Canada’s Trade Battle With the U.S. Intensifies

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

The tariff battle with the United States continues. U.S. President Donald Trump castigated Canada in a news conference Sept. 2, alleging the U.S. loses anywhere from 60 to $100 billion a year in cross-border trade deficits.

He suggested that the U.S. has no need for trade with Canada. “They need us, we don’t need them. They’ve taken advantage of us for years, and it’s time to stop,” he maintained. Describing the trade relationship as “a very unfair deal,” Trump said he considered Canada harder to deal with than China or Vietnam.

U.S. Vice-President JD Vance on Aug. 24 claimed that “Canada and China have been the two worst countries when it comes to trade policy anywhere in the world. What a shame that is. China, you of course expect; they're our big economic competitor,” he said.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick accused Canada of walking away from the negotiations for political purposes. “It was manufactured,” insisted Lutnick on Aug. 27. “So there’s the sovereignty party trying to run, and they’re in the lead in Quebec and so this was Mark Carney manufacturing something that would try to keep them from winning, and then you have Alberta has an independence resolution.”

American columnist Victor Davis Hanson, on his Sept. 1 podcast on the Daily Signal conservative website agreed, suggesting Carney picked a trade war with Trump “because of the timing.”  There are upcoming votes in Alberta and Quebec where they are “talking about more autonomy. In the case of Quebec, independence.”

Also, the U.S midterm elections are in November, and the Democrats “are unapologetic anti-American and pro-Canadian.” There are key Senate races in Maine and Michigan, right on the border, along with Wisconsin. And so, Hanson speculated, “what Carney was trying to do was to get people in the United States sympathetic to Canada.”

Canada’s economy remains divided by interprovincial trade barriers and conflicts between provinces. Notice that the premiers of Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia, whose provinces are being hit the hardest by Trump tariffs, are all convinced that the thing to do is to slap giant countervailing tariffs and export taxes on the exports of Saskatchewan and Alberta, but not their own products. The fact that doing so promises to ruin those industries for generations afterwards is of little concern.

Canada doesn’t take comparative advantage of critical minerals and oil and gas but instead, those industries are strangled with endless taxation and regulation. The Liberals have spent the past decade trying to destroy the Alberta-based energy industry. Providing the means to extract and ship oil to market is nearly impossible.

“Countries rarely collapse because they lack potential,” writes David Suchanek, who teaches economics and international business at Appleby College in Oakville, Ontario. “They decay because potential becomes an excuse for tolerating mediocre institutions. Weak productivity growth, chronic permitting delays, fragmented regulation and interprovincial trade barriers routinely turn comparative advantage into comparative frustration.”

Stephen Nagy, in an article in the Aug. 28 National Post, “Canada Must Stop Being the ‘Ugly Ally,’” reminds us how in the Trudeau decade Canada’s relationship with its most vital security and trading partner was disastrously mishandled.

“We saw Trudeau explicitly campaign against ‘MAGA conservatism,’ while then Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly publicly mused about creating a game plan to deal with a hypothetical authoritarian shift in the US.” Following Trump’s 2024 electoral victory, Trudeau called Kamala Harris’s electoral defeat “a setback for women’s progress,” and suggested women’s rights were under attack by “regressive” and “reactionary” political forces.

The heavy-handed way the truckers were treated during their occupation of Ottawa during the COVID pandemic, including the freezing of bank accounts, also did not go unnoticed.

In Carney’s attempts at economic diversification, he is making deals with the likes of China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. All these countries are, of course, far from making even a pretence of democratic governance, but in the case of China, that nation is a world power and the most important economic and geopolitical rival to the United States.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has named Dominic Barton, Canada’s former ambassador to China, as the new board chair of a reconfigured Invest in Canada initiative, a move which will please Beijing. During his years in the executive suite of Brookfield Asset Management from 2020 to 2025, Carney went out of his way to praise Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But anyone who thinks Washington, be it under Trump or a future Democratic administration, would allow a truly close Canadian “strategic partnership” with Beijing is dreaming. It would make a mockery of NORAD and turn the 49^th parallel inro an American border with a country that had come under Chinese economic – and perhaps political – sway.

As Conrad Black has written, in “Carney’s Big Chance,” National Post, Aug. 29, Trump considers that “we have been an incoherent nationality whose modus operandi has been a dishonourable freeloading on the Americans for national defence, and absolute commercial dependence upon the United States as if we were states of the American Union, while only masquerading as an independent country.”

