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.
We’re in another spat with our northern neighbor, Canada, kind of a psychodrama again. We were at the penultimate stage of a new trade agreement, just expanding on the prior trade agreements when, at the last moment, Prime Minister Mark Carney pulled out, and he cited that there were unfair demands that adjudicated whether Canada, as a sovereign nation, could trade as it wished and import and export as it wished.
And then he said there were cultural appropriations, that we were demanding certain curtailments of the full expression of Quebec culture. We like to have good relations with Canada. They speak the same language. We come out of the same original font from the English-speaking world in England.
We remember the great relations we had with Prime Minister [Brian] Mulroney during the Bush administration. I think Stephen Harper, who was the model of a prime minister between 2006 and 2015, was the acme of Canadian-American relations. But right now, Donald Trump got very angry, and he said that he was going to rename Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes, Lake America.
I don’t think that’s gonna hold just because 60% of the water acreage of the five Great Lakes rests in Canada. Lake Ontario itself, I think, is 55% Canada, and it’s been Ontario for a long time. But it’s symbolic of the anger that’s building. Carney was not quite honest in what he said to the Canadian people.
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First of all, Canada runs a chronic $50 billion surplus. Sometimes it goes up to 70, sometimes it approaches 100, but it’s pretty much solid in that territory of 50 to 70, no matter what happens. And under this administration, it knew that the United States wanted symmetrical trade, roughly, you know, $10 or $15 billion either way.
So, that was the original and remaining issue. The other thing that was very, I think, disingenuous by Carney, who, by the way, has told his European Union friends he has no relations to speak of with the Trump administration in particular and America in general. But it only affects 5% of all trade.
Ninety-five percent of trade is unaffected. And why were we trying to get this deal, and why did Canada suddenly back out? Well, there was a political reason, and then there was an issue reason. The issue was, we were saying that, like Mexico used to do, you bring in dumped below-market-price Chinese products, and you send them over here as Mexico did with cars, appliances, and technology.
It got stuff from China cheap without tariffs, and then it assembled it at below the cost of production, basically, in the United States by using this secondhand or this runaround, wraparound, whatever you want to call it, from China. Canada does the same thing. They import cheap aluminum and steel from their Chinese partners.
They put it into products like automobiles, trucks, and they send it to us, and we say, “Well, that’s not really your product. You’re using materials from our chief rival, which we have sanctioned, and you’re aiding and abetting them.” And it didn’t do Carney any favors when he has said before that he wanted a new relationship with China, basically at the expense of ours.
The other thing about Canadian sovereignty, culture, civilization, and the French language was completely bogus. Basically, our social media companies and sales companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, you name them, Google, they wanted to slap on a 5% tax, I should say a surcharge, on all of their revenues in Canada on the idea that they were impinging on the cultural integrity of Canada.
It was just a way to shake down our companies and get money, and we don’t do it to Canada, we don’t do it to other countries. We expect them not to do it to us.
There was also a political reason. Why now? There are two plebiscites among the provinces of Canada. One is in Alberta and one is in Quebec, and for different reasons they’re very angry at the central government.
Besides the fact that Canada has a lot of problems, number one, Alberta’s energy-rich and has enough money to stand on its own, and it’s more pro-American usually than the other provinces.
And two, it can’t fully extract its natural oil and natural gas and rare minerals because of strict Canadian environmental laws and other reasons that the other provinces restrict pipelines to their territory, etc.
The other was the age-old problem with Quebec, is that French nationalism, so there’s always a separatist movement, and it’s getting closer and closer to being reified.
The other thing was we’re coming up to the U.S. midterms, and Carney knows that there are close elections in Wisconsin, in Maine, and in Michigan, and if he can trash Donald Trump and appeal to the Democratic Party, and he hired a high-ranking former Hillary Clinton employee as one of his major advisers.
He is trying to be the victim and show how oppressive the United States is and help similarly minded, left-of-center politicians and movements in the United States.
There’s another problem, and that is Canada’s problem is not our problem. In the last 10 years, of all the major Western economies, Canada is the lowest.
It’s only had 1.1 GDP growth. That’s just baffling because it’s so rich in natural resources.
Another thing to remember is Canada has much more immigrants than we do as a percentage of its population. We have an all-time high at 16%, 55 million. Right now Canada has about 26% or 27% of its population that is immigrants.
And when you add second-generation immigrants, about seven million, and you add visa holders who are not Canadian citizens but residents, you’re getting close to 45% of the population was not born in Canada or their parents were not born in Canada.
And when you add that with a very sluggish economy and people coming from largely Asia, India, China, and the Latin American countries, they have a lot of very poor people in dire need of social services in a stagnant economy that cannot support it.
Then you add in that for the last 20 years it has not met any of its requirements for NATO rearmament. It’s just this year it may or may not, depending on how you calibrate the expense, make its 2%. Last year it may have done it. A lot of the money that they claim they spent on weaponry may have been on infrastructure, retirement, salaries, et cetera.
But the point I’m making is Canada rightly assumes that they’re next to the United States and no one is going to invade Canada, and no one is going to shoot a missile at Ottawa or British Columbia without the United States knocking it down. We all know that, but yet it will not pay its fair share, and this is a country that had a substantial presence in World War II.
I think it was the fourth-greatest navy in the world at the time. So there are other problems that make it very insecure. And when you look at the entire Canadian culture, it is more now European than North American. About 5% to 7%, depending on what year we look at, but the numbers are increasing, are euthanized.
They believe, and they have now green-lighted euthanasia all over Canada. So about 17,000 to 18,000 people a year die. That is completely foreign to the American experience.
Add it all up.
You’ve got a weak economy. You’ve got an inability or unwillingness to meet its defense responsibilities. It’s got a terrible problem of massive immigration where it cannot assimilate, acculturate, or integrate newcomers into the traditional Canadian cultural and civilizational protocol and experience.
It’s right next to a U.S. powerhouse, and you’ve got a left-center government with midterm and provincial elections coming up, and the result is it wants to seize, if I could use that leftist word, seize on two issues that are pretty irrelevant.
All it has to do is say, “If we bring in cheap below-cost Chinese communist aluminum and steel, then you can tariff, tariff, and we’re not gonna tariff you because you’re smothering French culture in Canada.”
Come on, we’re not gonna charge you 5% on your companies that do that. They’re private entities. They’re free to do whatever they want. They offer a product. You’re not forced to use it.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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