ago, but we just assumed our boyfriend would have our back if we got into trouble. But this guy has shown us why you shouldn’t rely on any man.

We’re diversifying our trade partners, looking beyond the U.S. to regions including Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates. We’re scrapping counterproductive legislation. We’re finally getting serious about increasing our resource exports, about building pipelines, and breaking ground on other big projects.

We could be doing more, of course; there are still plenty of regulatory barriers (for example, Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act, which can still be bypassed for a project deemed in the national interest), as well as red tape and other barriers impeding investment and production in Canada. But we’re seeing more action on these files in a year than we have seen in the last decade. And paradoxically, it’s thanks to Mr. Trump.

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Indeed, the Trump effect has been to force Canada to confront the rules and policies that are keeping us from being our best selves. One of the most obvious policies is supply management, which artificially raises the prices of dairy, eggs and poultry across the country to placate what is perceived as a powerful voting bloc. It is unlikely the federal government will dismantle that now, however, since Mr. Trump specifically identified dairy as a trade irritant and Ottawa will not want to give him the win.

But it makes little sense Canada would continue to hurt itself just to spite a man who will hurt us no matter what we do. Living well is the best revenge, as they say. Might as well start now.