A Pointless Economic Attack on America’s Northern Neighbour
Many Canadian conservatives were warming to Donald Trump—until he threatened to destroy their economy with crippling tariffs.
When Donald Trump was first elected US President in 2016, the share of Canadians expressing “confidence” in him polled at just 22 percent. (For Barack Obama, by contrast, the corresponding figure had been 83 percent.) Four years later, perceptions were similar: In advance of the 2020 election, only 15 percent of surveyed Canadians expressed support for Trump. Even among supporters of Canada’s right-of-centre Conservative Party, Joe Biden was more popular than Trump by a 47–33 percent margin.
But the tide shifted in the run-up to last year’s Presidential election: A September 2024 survey indicated that while a majority of Canadians still held negative views of Trump, the Republican candidate was more popular than Kamala Harris among Canadian Conservative voters. Many of these new Canadian Trump fans had come to admire his willingness to speak hard truths (as conservatives view them) about DEI, biological sex, drug policy, and immigration—viewpoints that Canada’s own (less outspoken) conservative politicians often treat as taboo.
Moreover, the 2024 US election took place at time when Canadian voters of all stripes were growing fed up with Canada’s outgoing Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau—especially his (often sanctimoniously expressed) enthusiasm for progressive causes such as mass immigration, carbon taxes, postmodern intellectual fads (specifically, “postnationalism”), expensive anti-racism programs, incessant “2SLGBTQI+” boosterism, all-ages drag shows, Black Lives Matter, land acknowledgments, gender equity, and intersectionality.
Jonathan Kay
On all of these issues, Trump and Trudeau stand at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. And as Canadians’ patience with Trudeau’s late-2010s-era progressive dogmatism grew thin, it was natural that some would begin to see Trump—the anti-Trudeau—in a more sympathetic light.
Not to suggest that Trump cares what anyone outside the United States thinks of him. But if he did, he might have been pleased to learn that he had ideological allies in Canada who were rooting for his success.
But in light of the crippling 25 percent tariffs that Trump is threatening to impose on Canadian (and Mexican) exports, that uptick in north-of-the-border support for Trump now seems painfully misguided. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a Conservative, perhaps put it best in an unguarded comment made on Monday: “On election day, was I happy [Trump] won? One hundred per cent, I was. [But] then the guy pulled out the knife and [expletive] yanked it into us.”
While Canada and the United States have fought many trade battles over the decades, it’s unlikely that any were initiated on so flimsy a pretext as this one. The White House claims that the “extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency.” But it’s estimated that less than one percent of fentanyl consumed in the United States originates with Canadian smugglers. And while the number of migrants gaining access to the United States from Canada has gone up recently, it’s still a rounding error on America’s total influx.
Canada responded to Trump’s threat by announcing a countervailing set of tariffs on American products. As in all trade wars of this type, consumers in both countries would be made poorer. To quote US Republican Senator Rand Paul, “tariffs are simply taxes. Conservatives once united against new taxes. Taxing trade will mean less trade and higher prices.”
Tariffs are simply taxes. Conservatives once united against new taxes. Taxing trade will mean less trade and higher prices.
— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) February 1, 2025
Thankfully, Canadians got a last-minute reprieve on Monday. The tariffs haven’t been shelved, however, but merely delayed for another thirty days. In the interim, Canada’s government is working feverishly to indulge Trump’s demands—such as the deployment of thousands of security officers to prevent drugs and migrants from entering the United States.
It’s hard to say what other demands Trump will make: He seems to revel in his ability to humiliate smaller nations in this manner, and continues to taunt Canadians with semi-comedic bluster about turning Canada into “the 51st state.”
It’s hard to overstate the economic pain that Trump’s tariffs, if fully enacted, would bring to Canada—which explains why Trudeau has been so eager to jump through Trump’s hoops (even establishing a “fentanyl czar,” at the President’s request). Exports account for a third of the Canadian economy, and over three quarters of those exports go to the United States. In the United States, by contrast, exports comprise just eleven percent of GDP, and Canada buys just seventeen percent of them.
So while, yes, consumers in both nations would suffer from a tit-for-tat trade war, the scale of the suffering would differ enormously. Trump knows this, and is exploiting that imbalance. His defenders call this clever hard-nosed statesmanship (“3-D chess,” as one of my social-media followers put it). In fact, he’s simply acting like a bully.
The timing of Trump’s threats comes at a politically awkward time for Canada. Trudeau announced his resignation in early January, and then prorogued (which is to say, suspended) Parliament until March, as a means to (1) evade scathing attacks from the opposition Conservatives (who enjoy a healthy lead in most opinion polls); (2) pre-empt a non-confidence vote that would bring down Trudeau’s Liberal-led minority government; and (3) give his would-be successors time to stage a shotgun Liberal leadership race. Trudeau’s political obituaries were all written last month, and it was imagined that his remaining time in office would comprise little more than a sombre personal denouement that would end when his party got trounced in this year’s federal election (which, by law, must take place on or before 25 October). But Trump has now given Trudeau and his fellow Liberals reason to hope they might be able to rally voters to their party’s banner with patriotic calls to join in a “strong, united Team Canada approach.” (And some opinion surveys have indeed shown a slight uptick in Liberal polling numbers—though it’s become difficult to disentangle the statistical effects of Trudeau’s resignation from Trump’s tariffs.)
