The second Donald Trump administration hasn’t even begun, yet it feels like everyone has forgotten some of the lessons of the first one — namely, that it’s impossible to try to negotiate with a White House whose primary interest is in domination. If anyone needed a reminder, the president-elect provided the entire country (and all of Mexico) with one last night, announcing on social media that one of his first acts after his inauguration would be to implement 25 per cent tariffs on all goods made in Canada and Mexico until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”
There are so many problems with this ultimatum from Canada’s perspective: the amount of fentanyl that crosses the northern border to enter the United States is a tiny, tiny fraction of the volumes that come in from Mexico or from the coasts, according to those resistance libs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In most years, the volumes intercepted by American law enforcement coming from Canada are so small, they could be easily moved by a single able-bodied person with a backpack.
(Canadian law enforcement has not helped matters in recent years. It’s issued press releases denominating fentanyl seizures in “number of lethal doses seized” — as the standard lethal dose for fentanyl is two milligrams, almost literally any substantial seizure will involve millions of lethal doses. But the phrase sounds much more impressive and budget-justifying in a press release than “a few kilograms.”)
The same story is broadly true of migration: the human flows heading south from Canada are a small fraction of those arriving in the U.S. from elsewhere. But facts aren’t the point, and they aren’t going to be for another four years at least. Again, many have already forgotten what the first Trump term was like, but it included, to pick just one example, the White House hastily redrawing hurricane tracks on a map in Sharpie marker to justify Trump’s statements.
This all leaves Canadian policymakers in a bit of a jam, because it’s hard to defend yourself on the facts when the facts don’t matter. Premier Doug Ford sounded positively hurt Tuesday morning, saying at Queen’s Park that Trump’s tariff announcement was “like a family member stabbing you right in the heart.”
Unsaid was something at least as important: we’re watching Ford’s Plan A for dealing with the second Trump term fall apart in real time, and it’s not clear what could replace it. Ford has been vocal about carving out a separate peace with Trump’s Washington, calling on Mexico to match U.S. and Canada tariffs on Chinese cars and proposing an as-yet-theoretical bilateral trade deal to protect Canadian jobs and, incidentally, put some distance between us and American animosity to Mexico.
Honestly, it was worth a shot. It’s kind of unseemly for Canada to try to build itself a lifeboat in this storm without Mexico, but national interests are what they are. The feds conspicuously did not shoot down Ford’s trial balloon, although they emphasized for propriety’s sake that Canada’s interests are well-served by the current agreement, which was negotiated during Trump’s first term.
The problem facing Ford — and the rest of the Canadian policymaking universe — is that, for 40 years, economic policy in Canada has taken open access to the U.S. market as a given, and that assumption no longer holds. It’s genuinely hard to know what would work to appease Trump and the people around him or whether appeasement is even possible. Trump spent the entirety of his recent presidential campaign saying, loudly and often, that tariffs are good and that they would be the centrepiece of his second term. This is, by all reporting, a matter of deep conviction for him and not something that could be negotiated away easily.
So the next four years will probably look much like the years 2016-2020 did: Canadian premiers and the prime minister (or their successors) will work in varying degrees of co-operation to remind American officials at every level how important the economic ties between our two countries are and hope that various congressional and state-level Republicans can catch the ear of the incoming president. That playbook worked, more or less, in the first Trump administration. The dark question that should be plaguing our leaders now is whether it will work a second time.
For Ford in particular, there’s the additional question of how all of this will affect his plans for an early election next year. He can try to pitch himself as a steady hand on the tiller in a more tumultuous world, but that pitch becomes less credible when his efforts at public negotiation are so obviously rebuffed by Washington.
Donate