Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Victor Davis Hanson: Canada, everybody likes Canada. Come on. We all have—I have a brother-in-law who’s Canadian and a very nice person. But there’s three things to remember about Canada, this dispute.
No. 1 are the issues, and they’re real.
No. 2 is the timing. Why now?
And No. 3: Why does Mark Carney seem so angry?
He’s not a Stephen Harper, that wonderful prime minister that I think all of us on the conservative side, but all Americans in general, really admired. And he’s not Brian Mulroney, whom I admired, who just passed away not too long ago.
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So, there’s three issues. There’s Carney, there’s the timing, and there’s the problem.
The problem is that Canada pretty much got into a habit the last few years of running up a $50 billion to $70 billion surplus with the United States. Not as bad as Mexico, but under [President] Donald Trump’s vision of symmetry, he wanted to address it.
And what made it egregious is we had a North American Free Trade Association, which was supposed to eliminate the need for tariffs and taxes on imported and exported goods because there would be fair dealing and there would not be differences very much.
What Ross Perot—remember he said that, that huge sucking sound of jobs—the sucking sound … and money. Yeah. That wasn’t gonna happen, we were told by [Bill] Clinton and [Al] Gore. And it did, and Mexico had $200 billion. And the weird thing is, we told Mexico, “You’re not going to get Chinese cheap dump parts and assemble them and be the gateway for China to evade tariffs, to get undercut our jobs.”
And they said, “OK, we won’t do it.” Then we said, “We’re going to tax, we’re gonna start your remittances at 1%, $65 billion … ” And we said that because we had 30 million illegal immigrants, mostly from Latin America and Mexico, who were largely recipients in some fashion of American largesse: housing, education, food, health care subsidies.
We’re not gonna pay that and free them free cash to become the largest source of foreign exchange in Mexico, which we are.
Jack Fowler: Money, that probably had not been taxed in the U.S. either.
Hanson: No. No. And never had. It was probably cash. Then we tried to tell them about the cartels, and the point is, we were making progress, but not so much with Canada.
They kept running this surplus. And then we said there were other peripheral issues. You promised to meet your NATO goals, and you never did. Last year they may have done it, but they may have done it by bookkeeping that counted salaries and infrastructure rather than just militarily strict budgeting.
And if they did, it was like 1.98%, 2.01% of [gross domestic product]. So, they were reliant on America’s nuclear shield and protection, and nobody in their right mind in America ever thought that if the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans threatened Canada, they would not be protected by us, either through anti-ballistic missile systems or forward …
And they have no military. I think they have 79 jets that are functional. Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Kuwait have 300. Israel has 400.
Fowler: And their landmass just begs to have broader coverage.
Hanson: So, the issue was Trump said, “Let’s reopen negotiation.” They were all set. They agreed on everything.
And by the way, it only affected 5% of all of the total amount. And he said through his agents, Howard Lutnick and the others, “If you do what Mexico is doing and you import cheap aluminum and steel from China that does not have a market economy, then you’re breaking the understanding because you are assembling things in cars and autos and sending them here that are not solely Canadian-made.
“And you’re doing it at the bequest of China. And No. 2, you are telling all of our social media companies, Meta and sales companies that are online, Amazon, Google, Twitter,” the old Twitter, X, excuse me. “You’re telling them they have to pay 5% so that they don’t smother Canadian culture just off the top of all their revenues, hundreds of, I don’t know what it was, hundreds of millions of dollars. Why are you picking on these companies? And this is in addition to any other import fees or anything.
“We don’t do that with yours. When I read the National Post, the government doesn’t say to the National Post, ‘You are influencing American public opinion and you’re stifling our culture, so we need to tax you 5%.’”
So, that was the issue. And the other issue was that after a certain percent, tariffs went up 250% on dairy and farm products to Canada.
And Canada said they were supporting independent entrepreneurial family farms. But like everything Carney says, it’s not accurate.
If you’re a Canadian farmer or you’re a Canadian egg producer, whatever, you get an allotment from the government. You can’t just go out and start something, just like you can’t set up an X-ray or a CT center.
