Want to Fight Trump’s Trade War? Visit Canada

5 hours ago 1

The president is treating America’s neighbor to the north like an adversary. Don’t be like the president

I hadn’t fully formulated my thinking until the Canadian guard at the border crossing asked why my wife and I wanted to visit his country.

“Well, we’re going to buy stuff,” I said.

“What kind of stuff?” he asked

“Pretty much anything,” I said. “To be honest, we’re ashamed and embarrassed by the way our country is treating your country, and we couldn’t think of much to do about it except come and spend some money and hope it helps the economy.”

“Have a good visit,” he said with a grin.

And we did — an excellent visit, wending our way through the eastern townships of Quebec, along the border with Vermont where we live. We bought bread at a local bakery, caramel sauce that a mother and daughter team were making at a confiserie, and chocolates for my mother-in-law’s 97th birthday from a chocolatier next door. We also went to Canadian Tire, which is the Canadian equivalent of Walmart and Cabelas combined, and at a hip grocery we found cartons of a not-bad non-alcoholic beer from Montreal (Sober Carpenter, it’s called). We were pretty close to the daily allowance for purchases when we came back through the one-man customs post on the backroad at Highgate Springs — and that didn’t include the excellent diner at a bistro in a small border town.

Obviously this is a somewhat ludicrous (albeit delicious) plan for responding to Donald Trump’s entirely ludicrous plan for annexing Canada as the 51st state. But what else to do?

Many things Trump is doing pose a more immediate danger to the world than his delusions about taking over Canada: shutting down HIV and malaria treatments, withdrawing from the World Health Organization and the international climate talks, helping Vladimir Putin in his attempted conquest of Ukraine, announcing plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and damaging America’s uniquely important system of higher education, to name a few.

But it’s his plans for territorial expansion — into Greenland and Panama and Canada — that might provide the best MRI of his joyless brain. He’s refused to rule out using the U.S. military in the first two territories. “I’m not going to commit to that,” Trump said earlier this year when asked if he would eschew force. “It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country.” He added, “We need Greenland for national security purposes.” Canada, he said, would be subdued by “economic force.”

Editor’s picks

It’s worth pointing out that when Trump started talking about Greenland during his first presidency, everyone assumed it was a fleeting idea — but clearly it stuck in his mind, and now he’s talking about using troops. Annexing Canada seemed a bit like a joke too when he first brought it up before he took office for a second time, the kind of shiny object he uses to distract attention from more pressing folly. Here’s how he explained it last week: “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the U.S., just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago, and makes no sense. This would be the most incredible country visually.”

In other words, it would be big — and I think we can agree that big is a distinction that excites the president.

Trump also seems to have realized that Canada has a lot of stuff underground. On the one hand, he insists, “We don’t need their cars. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need anything that they give.” (This, by the way, isn’t true — many Americans manifestly need their energy; in Vermont a third of our power comes down the line from HydroQuebec. When the premier of Ontario threatened to pull the plug on northern states, Trump backed down from some of his tariffs). But Trump loves stuff, as evinced by his current effort to extort Ukraine’s mineral wealth. “I do think that Mr. Trump looks at our natural resources and has that acquisitive mind behind it,” Canada’s immigration minister said last week.

Related Content

This is a mindset appropriate for a very young toddler. (My daughter said the other day that one of the other young mothers in her circle had made the mistake of teaching her child the ASL sign for “more,” and it has become his constant, silent refrain.) But it’s an utterly bizarre urge for an American president of the last 100 years and more. Our foreign policy horrors from Iran and Vietnam on down the sad litany have been about acquiring influence, not territory. Our foreign policy triumphs (say, the Marshall Plan) have come from empowering our friends, not intimidating them.

