Conrad Black: A comprehensive plan for Canada to survive Trump’s trade war

President Trump has said many times that he likes Canada and that his only grievance against us was that we had better trade negotiators than the United States. I have had the opportunity to suggest that the most effective response to that was to get better negotiators rather than to sandbag us with unreasonable tariffs that would come back upon millions of Americans as well. The long promised 50 per cent U.S. tariff increases on a wide range of Canadian items are scheduled to go into effect on August 19, though there are rumors of an imminent preemptive agreement that will avoid that.

Globalism was partly based on the retention of trade concessions that the advanced countries and especially the United States had made in order to buy the comparative goodwill of many politically neutral or unreliable countries during the Cold War, and partly came from endless demands from underdeveloped countries for “trade not aid,” as if we owed them the creation of domestic unemployment to increase their workforces. It has finally been realized that the advanced countries do not have to be overly self-sacrificing for the benefit of other nationalities to whom we do not owe such largesse.

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There was absolutely no reason for the United States to be running a trade deficit of $1.3 trillion and although the American administration has imposed tariffs in a gratuitously blunderbuss manner, there is nothing wrong with that country straightening out its accounts and putting the welfare of its own workforce ahead of others. The world owes the United States more than the United States owes the world. However, and as I have also had occasion to tell Mr. Trump and reported here, his assimilation of Canada’s conduct to Mexico’s was an outrage. The U.S. does not really run a deficit with Canada; this has always been a fair-trading country, and Mexico was in active collusion with the most violent gangsters in the world in the introduction of huge numbers of destitute people into the United States including hundreds of thousands of hardened criminals bringing with them dangerous quantities of lethal narcotics. Mexico also engaged in a systematic pattern of attracting American manufacturing with tax breaks, cheap labour, and abuse of trade arrangements to sell product back into the U.S. that had formerly been made there. We did none of this and were defamed by the comparison.

On the other hand, the Liberal election campaign last year representing the American president as Godzilla preparing to rape Canada-the land of Dudley Doright and the pure snow-maidens, though it had the virtue of succeeding electorally, was also unutterable nonsense. It is a hallmark of the Trump negotiating tactics to announce extreme positions and create a great deal of confusion and alarm, as has been demonstrated (quite unsuccessfully) in the current pyrotechnics about the Iran war.