Everything is controlled. So, the idea that the United States was gonna drive you out, maybe it could hurt you if we ever got up to the 250. They said, “It’s 250%” but we never really charge you.” And we said, “We never really charge you because all of our companies, when they meet your little quota, they can’t send anymore because it’ll be up to 250%, so they self-restrict it.”
So, that was the situation. Carney then blew up and said, “We’re not going to let the United States destroy our sovereignty and tell us who we have to trade with.”
Subtext: If we want to help Communist China dump product in the United States by assembling it into our automobiles, trucks, etc., at cheap stuff, which even our steel and aluminum people don’t want, and our companies and unions want to agree with the Americans and restrict it, we’re gonna walk out.
And more importantly, if you don’t wanna pay, then you’re stifling the French language. So, it was all misdirection, No. 1, and it didn’t really make that much difference because, as I said, it was only a tariff. So, why did he blow up?
No. 2, he blew up because of the timing. There is an election in the province of Alberta and one in Quebec.
And although they’re very different places, the most conservative and the most liberal of all the provinces, they had one thing in common. They all were talking about more autonomy. In the case of Quebec, independence, and the popular government—under Carney as all—is very unpopular. Maybe not vis-a-vis us, very popular in that regard.
But the people who were nationalist in the sense of O Canada, pan-Canadianism, were in the minority view in some of the polls.
So, he wanted to come out and get really tough, say that Donald Trump is this and that, and he had just come out of Europe not too long ago and told the Europeans, “We have to have a new paradigm. I have no relation with Trump.”
And he was going to be the nonaligned kind of 1960s-type Third World, I guess he thought.
By the way, that’s not … Canada has 41 million people. California has 41 million people. California has a $4.3 trillion GDP even under [Gov. Gavin] Newsom, which is like Canadian socialism.
And they have 2.2. So, every Californian produces in a reductionist sense, twice the goods and services as Canada. So, he can’t stand there as the world banker with three passports and tell us that he’s got a winning formula. So, in any case, he thought taking on the United States, storming out of a trade agreement, damning the United States, excuse me for that language, I don’t mean it in the pejorative or obscene fashion, that would win him popularity and with it a no vote on greater provincial autonomy in these two potential breakaway provinces.
So, he timed it to do that. There was another part to his timing. We are nine weeks from the election. Anybody who listens to a Democratic politician, Hakeem Jeffries, especially Gavin Newsom, about this trade dispute, they are unapologetic anti-American and pro-Canadian. Hillary Clinton’s former top official in her campaign is working for him, for Mark Carney, as a media advisor, public relations or something.
Yeah. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Exactly. And there are key Senate races in where? Maine, right on the border, Michigan, right on the border, and Wisconsin. And so, what Carney was trying to do was to get people in the United States sympathetic to Canada, and here’s Donald Trump again.
And Donald Trump helped fuel that when he said he was gonna rename Lake Ontario, Lake America. Lake Ontario’s 55% of its mass is in Canada. I think most Americans don’t care that it’s called Lake Ontario. This was the way he was trolling them. But the Left went crazy as if they never rename things, which they rename everything.
So, my point is, he took two issues that were not really issues. He blew them up, he stormed out, and he did this to tell the Canadian electorate, “Don’t try to break away or flirt with America or flirt with yourself as an independence providence—whatever it is, ’cause I am standing up for Pan-Canadianism against the Americans.”
And then he was telling the Americans in Michigan, in Maine, and in Wisconsin, “Your prices are higher? It’s because your stupid president has tariffs and went after us.” What he didn’t really tell them is that, when Alberta’s, I guess it was Mr. Ford, said we might cut off oil exports, the Americans shrugged their shoulders and said:
“Go ahead. We’re the largest producer of oil and gas in the world. The Persian Gulf is settling down. Price of oil is going down. But more importantly, you have a heavy crude sulfurous product. Your own provinces will not let you send it easily on pipelines to transport centers where you can send it to China. You send it right across the border to the United States.
“We refine it, and guess what? Natural gas, in the case of natural gas, you can’t even send it to Montreal through your own territory because you have these provincial restrictions, environmental nuttiness. So we take your natural gas and we pass it along and plug it into our pipelines, and then it goes back up to Montreal.”
They didn’t even know that when they walked out.
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