Canada has been able to indulge in these activities precisely because it borders the United States – a country that, until Trump came along, paid it little attention.

 

 

The Rise of the Anti-Immigrant German Right

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

On Sept. 4-5, 2015, Angela Merkel, then the German Chancellor, opened the floodgates of the country by allowing some million refugees into the country. Most of them were fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

This all followed the publication of a photo of the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, a two-year old who drowned and was washed up on a Mediterranean beach (a picture which some observers considered staged).

“We can do this,” she famously assured Germans. She was wrong. A decade of chaos, including periodic terrorist attacks, has been the result. Germany, even in its most urban and populated areas, went from a safe nation with high levels of social trust and generous social safety nets, to something rather different. Some 25 years ago, the concept of ungovernably dangerous areas was simply unheard of. Not anymore.

This has given rise to the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now leading in national polls, and on the cusp of taking power in Saxony-Anhalt in that state’s Sept. 6 election. The state government is currently run by the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), as it has been for most of the time since 1990.

The AfD, Germany’s largest opposition party, was founded in 2013 as an anti-euro party that then shifted direction to focus on reducing migration. It challenges the consensus on migration, nationhood, Europe, and identity. Germany is bracing for three state elections, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on Sept. 20 alongside that of Saxony-Anhalt.

Located in the former Communist East Germany, Saxony-Anhalt is a conservative and underappreciated region marked by depopulation, industrial decline and rural traditionalism. The AfD has long polled more strongly in eastern Germany than in the former West Germany.

“We will form the government in Saxony-Anhalt,” the party’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, predicted in an interview with broadcaster ZDF Aug. 23. A recent Infratest dimap poll showed the AfD with 41per cent support, a result that would double the party’s vote share compared to the last election in 2021, and well ahead of 24 per cent for the conservative Christian Democrats. The Left Party is at 13 per cent, while the Social Democrats are at between six and seven per cent.

This would be enough for an absolute majority of seats in the legislature and allow the AfD to form a government without coalition partners. This is important, because Germany has a cross-party consensus to uphold a firewall or Brandmauer against any parties to the right of the conservative Christian Democrats. This means no party would form a coalition with the AfD, which is almost always necessary to rule under Germany’s electoral system. Even when the AfD came first in the 2024 elections in Thuringia, a state neighbouring Saxony-Anhalt, with 33 per cent of the vote, the centre-right CDU, which came second, chose to form a government with parties to its left, sending the AfD into opposition despite being the largest party.

Ulrich Siegmund, the leader of the AfD in the state, told broadcaster Deutsche Welle that he wants to create a “domino effect” with a “historic” victory. The country’s domestic intelligence service has labeled his AfD’s regional chapter as “right-wing extremist,” which he dismisses as politically motivated. 

The AfD has unveiled an ambitious 100-day government program, including tougher deportation policies, changes to welfare provision for asylum seekers, cuts to funding for NGOs and party foundations, and reforms to public broadcasting.

They also fear ethnic Germans are slowly being replaced by other groups. Nearly a quarter of former East Germans have moved west or abroad since German reunification in 1990. In those five states, the population has fallen by 16 per cent (excluding East Berlin). Saxony-Anhalt recorded the most dramatic decline at 26 per cent. That’s left behind a region that is now Germany’s oldest, with an average age of 48.3 years. Its birth rate among the lowest, with many communities watching traditions slowly disappear.

 “Germany suffers from massive depopulation,” their manifesto states. “What in political debate is referred to as ‘demographic change’ is nothing less than the aging and extinction of the German people.” The text claims that the “ruling parties” know the extent of the problem but are lacking “the political will or the courage to enact the measures that would be necessary to reverse the trend.” The number of people without German citizenship has more than doubled since 2015.

On immigration, the party has limited room to manoeuvre at the state level, since this is largely the federal government’s prerogative. But it would use Saxony-Anhalt’s four of 69 votes in Germany’s upper house, the Bundesrat, to lobby for radical change at the national level as well as enacting state-level measures like refusing to take an allocated share of asylum seekers even if they have entered Germany through a safe state. There is also a frequent use of the term “remigration” to describe the party’s aim to reverse the mass migration Germany has seen over the last decade or so.

 As early as 2010, Thilo Sarrazin, a German economist and author, published Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself), a critique of post-war immigration policy. By leaving Germany’s demographic anxiety entirely to the AfD, the mainstream parties are losing a lot of ground.