Ben Woodfinden: Don’t trust the Democrats. They will tariff us too, just with a smile

Hours after Trump’s latest tariffs on Canadian wine, dairy, and autos took effect, California’s Democratic Governor and likely presidential contender Gavin Newsom posted on X calling Canada America’s “closest ally.” Then a few days after his initial tweet, Newsom did interviews with CBC and CTV, and on CTV he said something very important for Canadians to take note of. When asked if he would remove all of the tariffs Trump has put in place, he waffled for about a minute before eventually coming to say “I can’t guarantee that, but I can guarantee you nothing like this — the level of disrespect, talking about the 51st state.” In the CTV interview, Newsom even explicitly brings up some of the tariffs from Trump’s first term that Biden then kept in place.

This illustrates a crucial point that Canadian voters, policymakers and politicians all need to drill into their heads now: Democrats aren’t coming to save us.

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A Democratic president will likely be much nicer to us, end the insults, ratchet down the trade war, try and rebuild and restore some degree of normalcy to a broken relationship. But we aren’t going back to a world in which tariffs in some form don’t exist, and America is not increasingly inward looking and less reliable. Our plan cannot be to just bunker down, wait until 2029 when Donald Trump leaves office and hope everything goes back to normal. This is the new normal now and going forward we have no choice but to adapt. We must reduce our dependence and exposure to the United States no matter who is in the Whitehouse next, or after that.

Let’s start with tariffs. Since the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1989, and NAFTA after that, we’ve had mostly open, tariff-free trade with the Americans. Mostly is the key word here, it’s never been completely tariff free. For example, Canadian softwood lumber has long been the subject of on and off American tariffs since 1982. In 2015, Canada won the right to hit back with more than a billion dollars in tariffs after the Americans passed a law forcing meat sold in the US to be labelled with where the animal was born and raised, which made our beef and pork more trouble to sell there. And there have been others: ongoing fights over dairy, over Bombardier jets, over “Buy American” and so on.

So it could be tempting to read the last year and a half as just more of the same, only louder. That would be a mistake. The old fights could get heated, but they were narrow and focused disputes in which both partners shared the same understanding: that open trade between us was normal and good, mutually beneficial and the fights were about the exceptions.