Victor Davis Hanson: Canadians Feel Real Pain in Stage Four of Trade War

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

I’d like to offer an update on the Canadian-American trade spat. 

Earlier, I had staged it. I said stage one was surprise on both sides of the border that two neighbors who spoke the same language, had the same civilizational origins in Britain, were close neighbors, and had the largest undefended border in the world were at a point of very angry disagreement. 

The second stage was that Prime Minister Mark Carney started to suggest that the United States was solely culpable, was a bully, and had forced him to cancel the agreement at the 11th hour late on a Friday afternoon without warning.  

And he said that the United States tried to impugn or intercede or limit, prune back, whatever term you use, Canadian sovereignty, both by telling Canada that it couldn’t import cheap Chinese EV vehicles or that it could not import cheap steel and aluminum from China that were really, to be fair, dumped below the cost of production as a way of getting around American tariffs via being used for assembling autos or vehicles in Canada and then shipped into the United States at a cheap price. 

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And he accused us of trying to squelch Canadian and indigenous Canadian expression. In other words, our digital media companies were so successful in bringing the news and social media accounts to Canada that people who wanted to get the indigenous voice out and the French voice out couldn’t, and therefore he was going to unilaterally tax us 5% on top of corporate income tax, which nobody else does. 

We don’t tell Canadian broadcasters or Canadian newspapers we’re gonna tax you so you include the particular culture of the San Joaquin Valley of California. We feel that you don’t know anything about it, and so you’re gonna have to pay a tax to operate in our country. It’s absurd. 

So then the second stage was this war on the United States. The third was a recalibration. People said Carney hasn’t really digested the actual details of why he walked out. He’s been mysterious. He’s been murky. He won’t tell us exactly. 

And why would he side with a totalitarian communist government with Maoist roots that has a million Uyghurs in camps, destroys international trading protocols with dumping products below the cost of production, maintains asymmetrical mercantile trade surpluses, manipulates money and currency, and copyright and patent violations?  

Why would he want to side with them over the largest, the longest democracy in the world, its neighbor, its English-speaking neighbor? It doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do that? 

And I also suggested in stage three that one of the reasons he was doing that is Canada has not utilized its treasure house of natural resources. I’m talking about precious metals, potash, timber, oil, gas, you name it.  

It’s a socialist, ossified, calcified European-style economy plagued with 45% of the population was not born in Canada or their parents were not born in Canada, and they have enormous social welfare needs that the ossified European socialist economy cannot meet. 

And so, because it is failing, it has to have trade surpluses with the United States, and it has to have the United States protect it, and it resents the United States, thinking that we caused its problems. We didn’t cause its problems. 

Alberta can’t make a pipeline to British Columbia because of us. It can make a pipeline into Washington. It can make a pipeline into the United States in the Midwest to sell its oil, but it can’t do it between provinces. 

So if you want fossil fuel products into Quebec or Ontario from Alberta, then they’re gonna come through the United States’ pipeline system. We didn’t do that. 

We had nothing to do with their insane immigration policies. We had nothing to do with their net-zero, insane Green New Deal solar and wind policies. We experienced all that, but we stopped it, and we told them to stop it. 

So that was stage three, a second look at Carney’s narratives. 

Stage four is more serious for Canada. The jobs report came out. They’ve lost 41,000 jobs just in one week of the tariff war. We created 160,000 in August. It’s gonna get worse for Canada. 

We have, as I said, nine times the population, 13 times the nominal GDP, and Canada is entirely reliant. Seventy-five percent of it is reliant. I don’t say that out of triumphalism or boasting, but in sadness for Canada. I don’t know what they’re doing. 

Mr. Carney, who had three passports before he was prime minister, a Canadian, a British, and an Irish. He was the epitome of a globalist, and he wasn’t a nationalist. So his immigration, his energy, his defense policy, and his trade policy were all globalist. They were all European-style, and they didn’t realize or properly exploit the natural gifts of Canada. 

So now we’re in stage four, and the Americans are starting to notice something. The Canadians are booing us at sports events between Canadian and American teams. They keep bragging about elbows up, i.e., we’re gonna be like hockey players and defend ourselves from aggressors like you, violent aggressors.  

