1 week Ago By John Snobelen
Article content I always wondered what would happen if you put the economy in a blender and turned it on high. Now, thanks to U.S.
President Donald Trump, we know. Trump tossed international trade into a blender and flipped the switch. Global markets spun around as trillions of dollars spilled out.
Froth formed around lost jobs and evaporating savings. Moving just as fast as the markets, various contradictory explanations of the “master plan” driving the carnage spun out of control. Trump supporters strained to make logic pretzels as they grabbed onto passing shreds of incoherent policy.
It isn’t easy to find a rationale for the irrational. At first, Americans were told the tariff war was all about reducing the plague of fentanyl pouring across the northern border. True believers took up the cry, yelling at Canadians to stop the flow or suffer devastating tariffs.
This might have been sound reasoning except for the irritating fact that precious little fentanyl comes from Canada. But never mind, the next logic leap was the urgent need to protect auto workers in Detroit from auto workers in Windsor. Heck, why not just erase the border and be one happy family? The incoherence on trading with Canada faded as the world’s richest country set out to punish the globe.
Trump declared that America had been ripped off by trading partners trying to sell them stuff. Things kicked into high gear on ‘Liberation Day’ and the markets shed more trillions as the air filled with a noxious odor. Trump presented his “reciprocal” tariffs with a poster board that calculated offending countries’ “trade barriers.
” That presentation would not have earned a passing grade as a middle school project, but the MAGA crowd bought it. Now, they are buying a new “strategy” of pausing most of those tariffs to allow evil foreign nations to continue. As Trump explained, “kissing my ass” to negotiate.
Apparently, this is the art of the deal. Americans can be forgiven for attempting to find a rational plan amid irrational behaviour. The alternative is to accept that America is now a logic-free zone and, worse, that trade deficits are fuelled by the insatiable demand of American consumers for more stuff.
Canadians are not required to participate in the search for some hidden master plan in America’s foreign policy. Our task is to elect a government that can best address our own urgent needs with clarity and purpose. A decade of Liberal governments that focused more on culture wars than long-term strategy has left Canada with a lot of work to do.
The first task is to avoid being sucked into the culture war narratives now engulfing our southern neighbour. What we need is the discipline to reduce the size and cost of government by prioritizing spending, with a focus on things Canadians need now and investments that build a solid future. We need leadership to get our natural resources to a global market and create a competitive tax structure that invites investment in our future.
And we need to reach beyond regional differences and build a common Canadian perspective. This election isn’t about responding to the insults and insanity America has hurled at the world. It is about ignoring the American experiment in divisiveness and arrogance and building on Canadian values and opportunities.
Canadians didn’t put the global economy in a blender, but when the chaos is over, Canada can be stronger because of it..