Trump’s plans to use tariffs to force Canada into submission don’t make economic sense — the auto industry has spent the last few weeks trying to explain that building a car is a cross-border exercise — and they don’t even make political sense. The feckless Republicans have been unwilling to call out Trump for his folly, but they have pointed out that if you let 40 million Canadians vote in America’s elections, the chances are they’ll shift America’s political balance. “They’d have a sizable delegation in the House,” one courageous GOP observer recently told NBC News. “I don’t think anybody thinks that’s a great idea. Oh, by the way, how many Electoral

College votes are they going to get?”

Meanwhile, the tariffs are tanking the stock market, and yet Trump is happily moving forward with them. The emotional payback is apparently gratification enough. Taking over a big place with a lot of stuff definitely fits his idea of what makes America great. If I were the Canadians I wouldn’t count on common sense. You have a heavily-armed baby at your doorstep.

But for me, the question is less what the Canadians will do about it — they are a sovereign country, after all — and more what those of us Americans who hate this kind of bullying will do about it. The most important thing, of course, is to try and weaken Trumpism here at home. At Third Act, which I founded, we’re helping rally Americans to protect our democracy. On our way to the border, my wife and I stopped at a vibrant protest outside the Tesla dealership in Burlington.

There’s also the option we took last week: go spend some money in Canada. Roughly the same number of Canadians and Americans cross the border each year — about 20 million in each case, which is half of Canada and a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. The number of Canadians packing the RV for a trip south will almost certainly plummet. The U.S. is apparently now planning on forcing Torontonians who head to Florida for a month of watching baseball’s spring training and relaxing along the Gulf of Whatever to register with U.S. immigration authorities. But the number of Americans heading north should, one hopes, go up.

For one thing, tourism is a large part of Canada’s economy — about six percent of its GDP. For Americans, visiting Canada is a way to try and make up some portion of the damage that Trump is trying to inflict. It won’t compensate for the tariffs on lumber and so forth, but every bit helps. I’m a big believer in buying local. I once fed our family for a whole year on food grown in Vermont’s Champlain Valley. But this is an exception. It isn’t charity, but something closer to recompense for our country’s thuggish behavior.

For another, it will remind Americans that Canada is a real country. When you are at the center of things — which is clearly how MAGA sees America — it’s easy to imagine the rest of the world mostly in relation to you. People on the fringe of empires tend to know more about each other, largely for reasons of survival. I’ve traveled to every Canadian province and territory to report and speak and organize (and hike and ski). It’s a country every bit as beautiful as America. We have the Grand Canyon and the redwoods; they have the Bay of Fundy and (at least a few remaining) old growth forests in the mists of British Columbia, the incredible icefields around Jasper, and the endless lakes and rivers of northern Ontario and Quebec. On a bracing blue-sky day, St. John’s Newfoundland is one of the prettiest cities in the world, while Ottawa’s Rideau Canal, with a hundred thousand skaters making their way between food booths, is one of the world’s finest outdoor parties. Canadians also do a good job of looking out for each other — from their national health system, which allows them to live longer than Americans while spending roughly half as much on health care, to their superb national broadcaster, the CBC, knitting the vast country together.

Canada is by no means a storybook place. Some of my travel has been to try and convince Canadians that on a heating planet it’s not okay to endlessly expand the export of gas and oil, and if you want to read some tragic stories about racism, Google “residential schools.” But it’s no worse on these scores than the U.S., and at least there’s a vibrant debate about it all.

Which might be the third reason for Americans to visit Canada: to warn them not to take their polity for granted. Canada, like every nation, staggered out of the pandemic. It had a Freedom Convoy of truckers who paralyzed Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates. It has its own set of weirdo right-wing influencers, including manosphere founding father Jordan Peterson, forever fussing about wokeness. It even has its own Trumpy candidate in this year’s election for prime minister. Pierre Poilievre, who was temporarily suspended from the House of Commons for calling now-former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “wacko” (two guesses where he got that). Poilievre was well ahead in the polls until Trump started looking pruriently across the border. Now his race against Trudeau fill-in Mark Carney is forecast to be a nail-biter.