Winston Churchill said there was nothing quite as exhilarating as being shot at without result, and for a moment there it looked like Canada had dodged a bullet: talk of tariffs on Canadian goods exported to the U.S. was paused until March, giving the various and sundry governments of this country some breathing room to try and organize a reaction against our biggest customer suddenly being gripped by madness. It turns out that dodging many bullets is harder — and this week the punishment has resumed, with U.S. president Donald Trump announcing tariffs on foreign-made steel and aluminum, including from Canada. The new tariffs are announced to go into effect on March 12, not long after the pause on the comprehensive tariffs will be lifted.
Who knows, maybe we’ll somehow get both? There’s no point in trying to be optimistic about this stuff anymore, the best we can aim for is resignation. The impact of the steel tariffs would be devastating in Ontario: major steelmakers like Algoma and Stelco have been in and out of creditor protection in the 21st century as they struggle to hold back the rising tide of Chinese production. U.S. tariffs certainly won’t help. It’s undeniably bad news in places like Hamilton and Sault Ste. Marie.
More notable is the fact that the Trump administration isn’t particularly trying to justify these tariffs as in any way a response to Canadian conduct. If there was a fig leaf of rationalization over the prior round of tariffs (maybe it was dairy, maybe it was fentanyl traffic) the comprehensive and complete reason for steel tariffs against Canada amounts to “because, that’s why.” Trump and his administration want the U.S. to make its own steel, regardless of how secure and consistent Canadian suppliers have been. This is clarifying, in a useful way: Canada’s conduct does not matter and neither does the fact that our largest steel producers are a stone’s throw from the U.S.-Canada border. We are now regarded as suspect aliens, not friends and allies.
(Canadian conservatives who embarrassed themselves by taking Trump’s side in the first-round tariff dispute ought to have learned this lesson from the first Trump administration: literally nobody leaves his service with their reputations intact.)
And it doesn’t end with steel and aluminum. Trump is apparently convinced that Canada “stole” American auto jobs, and is threatening a 100 per cent tariff on Canadian-made cars, saying that cars should be made in Detroit instead. There’s no point reiterating that cars made in Detroit are assembled out of parts that were made in Windsor, and vice versa: the people around Trump have undoubtedly explained this to him, and he doesn’t care.
This all makes Doug Ford’s first trip (of two planned) to Washington D.C. to plead Canada’s case seem quaint, if not naïve. Ford spoke to the U.S. chamber of commerce on Tuesday trying to sell Ontario as a keystone in a “new American and Canadian century” but the arguments that worked in the first Trump term may simply be exhausted and out of date. What Canada faces isn’t someone who’s ignorant of the interconnected nature of the North American market; Trump understands it and resents it.
What we face is a U.S. president who is quite openly saying two things, over and over in public and on camera: he doesn’t believe that Canada should exist as a country separate from the United States; and so long as it does, any kind of industrial prosperity enjoyed on the north side of the border is by definition illegitimate and stolen from more deserving people to the south.
There’s lots of reasons that Doug Ford’s trips to D.C. are a stunt, unlikely to meaningfully change events. But the simplest and most fundamental is that there’s no negotiation to be had here, no clever persuasion that can move Trump off these obsessions. There’s no meeting these demands halfway or finding a win-win. What might work, eventually, is economic and political pain that must inevitably come when his desires come to fruition. The bad news for Canada is that whatever pain the U.S. economic and political systems have to endure to get this out of their system, we’ll have to endure worse, first.
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