Upset over the Keystone XL cancellation?

Here’s how We Could screw over the Americans

u.s. President Joe Biden had only been in office for a matter of hours before he cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, instantly evaporating thousands of jobs on both sides of the border, and spurring calls from Alberta Premier Jason Kenney to impose “meaningful” punishment on the united States.

To be clear, Canada trying to impose economic sanctions on the united States is a horrible idea that would almost certainly prompt devastating countermeasures. As university of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe told National Post, Canada would be screwing with a relationship that represents 30 per cent of our own trade, but only three per cent of the Americans’. “We can’t really hurt them,” he said.

But if we want to start an inadvisable rage-fuelled trade war anyway, here’s how to cause the most immediate damage.

Shut off the power

If you’re an American able to pick up CBC on your kitchen radio, it’s a good chance that said radio is powered in part by Canadian electricity. Canada exports huge quantities of electricity to border states from Washington to Maine. The u.s.-canada electricity grid is so integrated, in fact, that when the entire u.s. Northwest plunged into blackout in 2003, they took Toronto down with them. Canada could inflict critical brownouts on Minnesota, Michigan, Vermont and parts of upstate New york, among others. A particularly spiteful detail of this measure — particularly in the wake of the environmentalist underpinnings of the Keystone XL cancellation — would be that it would shut off mostly clean hydroelectric power while forcing the u.s. to compensate with increased burning of coal and gas.

Isolate alaska and point roberts

Point roberts, Wash., is a peninsula south of Metro Vancouver that is American solely by virtue of it lying beneath the 49th parallel. With its imports and economy all strongly dependent on free passage through Canada, it wouldn’t be that hard to place the peninsula under a semi-permanent siege. And while we’re at it, Canada could similarly make life difficult for Alaskans. driving through Canada is still the No. 1 method by which Alaskans access the Lower 48 states, and recent months have seen a number of American families violating Canadian quarantine on the pretence that they were merely entering the country in order to travel to Alaska. So, we simply shut off the Alaska Highway and claim it’s for “COVID-19 safety.”

Stop the oil

With Canada exporting four million barrels of oil per day to united States (roughly 240 Olympic swimming pools’ worth), turning off the taps would instantly make international front page news. Of course, there’s a good reason why even the most hotheaded Albertans aren’t pitching this option. For one, the u.s. is now the world’s No. 1 oil producer; it has no problem getting its petroleum elsewhere if the Canadians start acting up. Second, a lot of Canada’s gasoline and diesel gets made in u.s. refineries; if we’re going to start closing cross-border petroleum pipelines, it wouldn’t be long until filling stations from Vancouver to Sudbury started running dry.

Cripple their auto Sector

Autos and auto parts are the second-largest source of Canadian exports to the u.s. For Canada, much of it is in the precision widgets that get shipped to u.s. factories for final assembly into new cars. remember Belinda Stronach? Her father founded Magna International, one of the largest such widget manufacturers, making everything from electronic door latches to integrated backup cameras. By placing prohibitive tariffs on Canadian-made auto components, assembly lines across Michigan could be thrown into sudden disarray. But for a Canadian auto parts sector already struggling to prevent business from fleeing to China or Mexico, there’s almost no scenario in which arbitrary border closures wouldn’t be a disaster for Ontario manufacturers.

kneecap the alaska Cruise Industry

Virtually every vessel participating in the multibillion-dollar Alaskan cruise industry makes at least one stop on Canadian soil, usually in Victoria or Vancouver. This is not an accident; under the 1886 Passenger Vessel Services Act, foreign-flagged ships are prohibited from directly taking passengers between two u.s. ports. With virtually all cruise ships flying foreign flags, forbidding them from making their mandatory Canadian stopover would decimate whole swaths of the American cruise industry. Of course, it would also be a great way for Canada to accidentally inspire bipartisan congressional support for a repeal of the 1886 act, which would have the notably deleterious effect of compromising Canadian cruise ship tourism for the rest of time.

declare a free-for-all on u.s. patents

This is the one weapon in Canada’s trade war arsenal that has garnered some support from the sober-minded halls of academia. When Canada was reeling from a series of donald Trump-imposed tariffs in 2018, biomedical scientist Amir Attaran suggested in Maclean’s that the best way for Canada to hit back would be to expropriate American pharmaceutical patents. The federal government could simply pick some patented drug that sells particularly well in Canada, open it up to generic manufacture, and watch as Big Pharma knocked down President Biden’s door with objections. In an extreme case, Canada could even start systematically cancelling the copyrights on all manner of music, movie and books; who needs Netflix when all five seasons of The Wire magically become public domain? Threatening to suspend intellectual property rights is a strategy that other small nations have used to successfully put pressure on larger ones. ecuador threatened to stop recognizing music copyrights in a 1990s dispute with the european union. Antigua even won WTO backing for its decision to ignore u.s. intellectual property rights in retaliation for the u.s. cracking down on Antigua-hosted online gaming sites.