re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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Do you actually believe that the French and Britain could defeat the Russian army?

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Who the hell is Malcolm?

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“What (Trump) wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that will make it easier to annex us.”

After all the pretexts, after all the fake grievances – migrants, fentanyl, trade deficits, banks – there is no longer any doubt. After months of attempting to mollify Donald Trump, only to be struck by the same 25-per-cent, across-the-board tariff first announced in November, the Prime Minister at last saw no reason not to lay out the reality of our situation in the starkest possible terms.

The President of the United States is trying to destroy us.

This is not a trade war. Mr. Trump does not have any legitimate issue he wishes to raise with us, using the tariff to impress upon us how serious he is. It is not a negotiation, in which each side brings something to the table it is willing to trade for something else. But neither can it even be dignified as extortion. The tariff is not intended to extract concessions from us. If it were, we would have heard some sort of concrete demand from him by now. It is intended, purely and simply, to harm us.

And it will not end here. More tariffs are coming, on our steel, on our lumber, plus a “reciprocal” tariff designed to punish us for the crime of collecting a national value-added tax, the GST. That pretext is as baseless as the rest: the GST does not discriminate against imports, but applies equally to all goods and services sold in Canada, domestic or foreign. Again, there is no demand here, or none that could possibly be met. The point is not to force us to the negotiating table.

The point is to break us.

As ever, it is necessary to step out of conventional modes of analysis, to wrap our minds around the full insanity of Mr. Trump’s ambitions. Sucker-punching your nearest neighbour and closest trading partner, even as you are cozying up to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, may not seem to make any sense, until you recall that Mr. Trump has been attacking every other democracy in sight, from Ukraine to Europe to Taiwan.

At which point the penny drops: he sides with the expansionist dictatorships because he agrees with them – because he aims to establish one himself. When he talks about invading Greenland or seizing the Panama Canal – or using “economic force” to annex Canada – he means it.

The good news is that the weapons of economic warfare are, by their nature, mutually punitive. Mr. Trump’s tariffs may hurt our exporters, but they will hurt American consumers, workers and businesses just as much. That’s particularly true in a tightly integrated continental economy such as ours, where parts might move back and forth across the border half a dozen times en route to making the finished product.

Sticking a spoke in the wheels of trade, as Mr. Trump has now done, can only result in higher prices, stalled production lines, broken supply chains, and lost jobs – in America, not just in Canada. Just the threat alone seems already to have spooked investors: not only are stock markets cratering, but the Atlanta Federal Reserve projects that first-quarter GDP in the U.S. will fall by 2.8 per cent annualized.

Of course, the retaliatory measures Canada has announced will do much the same to our consumers and workers. So be it. If this were an ordinary trade war, a spat over this product or that industry, that might be seen as needlessly escalatory.

But this is something quite different. The tariff fight has to be seen in the context of the larger struggle, which – if it were not clear before, it should be crystal-clear now – is existential.

Whatever harm we do to the Americans will probably be only a fraction of the harm they do to themselves. But what is essential at this moment is the demonstration effect: to show that we are unafraid, our resolve is ironclad, and we are willing to pay whatever price we must to preserve our independence.

That cannot, however, be the end of it. Fending off Mr. Trump’s advances may be the immediate imperative. But we must be no less vigilant to reduce our exposure to such attacks in future – by making our investment climate so attractive that businesses will want to locate here, notwithstanding the Trump tariffs; by increasing our productivity enough to offset the efficiency losses from such unwarranted restrictions on trade; by diversifying our trade as much as possible, in favour of more reliable partners.

In time, perhaps, the Americans will come to their senses. But the damage is done. Mr. Trump will never realize his dream of annexation. He has, however, succeeded in destroying the trust between our two nations, probably permanently.

- Andrew Coyne

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