Much of the country’s media establishment, which until just a few weeks ago had resigned itself to a Conservative win in the coming election, has gone in hard for this sudden patriotic mania. A reporter at the Toronto Star bluntly instructed Canadians that “if you’re not on Team Canada right now, sit down and be quiet.” At the Globe & Mail, a columnist has been strenuously berating Alberta’s Premier for seeking more favourable trade terms for her province’s oil and gas exports, denouncing her for having “broke[n] faith with other Canadian leaders [and] sucked up to Trump.” (The fact that she was successful seems only to have made her crime worse in the media’s eyes.) In one especially odd episode, a CBC reporter attending a recent press conference asked federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre if he might consider simply stepping aside so that Liberals can continue running the country unimpeded, and thereby “allow us to get through this crisis.” Not surprisingly, Poilievre declined that invitation, and the episode became viral clickbait for Canadian conservatives who were already exasperated by the CBC’s political bias.
CBC reporter: Are you saying you would step aside & not compete for the head of the country to allow us to get through this crisis?
— Stacey (@StaceyMonette27) February 2, 2025
What a stupid question.
Poilievre doesn’t hold back. pic.twitter.com/MKwDrME5xG
Trump’s behaviour has created branding risks for Poilievre and other Canadian conservatives, however—as even under normal political circumstances, they are often accused of harbouring pro-Trump sympathies by the CBC and other leftist media outlets. And over the weekend, Poilievre made his position on Trump absolutely clear. “Common Sense Conservatives condemn President Trump’s massive, unjust and unjustified tariffs on Canada’s already weak economy,” he wrote on social media. “Canada is the United States’ closest neighbour, greatest ally and best friend. We share the longest undefended border and fought alongside Americans in two world wars, Korea and Afghanistan, where 158 of our brave men and women died helping the U.S. avenge the 9/11 attacks. There is no justification whatsoever for this treatment.”
Poilievre then went on to put the screws to Trudeau, by demanding that the Liberals “put aside their partisan interests and recall Parliament now to pass a Canada First Plan”—a plan that would, among other things, promote domestic production of strategic goods such as steel and aluminium, tear down Canada’s arcane interprovincial trade barriers, and ensure that “all [Canada’s] tariff revenues [are used to assist] affected workers and businesses” (as opposed to lining government coffers). Such demands put the PM in an awkward no-win spot. If Trudeau reconvenes Parliament, he risks having his government brought down in a no-confidence vote. If he doesn’t, then his unifying rhetoric about banding together under the banner of “Team Canada” will seem disingenuous.
Trudeau’s patriotic flourish rings hollow for other reasons, too. As Quillette readers know, his Liberals have spent years denouncing their own country as a supposed “genocide” state populated by racists, misogynists, and transphobes acutely in need of (Liberal-funded) “anti-hate” education. Trudeau himself—the man now presenting himself as captain of Team Canada—took a leading role in hyping false claims that 215 corpses of Indigenous children had been found on the grounds of a former Indigenous school in 2021, even going so far as to lower Canadian flags on federal buildings for almost six months during the resulting social panic. No one in modern Canadian history has done more to smear Canada’s reputation or degrade its sense of national pride. And I was only half-joking when I suggested on X that Trump might find support among Trudeau’s hard-core progressive base if he rebranded his tariffs as part of BDS-style sanctions aimed at punishing Canada for its many (supposed) crimes against humanity.
History is full of examples in which societies put aside their petty political differences and band together to face a common outside threat. And it would be glorious if that sort of thing would now happen in Canada. But the prospects seem unlikely—and not just because Trudeau is too discredited and unpopular to lead such a unity movement.
It’s also because many of the noisiest Canadian conservatives on social media have succumbed so thoroughly to their embittered attitudes toward Trudeau that they are now inventing reasons to take Trump’s side. These include the argument that Trump is correct to claim that America’s drug and migrant problems can be blamed on Canada; that weak stewardship of the Canadian economy somehow made Canada a ripe target for foreign economic predation; and even that Trump would somehow be doing Canadians a favour by fully taking over portions of our country.
All of this feels like an exercise in victim blaming. Trudeau deserves plenty of criticism for all sorts of things. But Trump’s tariffs aren’t among them.
All of this feels like an exercise in victim blaming. Trudeau deserves plenty of criticism for all sorts of things. But Trump’s tariffs aren’t among them.
The fallacy at play among Canada’s remaining pro-Trump contingent is that every enemy of one’s enemy must surely be one’s friend—and so if Trudeau is taken to be the villain, our salvation must lie the way of America’s freshly elected anti-Trudeau. But that logic only works on chessboards. In the real (Canadian) world, it’s possible to dislike—even loathe—Trudeau, while also recognising that, in this case, the threat to Canada’s way of life is very much coming from outside the building.
