Commentary
There are two alternative ways to deal with the current tariff conflict with the United States.
One is to exploit the increasing doubt about why the negotiations broke down and make a discreet counter-offer to the final state of proposals that caused the talks to stall. If there is no quick compromise to reaching an adequate agreement for both sides, we must take Prime Minister Mark Carney’s histrionic pseudo-Churchillian campaign defending Canada against heavy odds applied by an unjust competitor, and devise a plan to manufacture or otherwise produce as much as is practical behind tariff walls for ourselves, and embark on a comprehensive plan to broaden trade. If possible, we should do both.
The second of these is one of the pillars of John A. Macdonald’s National Policy in the 1880s and ’90s, in which the share of our exports taken up by the United States was only about 40 percent—a vulnerable exposure but nothing like the more recent numbers of over 70 percent.
Under either scenario, we must be done with this ludicrous climate change overreaction and build oil and gas pipelines to the east and west coasts and greatly expand our refining capability as soon as possible—and without tolerating frivolous and vexatious litigation from representatives of the indigenous people. The native victimhood industry has been pushing on an open door for so long they believe they possess the unlimited right to bring the commercial affairs of this country to a standstill.
It is time to put an end to any official collective self-defamation that we ever sought or would have tolerated any form of genocide against the native peoples. It is also well past the time when we should have banished the climate change hobgoblin. The climate is changing, as it does, but the global temperature has not moved perceptibly in over 30 years, in which time $16 trillion has been spent in the world addressing climate change and not one life has been saved.
This may be the most egregious example of the well-known historical phenomenon of the “madness of crowds.” My own view, as I have expressed here and elsewhere, is that following the defeat of the international left in the Cold War, it showed an astounding and unprecedented genius for improvisation, bedraggled and thoroughly beaten though it was. The left spontaneously clambered aboard the conservation bandwagon, which had been chiefly inhabited by authentic nature-lovers, and swiftly rebuilt this amiable if eccentric movement into a battering ram from which to assault capitalism from a new angle in the name of saving the planet.
In the complacent vulnerability created by our Cold War victory, in Canada and Western Europe, we fell for it and spent backbreaking amounts of money making life more difficult for our people of modest means. The cost of gasoline and home heating fuel skyrocketed as we hurled ourselves into the unmitigated idiocy of solar panels and windmills. By retracing our public policy steps on winged feet, Canada could swiftly become one of the greatest energy exporters in the world.
Although compromised trade relations with the United States will make it more difficult to attract manufacturing investment to Canada, if we cut our corporate taxes significantly below those of our neighbour, we could certainly reverse the negative capital flows of the last 10 years and enter a phase of much greater job creation than we have known in over a decade.
Immigration policy also has to be reformed to seek the most easily assimilable people who bring the greatest accretions of skill to the workforce. Income tax reductions will help, and so will sufficient housing production to avoid squeezing the livelihood of citizens of modest income and reducing the ethnic and racial abrasions that result from it. In fact, Canada is a country that is uniquely welcoming to immigrants when their arrival is encouraged. Problems have arisen because immigration was in numbers far beyond our ability to house and provide basic services for them. This strained the citizens of modest income, who have often been falsely accused of racism and bigotry when they are merely objecting to public policy that makes their own lives more difficult for no valid reason.
The fact that the official Canadian explanation for terminating trade negotiations with the United States has moved around from bad faith by the U.S. commerce secretary intervening in the eleventh-hour negotiations, to concerns about a last-minute 15 percent tariff on trucks, indicates that the rights and wrongs of the breakdown of discussions are not clear. Nor is it clear why the negotiations were terminated. Rank political posturing on the Canadian side should neither be assumed nor ruled out.
To return to the first two alternatives, we should advance on all fronts: Canada should revive the discussions with the United States, having presumably demonstrated that we will not simply roll over like poodles whatever they do, and propose a compromise that we can live with. But at the same time, we should develop a comprehensive policy to strengthen Canada economically. We should start by getting rid of the internal trade barriers within Canada, if necessary by the invocation of some form of eminent domain by the federal government in the national interest. And to the extent that we are stuck with higher tariff barriers than previously, we should encourage domestic manufacturing, especially in areas where we might be able to develop export markets other than the United States.
This dispute has exposed our problems of negative capital flows, prolonged low investment, poor productivity, high taxes, excessive dependence on the U.S. market, and clumsy bureaucratic approval policy. We need more pipelines, transport, and infrastructure of all kinds, more digital resources, and an urgent and swiftly approved program of exploitation and export of our vast treasure house of almost all kinds of resources. The $7.5 billion that has been allocated for workers and companies affected by this tariff impasse should be clearly transitional and not permanent, and the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto on Sept. 14 and 15 should aim at producing decisions with imminent starting dates and not another lofty recitation of distant ambitions.
In the particularly sensitive areas of culture, entertainment, and the media, we should get rid of almost all the administrative personnel at the public broadcaster but greatly strengthen its budget, and install an administration that will guarantee reasonable balance, fairness, and professionalism that will make it a first-class international service of news and entertainment. To the extent that this could entice back to Canada many talented people who have departed due to the absence of adequate career opportunities in this country, that would be a huge and durable benefit.
The fact that Canada has only 11 percent of the population of the United States, and in the last decade a shrinking percentage of its GDP, takes nothing away from the fact that this is an extremely rich country with a very skilled and motivated population. We have the makings of an objectively more livable country than the United States, even if it is unable to operate on the same immense scale. It is time to get on with it.
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