Rachel Marsden: Canada should respond to Trump’s tariffs by acting like a sanctioned country

PARIS — Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico are a cymbal crash right in the ear of some chronic sleepwalkers who haven’t had to think much beyond a world that orbits around America.

It’s also an opportunity, in the same way as a divorce after decades of marriage. While it may be unpleasant at first to have to make the effort to jump back into the dating pool, making yourself attractive and rethinking your future, you just might end up finding something better than you expected.

In explaining his decision to slap 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican products sold to the U.S. starting this month (and 10% on their oil and gas exports), Trump suggested that these allies basically sat around on their behinds letting fentanyl and illegal immigrants stream into the U.S., threatening American national security interests. Even if that were true (which it isn't, at least in Canada’s case), those are “you” problems, sport. It’s your own responsibility to secure your own borders.

It’s also not like addiction to opioids like fentanyl hasn’t been around for at least a century in the U.S., driving that market, which also served to fund the CIA’s covert actions from Afghanistan to South America. As far back as the early ’90s, researchers were highlighting the cozy relationship between the CIA and Mexico’s Guadalajara Cartel as a top supplier of U.S. street drugs, for example.

Tariffs aren’t about any of that, though — but it sounds like a decent enough excuse to get some folks nodding in approval. As always with career businessman Trump, it’s all about making money. He thinks that the U.S. could do better if American companies were forced to rely more on domestic supply options or cheaper foreign ones than they have now, and that this will be the kick in the pants that they need to change things up. Or for Canadian companies to move to the US market to avoid tariffs.

Let’s not pretend that Trump is some crazy outlier on this issue. Not only did former U.S. President Joe Biden do little to change the tariffs that Trump put in place during his first mandate, but Biden even bumped up those on Canadian softwood lumber from Trump’s 8.99% to 17.9%, as the Wall Street Journal reported in November 2021, referring to Biden’s “trade wars.”

Biden also used the conflict in Ukraine as a pretext for effectively waging a trade war on supposed friends and allies in Europe, pressuring the bloc to cut itself off from cheap Russian gas in favor of an overreliance on much pricier U.S. liquified natural gas imports, and then seducing European industries suffering under high energy costs and reduced supply with tax incentives to relocate to the U.S.

Trump is just taking a slightly different tact to bolstering the U.S. economy. He’s using drugs and migration the same way that Biden used Ukraine as a pretext.

The tariffs will be paid by the American companies, who will ultimately want to minimize the cost passed on to consumers. Trump is forcing American companies to date around rather than blindly continuing to go steady with their current supply partners. Softwood lumber tariffs already prompted a switch from Canadian to increased German and European supply, for instance.

They'll also be looking to set themselves up at home so they’re more self-sufficient.

Trade barriers are kind of like sanctions, which almost never work as anticipated on the countries on which the U.S. imposes them. Because adaptation is a thing and countries aren’t like non-playable characters in a video game, forced to suck up whatever punch they’re dealt. And now that Canada and Mexico find themselves on the receiving end of the kind of economic backhand that’s typically reserved for Iran or Russia, they can either sit there whining about how it’s all so unfair, blow up Trump’s phone like a stage-five clinger and fiddle around on the margins to get back at him, or they can take off the gloves and limber up for some good old- fashioned NHL-style cross checks into the boards, politically speaking.

And they can do it in a way that surgically targets the Washington establishment while sparing average America and free market interests.

When you’ve been going steady with someone and they start yanking your chain and failing to recognize your worth, you don’t start begging to work things out. You say, “Fine. Your loss.” And then you make some grand, self-serving gestures of your own that can’t possibly escape attention.

For example, maybe it’s time for Canada to start withdrawing from cooperation on pet U.S. projects that have cost Canadians a fortune with little to no return on investment. First up: end all involvement in U.S. foreign military operations worldwide, starting with Ukraine, withdraw from NATO, the transatlantic weapons lobby, citing a disinterest in filling U.S. military industrial coffers to buy weapons that Canada doesn’t need, given the current state and nature of warfare, but is constantly pressured to buy.

Start making diplomatic gestures to improve non-traditional partnerships by developing trade relations with China, Russia, Venezuela and India. Join the China and Russia-led BRICS trading bloc serving the global south. Basically, just go down the list of guys your ex hates and start spending more time with them. Watch how fast he shows up on your doorstep talking like nothing ever happened between you.

Announce that Canada will henceforth serve as a third country conduit for nations under U.S. sanctions to facilitate getting their products into the global marketplace. Explain that you’re going to offset any impact to the Canadian economy of Trump’s tariffs by taking a cut as an intermediary dealer of said products.

Immediately cease any and all intelligence cooperation with Washington. That would mean, per U.S. intelligence community whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations, that Canadian spies would no longer surveil intercepted communications of Americans just so Washington can circumvent laws prohibiting its own intelligence services from spying on its own citizens.

And if Trump threatens to straight-up invade the newly rogue state of Canada, request a defense and security agreement with Russia and China. None of this sounds like anything that a few Russian missile systems parked right on the U.S. border couldn’t fix in a hurry. What would he do then? Invade? Why would he? After all, America’s own definition applied to Russia in the Ukraine conflict, it would be entirely unprovoked.

It’s not personal, bud — just business, eh.

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Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. rachelmarsden.com.