This War on Canada Couldn’t Be Dumber

TEAM Trump’s silly fight with Canada over tariffs is igniting unprecented blowback from our neighbor to the north. It’s unnecessary — and it misses the big picture. Start with Trump’s insistence that the tariffs are of strategic importance. That’s like saying that Canadians are untrustworthy. He also complains about Canadian subsidies to Quebec dairy farmers. But those subsidies go to a swing constituency of conservative voters in a province that nearly voted to secede from Canada in 1995.

In American terms, the subsidies are Iowa ethanol plus Fort Sumter together. They’re also trivial in amount.

Besides, Trump and his people have bigger fish to fry: The US runs a trade deficit in goods and services with everyone else — China, the European Union, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, India and Brazil. The only player with which it has a trade sur

plus is Canada. On goods, Canada is the US’s major export market, almost as big as the entire European Union and twice as big as China. About 8 million Americans owe their jobs to exports to Canada. Dismissing this is like Spinal Tap blowing off a gig in Boston because it’s not a big college town.

The Canadians, of course, are overreacting. When Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland was in Washington Wednesday, she delivered the most anti-American speech any foreign official has delivered in DC since her countrymen burnt the White House in 1814.

Viewers of the Bill Maher show will recall Freeland as an ultra-lefty. Like most Canadian officials, however, she’s good at covering up her views when she needs to, which is why her candor is so remarkable. She didn’t quite say she despises Trump. But she came close.

And she specifically cited the tar- iffs Trump announced on Canadian steel and aluminum, calling them “protectionism, pure and simple.” And so they are.

All of America’s trading partners are viewing the trade spat with Canada as a litmus test. If America can’t trust its closest ally, whom can it trust?

That’s why the Europeans have voiced their support for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and why Freeland was able to boast that they and the Mexicans “share our astonishment and resolve.”

Trump doesn’t pay much attention to Mexico, except as a source of illegal immigrants. He’ll have more to worry about if, as expected, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is elected president of that country on July 1. Obrador can be expected to be a tougher negotiation partner than the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, and if talks fail, expect the Mexican economy to suffer.

That would affect the number of illegal immigrants from that country, which fell by a million people between 2007 and 2014. They went back to a country that, thanks to the prosperity generated by NAFTA, had a lower unemployment rate than the US. Trump might not like NAFTA, but it has reduced the number of illegal immigrants from Mexico.

So you’d expect that economic rationality would triumph, that Trump would abandon his trade war. Don’t count on it.

First, Trump’s economic team has an inflated sense of the importance of access to American consumers. Sure, everyone wants to sell to US consumers, even if US markets are smaller than China and the European Union.

Again, irrationality works both ways: Mexicans don’t lose elec- tions by being too anti-American, and the same is true of Canadians. Trudeau might be an embarrassment, but Trump just got him reelected in 2019.

Second, some Trump officials seem to be getting a serotonin high from the sense that they’re on top of the world. Until recently, people like Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro looked at things from the outside, like the Little Match Girl. Now they’re on the inside, and they’re going to let you know about it.

Freeland was in town to collect an award from Foreign Policy magazine as the diplomat of the year. But diplomacy consists in hiding your personal feelings in order to advance your country’s interests. On trade disputes, we’ve not seen much diplomacy from either side.

‘ Trump might not like NA FT A, but it has reduced the number of illegal ’ immigrants from Mexico.