The American president has threatened us — Mexico too — with a 25% tariff on all goods and services that has all the political experts at your local landfill going apeshit, with no offence intended to either apes or their periodic need to take a shit. After all, domestic apes only shit what you feed them.
This is the kind of thing that gives your hero Pierre Poillievre the zoomies, and results in him yipping and yapping as he runs hell-bent along the perimeter of the backyard fence. As the postal workers are on strike, it’s the only exercise he gets.
I’m not going to get into the thousand or so reasons why this is all political theatre, on all sides, and by that I mean the Americans and their bullhorn-blowing acolytes here north of the border. But I can point out a couple of things.
First, if the tariffs were to actually be applied, every single American citizen, and probably all the illegal ones too, would lose an estimated $1500.00 a year in economic consequences, and that’s before any possible retaliation by Canada. That’s because of the intricate integration of the two economies. In essence, if the Americans were going to carry through with this threat, it wouldn’t be a case of shooting themselves in the foot, but rather a case of them employing a machine gun for the same purpose.
The Americans would never impose a 25% tariff on us, or Mexico. Full stop.
What they would do is use such a threat to make us take action in other areas, like defence spending, border security, and a range of other side issues where the Americans are pissed at us. To be sure, on the trade front, our southern neighbours have always been rankled by government subsidies in the softwood lumber sphere, or the Quebec dairy sphere, and other economic spheres, but those things have all been addressed through the negotiation of free trade deals between the two/three countries, including the last one signed by the incoming American president himself. You’re not going to suggest that he negotiated a bad deal with Canada, are you? Because he only negotiates “perfect” deals. And the last one has his fingerprints all over it.
Just look at the statement the American president-elect put out on his home-made social media platform that announced the tariff attack and threat in the first place.
“This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”
So, it’s not about trade, per se, it’s about using trade as a cudgel to get what you want in other areas.
As his nominee for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent writes, “Whether it is getting allies to spend more on their own defense, opening foreign markets to U.S. exports, securing co-operation on ending illegal immigration and interdicting fentanyl trafficking, or deterring military aggression, tariffs can play a central role,”
Oh my God, can we please learn about this guy, already? He’s only been around for forever, yet we continue to react, and/or over-react based upon assumptions that we make that are, oftentimes, flawed assumptions. I mean how many of us got that last election totally wrong, right?
If anyone thinks that Agent Orange is going to wipe out the economies of many of his own states, or that he’s going to be responsible for Americans at large taking a huge consumer price hit, then you’re thinking and behaving exactly as he intends.
So we’ll spend more on defence. Tighten up the border. Put the screws to fentanyl, which is actually more of a China/Mexico thing, although that drug causes untold mayhem here in Canada as well. I’ll not argue against any of those things, so go Donny as far as I’m concerned.
But to think the guy would go out and knee-cap himself just because he likes to mouth off on social media?
Hardly.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 