When Our Friend and Neighbor Declares War on You
I’m Canadian. I grew up believing that the United States was our closest friend, our biggest trading partner and our closest cultural neighbor. We shared music, movies, television, ideas and an enormous border that somehow never seemed to matter very much.
Today Canada’s prime minister declared that Canada is at war with the United States. Not a shooting war, but a trade war, a war over sovereignty and, increasingly, a fight over what kind of country Canada is allowed to be.
Mark Carney put it bluntly after walking away from negotiations with President Trump’s administration. “You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” he said.
That is a remarkable thing for a Canadian prime minister to say about America. It is also a remarkable thing for an American president to have made necessary. The United States has imposed new tariffs of as much as 50 percent on Canadian goods, while demanding concessions that reach far beyond the price of lumber, steel or automobiles. According to The New York Times, American negotiators pressed Canada over its policies supporting Canadian and French-language culture, including streaming, publishing, film and French labeling.
That should concern Americans as much as Canadians. Whether the United States can use its economic power to tell a smaller neighbor what it is allowed to protect, produce and preserve.
Canada has spent generations building a country that is distinctly Canadian. It has its own music, its own films, its own languages and its own culture. It will not become another version of America simply because it shares a border
America is damaging Herself. The United States has enormous economic power, the world's greatest universities, technology companies, entertainment industry and financial institutions. All extraordinarily successful because people around the world wanted to buy what Americans made.
For generations, countries trusted the United States to be a reliable trading partner. Businesses built factories and supply chains based upon that assumption. Consumers benefited from an enormous integrated North American economy.
The country itself let this happen. Now it’s up to the country. Why has so much changed? The USA voted for a felon to run the country. Maybe that was it.
Carney says Canada will accelerate its effort to diversify its economy and reduce its dependence on the United States. That may be painful in the short term, but it could ultimately make Canada stronger.
This sad day for Canada is a much more ominous one for the United States.
Neil
