FREE TRADE BETRAYED, Libin,

Protectionism is on the march! … is how reporters might write up the results of Tuesday’s election if it had happened in the U. S. or France, or the vote was British. But it was British Columbian, and in Canada we’re too busy congratulating ourselves as the vigilant guardians of the flame of free trade to notice that we’ve gotten as bad as anyone, maybe worse, and Christy Clark, who looks like she’ll keep leading B.C., is a big reason for it.

In the home stretch of a provincial campaign that proved so nail-bitingly close that it looks like it delivered a minority government, Clark’s gambit was to sink even lower than ever in her habit of pandering to anti-trade populism, mongering for a trade war with the U.S. as payback for its softwood lumber tariffs. “We aren’t going to be weaklings,” she declared, claiming to “stand up for jobs (and) our industry” by declaring trade war on Americans, their “greed,” and their thermal coal exports moving through B.C. ports.

Clark sounded a lot like the ostensibly anti- trade president she was goading. He says he’s standing up for American jobs and American industry by refusing to let Canada play “rough” on trade issues like softwood lumber any longer. But at least Donald Trump’s got a point: It’s Clark’s government that bans the exports of raw logs to the U. S., making them cheaper for B.C. mills who then export discounted lumber to the States. Still, Clark partly made her campaign about defending her anti-free-trade export bans by slapping antifree-trade carbon tariffs on U.S. coal and dragging the whole country into an all-out trade war.

But Clark’s cheap political point scoring isn’t just about making trade enemies with Americans. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley has politely pointed out that her province’s coal industry would pay just as dearly in Clark’s plan to start applying a $70-a-tonne carbon tax on any thermal coal shipments transiting through B.C. on its way to the Pacific. One observer said Clark’s idea would be devastating to Albertan producers, rendering it “financially impossible to export.” Estimates are it will cost 2,000 Albertans their jobs.

It would also violate the New West Partnership trade agreement between B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the first term is to “ensure that … (provincial) measures do not operate to restrict or impair trade between, among or through the territory of the Parties.” At all of this, Clark just shrugged. Squeezing Alberta’s industry and hampering its exports didn’t trouble her conscience when she demanded a list of her own conditions be met, including a $1-billion bribe for B.C., before she agreed to get out of the way of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. It sure wasn’t going to trouble her with an election campaign to fight.

Ever since Trump arrived in the White House, Canadian politicians have turned in impressive performances in preaching the gospel of free trade. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne in January said “we need to make sure that our neighbours understand the mutual benefits of Canada-U. S. trade and specifically Ontario-U. S. trade” and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been talking in Brussels and with Tom Brokaw about the blessings of “trade, and the promise of prosperity for all our citizens that comes with it.” But if you’re waiting for either of them to complain about Clark’s plan to build a carbon- tariff wall and make Albertans and Americans pay for it, I’m afraid it was all just an act.

Instead, Trudeau backed Clark’s trade belligerence, telling her he’d asked federal trade officials “to further examine” the potential of banning U. S. coal altogether from Canada’s Pacific ports. His government is also reportedly in the process of building a case for tariffs against imports from Oregon, whose senator fought for the softwood tariffs. The prime minister has also fiercely defended Canada’s closed-market dairy and poultry cartels, reasoning that we protect these things for a “good reason.” Of course that’s what every mercantilist always thinks.

Wynne, meanwhile, has been busy planning her own retribution, preparing to unleash a “Buy Canadian” policy that would ban U.S. companies from government procurement as revenge against any Buy American policies that might surface.

Reportedly officials almost used it against New York, until the state backed off its own protectionist plan. But “it’s sitting ready” to be deployed as a trade weapon, a provincial official told The Globe and Mail last week.

And of course there’s Jerry Dias, the head of mega-union Unifor, who is calling for Ottawa to “put the U.S. and Mexico on notice” that it will be us, not the White House, that had better get some big changes to NAFTA or else — and that “we need to slap duties on major commodities” like steel, starting now. Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz warned last week that “we know that with protectionism, everybody loses eventually, including the country that puts the policies in place.” Apparently Clark, Trudeau, Wynne and Dias want to make sure that if Canadians are destined to suffer trade trauma, we’d rather do it to ourselves than let Trump hog all the credit.

Maybe all this was for show. Maybe Clark was just playing it up for the campaign cameras, to be taken seriously but not literally. But now it looks like she could be at the mercy of the Green Party and the NDP; they might choose to take literally her idea of carbon-taxing everything American that moves.

More importantly, Clark and her fellow protectionistas in Toronto and Ottawa have done a remarkable job in rapidly undermining any reputation Canadians might have hoped to maintain for being principled free traders.

CLARK, TRUDEAU AND WYNNE WANT TO INFLICT THE SUFFERING, RATHER THAN LET TRUMP DO IT.