Conrad Black: Canada must not accept disrespect from the Americans

Some readers have reproached me for my general support of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies. It was essential to the maintenance of America’s position as the world’s greatest power and accordingly to the security of the West, that Trump succeed in rebuilding American strength and credibility, given the crumbling of Europe, the revanchist appetite of Russia, and the naked totalitarian ambitions of China. The blunderbuss incompetence of George W. Bush, who invaded Iraq and effectively handed pre-eminent influence in that country to Iran, and who greeted the collapse of the world economic system over Bill Clinton’s real estate bubble with the stirring tocsin: “The sucker could go down;” was followed by Obama’s pervasive subtle racism and appeasement of Iran, China, and Russia, and the almost uniform incompetence of Biden. These three reduced the moral authority and objective strength of the United States to its lowest point since the isolationism and depression of Herbert Hoover 95 years ago.

Trump’s stylistic abrasions have frequently been painful, though they have also often been entertaining and have alleviated the almost terminal pomposity of many high office-holders. But his near termination of illegal immigration and of the flow of illicit drugs across the American southern border, like his tax reductions, deregulation, assault on political correctness, wokeness, and bigotry and subversion in the universities, his support of non-unionized schools and his debunking of green extremism, his shaping up of NATO, and resumption of American energy self-sufficiency, have all greatly strengthened America. Trump has brought the U.S. armed forces to an astonishing pinnacle of effectiveness where it can eliminate the underground nuclear laboratories of Iran and move the president of Venezuela and his wife from their palace in Caracas to prison in New York without a single combat fatality, and can execute 15,000 airstrikes on Iran, eliminating a trillion dollars of military and infrastructure investment with the loss of only 18 servicemen, five of them in a noncombat accident, and very few Iranian civilians.

As was mentioned in this space last week, all talk of China seriously challenging the economic dominance of the United States has ended, just as the spurious Davosian nonsense of European overregulated socialism posing any serious rivalry to American capitalism has vanished into the mist of the forgotten nostrums of misguided imagination. Trump’s tariffs, as often happens with a man whose career was so much built on hyperbole and even hucksterism, were terribly oversold as a “liberation.” But there was no reason or excuse for the United States to have a $1.3 trillion trade deficit, and a great many American “allies” were picking America’s pocket. This was justifiable during the Cold War when a number of countries required some tangible encouragement to keep their distance from the Kremlin, but it was an heirloom of a bygone era, like the United States providing for the defense of Western Europe, which is now infinitely stronger than the emasculated Russian skeleton of the old U.S.S.R. This is why none of America’s allies except Canada seriously resisted Trump’s move to equalization of trade opportunities.

We were the only country that was unjustly treated by his tariffs. In the first version of this assault, when he was just the president-elect, Trump had the effrontery to assimilate Canadian conduct with Mexico’s. That country was complicit in trafficking millions of destitute people and hundreds of thousands of violent criminals and a huge quantity of the most lethal narcotics, into the United States illegally. Mexico was an unofficial partner of the most brutal criminal gangs in the world. It also incentivized many American companies to close their U.S. factories, re-settle just within the Mexican border, take advantage of tax breaks in that country and cheap Mexican labour and export back into America the goods that had previously been manufactured in that country.

Canada never engaged in any of this. It has always been a fair-trading country and on our border, we have had to deal with an unprecedented number of undesirables who have made their way all the way through the U.S. to us and we have also suffered the illegal importation of an excessive number of firearms. As the founding and the tradition of this country were not revolutionary, our right to bear arms is not as unconditional as it is in the U.S. We have not protested that and American complaints about our allowing the terrorists into their country are rubbish. It is the duty of every country to maintain the security of its own borders. That the United States failed to do that is something for which it alone is responsible, although it does have a grievance with Mexico. No North American country can be likened to East Germany, which built a wall to keep in its own people.

After Trump’s Liberation Day, I supported Ontario premier Doug Ford’s call for a strenuous response, including the suspension of electricity exports to the U.S. to enable our neighbors to enjoy the fresh winter weather fully. I also favour making arrangements with some of the Commonwealth West Indies countries and incentivize Canadians to winter there rather than Florida. There really is no trade deficit in America’s accounts with Canada, as most of that is oil that it buys at a knockdown price from us and sells on at a high profit to itself. If the United States persists in its declared goal of eliminating our steel and automobile industries, we should take over at minimal cost the automobile factories of American companies in Canada and build our own automobile industry in cooperation with a foreign partner and ensure that no American automobile is ever sold in this country again. Apart from the question of the domestic market, Canada is a fully competitive steelmaker with the U.S., where the steel industry has atomized and Andrew Carnegie’s mighty United States Steel Corporation has been sold to the Japanese for a bagatelle.

This is no time for petulance or belligerence, but we should all support the prime minister and our trade negotiators in retaliating as appropriate and patiently negotiating towards a reasonable compromise. In 30 months, Donald Trump will retire and it will be his policies and not the vagaries of his public personality that will remain. Personally, he is quite congenial. To the extent that we become less dependent on trade with the United States, that is a healthy development conducive to our sovereignty. The United States must always be respected, and Canada must never consent to be treated with disrespect. We have no delusions of grandeur nor are we anyone’s doormat.

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