Living to fight another day.
This was never about fentanyl or southbound criminals. It's about the end of the United States as a democratic ally, a reliable trade partner and a force for good in the world.
We can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Let’s stop trying.
By the time you read this, given everything we know about U.S. president Donald Trump’s manic and irrational temperament, the trade war he’s launched against Canada may very well be cancelled, in abeyance, or in some sort of suspended animation.
That was the original lede on this edition of the Real Story. My reasoning was that U.S. president Donald Trump didn’t count on the magnificently fierce opposition to his lunacy that arose from American manufacturers, American business leaders, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, sensible Republicans and the Wall Street Journal, even.
As in: The Dumbest Trade War In History. As in The Dumbest Trade War Fallout Begins.
But perhaps not least, Trump didn’t anticipate such a heartening show of patriotic Canadian unity around a strategy of retaliation and innovative defensive measures, and positive enthusiasm from almost all quarters in Canada for inflicting damage on American business interests and rebuilding a genuine Canadian economy along east-west lines.
Anyway, rapid-fire events ensued today.
Mexico agreed to relocate 10,000 National Guardsmen to its northern border in exchange for an American agreement to curtail the illicit transit of American heavy weapons to Mexico’s drug cartels - which the Americans should have been doing anyway - and hey presto, Trump suspends his threatened 25 percent tariff on American imports of Mexican goods. For a month.
And then Justin Trudeau, our sort-of prime minister, finally gets Trump on the line, and abracadabra. Here’s Trump’s version: “Canada has agreed to ensure we have a secure Northern Border, and to finally end the deadly scourge of drugs like Fentanyl that have been pouring into our Country. . . Canada will implement their $1.3 Billion Border plan.”
That $1.3 billion border plan was announced last December.
Other than that, there’s quite a bit of jimcrackery and reality-television showmanship involved. Canada will dispatch roughly 10,000 frontline personnel to the Canada-U.S. border (there’s even some talk of militarizing the Canada Border Services Agency in a shell game to make our Nato-threshold military spending look better). We’ll mimick silly American nomenclature by appointing a “fentanyl czar,” and list cartels as terrorist organizations.
And Trump will spend $200 million on Canada-U.S. efforts to curtail drugs and guns and money laundering and gangster-busting, which is what the Americans should have been damn well doing in the first place.
If it’s delicious irony you like, the genuinely useful bits mirror almost exactly what Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, our prime minister in waiting, has been advocating for years. Before Trudeau’s chat with Trump today, here’s Poilievre: "Send Canadian Forces troops, helicopters [and] surveillance to the border now."
Hire 2,000 more Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, extend their power along the entire border and not just at official crossings, and especially now that potentially hundreds of thousands of migrants will be eyeing safe passage into Canada to evade Trump’s ICE patrols. "We need to protect our borders, not to please any other foreign leader," Poilievre said.
It’s getting a bit embarrassing how many times I have to point out that Poilievre has developed the annoying habit of being right so much of the time. It is not in my nature to say nice things about politicians.
And we do need to get ready, by the way. Remember the tens of thousands of migrants Trump allowed to be escorted to our border at Roxham Road in Quebec during his first term in the White House, and how stupidly the Trudeau government was in pretending that it was perfectly normal to simply usher them all in?
Roxham Road Round Two is already in the making, as Quebec premier François Legault has been warning since last November. The federal government has been quietly scouting around the vicinity of St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, south of Montreal, for a venue capable of supporting a reception centre and meal distribution areas, with a waiting room capacity of 200 people at a time.
To appease a humiliated bully, flatter him.
What has happened here is that Trump resorted to the off-ramp he built into his strategy, which was always all about using 19th-century-style tariffs, tariffs, and more tariffs, on Canada, Mexico, China, Europe and anyone else he feels like, to recover the costs of the tax cuts he’s promised his various billionaire friends.
In case Americans themselves weren’t going to let him get away with it, he had the “fentanyl and criminal immigrants” dodge at the ready. A handy face-saving device. The fentanyl and border-jumpers ruse was his pretext for invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which was how he set out to end-run Congress and engage in tariff strongarming in place of an actual trade policy that embraces fair-trading democratic allies and freezes out democracy’s slave-labour enemies.
Along the way, Trump managed to delude quite a few people who should know better that it was about drugs and gangsters. A massive problem, but if you needed Trump’s histrionics to know that, you haven’t been paying attention. In any case, Trump miscalculated, so he availed himself of a perverse kind of win-win scenario: Take something that looks like victory on the drugs-and-gangsters file that can be lied about with impunity, and suspend or back away from his trade-war belligerence.
And this is why we live to fight another day.
Count on it, though. We will fight another day, because the era of free trade is over. It’s been slowly dying ever since the G8 (remember the G8?) invited a deadly toxin to enter the western world’s bloodstream in December, 2001, when we all acquiesced to Beijing’s admission into the World Trade Organization.
Odd how Trump cut China the same ten-percent tariff slack that he cut Alberta oil, wouldn’t you say? I say “Alberta oil”, but of course we’re talking about CNOOC and Sinopec oil that Canadian taxpayers just finished spending $34 billion to pump through a pipeline to the coast, with willing buyers like Beijing’s Sinochem at the ready to slurp it all up.
Aren’t we clever!