And they are waging anti-American propaganda. Carney is. He’s whipped this up because he did not want, as I said in stage three, he didn’t want an autonomous Alberta and an autonomous Quebec, and those referenda are coming up. 

More importantly, he’s now interfering in U.S. internal midterm politics. He’s got left-wing governors and senators deliberately taking the Canadian side, trashing their own president, with Gavin Newsom cutting videos in support of Canada, not us, and then targeting these tariffs at red and purple states along the border to get Trump supporters financially endangered, and therefore they won’t vote for Republican congressional candidates. 

And now we have the reaction. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He does not know what he’s doing. He’s living in a fantasy house.  

So far, the Americans have not noticed this. It’s just water off a duck’s back. But when you show on media day after day people booing us, and you hear him talk about war and battle, and you think that the whole world’s against us, they’re not. He’s all alone. 

He and the Chinese are the only two countries that issued counter tariffs. People in Europe love what he’s doing, but not one of them would follow his example. He’s got his neck out, and the fate of 41 million Canadians depends on him being successful, and he’s gonna fail because the United States is saying, “This is a new world. We’re not gonna subsidize everybody’s defense and run up $200 billion deficits with one neighbor, Mexico, and $50 billion to $60 billion with our northern neighbor and call it a free trade zone.” 

It’s not. It’s a mercantile effort, and we are at our wit’s end, and it’s gonna be a new world. We’re not the wealthy powerhouse we always were. We have $31 trillion, maybe $40 trillion, depending on how you calculate it, in debt, and it’s a new world. 

We want symmetry, and we want gratitude, and this man wants to wage an economic war and gin up world opinion against the United States in alliance with the most pernicious, deadly government in history, as a direct descendant of Mao Zedong, who killed 70 million people, and he’s championing Chinese interests by trying to get around our leverage. 

What he doesn’t understand, to conclude, is this: Canada has key interests in the Arctic. Given warming temperatures, the Northwest Passage may be used to navigate from east to west and west to east. We’re in a dangerous world where an increasing number of countries like North Korea have intercontinental ballistic missiles that have nuclear tips on the missiles. 

What am I getting at? Canada has 79 jets, and they’re 45 years old. Seventy-nine. Seventy-nine. I think California’s National Guard has almost as many. It has about 30 large, considerable ships rather than speedboats, but 30, 35 maybe. It has no military. It hasn’t kept its promises. It has welched. 

It depends on the United States to protect it from incoming aircraft or missiles, to protect it when Russian or Chinese ships decide that they’re going to claim areas of the Arctic that Canada thinks it has possession of or when they want to transit the Northwest Passage.  

In other words, we are subsidizing their defense like we just subsidized Europe’s defense. 

We are subsidizing their economy by allowing them to run up a $50 billion annual surplus. There are one million Canadians in the United States. There’s only a quarter of a million Americans in Canada. You’d think there’d be more since we’re so big, 360 million versus just 40 million. But a little tiny country of 40 million has a million in the United States. 

And you know what the final irony is? Two of Mr. Carney’s four children, his daughters, went to Harvard and Yale and live in the United States, and 95% of his globalist investments are in America. 

So when he tells Canadian small businesses to tough it up, we’re going to war economically against the United States, and your little businesses might have to go broke, but my investments are American because I’m betting on America over Canada because I would not dare put my capital into Canadian financial investments. He’s not. And my children prefer to live where? Not in socialist Canada with socialist medicine, with 45% of the population being immigrants or first- or second-generation Canadians, with a bankrupt economy. They want to live in the United States. 

And so the whole thing is absurd. And I would just caution Mr. Carney: The one thing you do not want to do is so gin up this war that you get on the wrong side of the American people. But all that invective, all that cheap booing, all that grandstanding, all of your flirtation with this communist, lethal government are not going down well. 

And for the first time, people are starting to notice. And your entire economy is in peril because when these reciprocal tariffs start to go back, they were aimed at lowering your $50 billion surplus, our deficit, to a manageable level. But now it’s going to go beyond that. 

And your economy cannot withstand it, not what you’ve done to it, not what you and Mr. Justin Trudeau did to it. You took a vibrant economy and a vibrant defense sector, and you turned them into a calcified, aging European economy and culture, and you’re not up to it. 

And don’t get on the wrong side of the American people with your cheap rhetoric. It won’t end well. 

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