At the risk of sounding like Jason Kenney, where’s John A. Macdonald when we need him?

At the risk of sounding like Jason Kenney, where’s John A. Macdonald when we need him?

I speak, of course, not of the policies that gave rise to the tragic legacy of Canada’s first prime minister so admired by Alberta’s first United Conservative Party premier – opposed as Mr. Kenney was to seeing the heads of mere statuary roll – but of Macdonald’s approach to tariffs.

The National Policy, that is – infrastructure, immigration, and tariffs. Plus, it might be fairly added … no little imagination.

Certainly, a National Policy of transportation and tariffs seems like a better elephant with which to trample the Liberals than the contemporary Conservative Opposition’s pathetic surrender to all things MAGA, no matter how idiotic. 

It’s frankly embarrassing to see Canada’s first ministers scrambling over one another to expose their bellies to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump after his opening negotiating gambit in his campaign to beat up Canadians to satisfy his urge to beat up Latin Americans, or whatever it is he’s trying to prove.

It’s so early in this thing that we don’t even know what he wants to negotiate, if anything, when he proposes to subject everything we export to the United States to a 25-per-cent tariff.

That’s so large it could be fairly described as a sanction far more likely to be effective than the supposed sanctions from hell the United States imposed on Russia in 2022, which seem to have had the principal effect of de-industrializing America’s Western European allies and shoring up Russian President Vladimir Putin’s domestic popularity.

Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader and putative next prime minister of Canada, stands on the sidelines demanding at least an equal measure of servility and grovelling impotence in response to Mr. Trump’s threats as do our first-ministerial co-dependents! 

You don’t have to read The Art of the Deal to understand that this is not a good way to negotiate, especially from a position of relative strength in the form of vast oil reserves, even if they are all mixed up with billions of tons of sand and the market’s about to crater if Mr. Trump can keep his tiny paws of those woke renewables Stateside. 

Mr. Trump is probably just being spiteful, and dumb. That would certainly be on brand. But who really knows? 

Still, you can’t keep the U.S. Air Force in the air with batteries, can you? At least not yet. So as Macdonald might say, thinking of some tariffs of his own … Tally Ho! 

Perhaps Mr. Trump would like to de-industrialize Canada as U.S. President Joe Biden’s presumed pipeline sabotage and confirmed sanctions regime have impacted Germany and the rest of the European Union. If so, the job won’t be as formidable. Thanks to modern “free trade” and the Stephen Harper government, we Canadians have to a significant degree taken care of that ourselves. 

We’re quickly getting back to doing nothing much but shipping staples, as described by Harold Innis, who wasn’t talking about office supplies. In other words, a situation with which Macdonald would have been familiar.

Canadians need to understand that Mr. Trump had to create the current fake emergency on the United States’ northern border to justify imposing tariffs on an emergency basis under the 1974 Trade Act without the assent of the U.S. Congress. And even so, he is restricted to 15 per cent, for 150 days.

This is true even if a couple of toadying Conservative premiers obsequiously say they think he has a point about U.S. border security. (Securing which, as someone said today, you’d think would be an American job, not ours.) 

“Team Canada,” as we embarrassingly insist on calling our federal-provincial negotiators in such anxious circumstances, would be better advised to keep their powder dry and wait to see how this shakes out in Congress, not to mention in the once and future president’s diminished attention span. 

Thanks at least in part to the divisive tactics of our own Premier Danielle Smith here in Wild Rose Country, this is unlikely to happen. In that great Calgary tradition, our Albertan politicians can be depended upon to demand a stampede to the worst deal possible, especially when it offers the side benefit of an excuse to continue battering Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

The blunt fact is, as long as Mr. Trudeau is prime minister, there is no way that Ms. Smith is going to be any kind of team player. And it’s unlikely it’ll make much difference after he goes. 

Well, it was too much free trade that got Wilfrid Laurier turfed from office in 1911, but it unfortunately didn’t work in 1988 with Brian Mulroney.

Still, it’s not as if we weren’t warned about the risk that Mulroney’s “free-trade” policies would ultimately get us to precisely where we find ourselves today. 

Here is Professor Mel Watkins, economist and co-founder of the NDP’s now all-but-forgotten Waffle faction, speaking to us from the grave: In 1985 Watkins asked aloud if Canada should tie itself even more tightly to a “grossly mismanaged” American economy sustained mostly by enormous arms spending, which he termed “military Keynesianism”? 

“It is one thing for Canada to be tied to an efficient, well-managed, benign economy, another to be tied yet more tightly to a crisis-ridden economy that seems at times resolved to solve its problems without regard to the interest of others,” he wrote. “There is a need for Canada to attempt to distance itself more from the United States, difficult as that would be.”

He concluded: “If the U.S. moves to protectionism, Canada should try for exemptions – but not at any price. … What Canada needs is to ‘secure and enhance’ its market for domestic producers. It needs to move, not along American lines – to deregulation, more ad hocery, and arms-spending style job creation – but along an indigenous path to a comprehensive industrial policy and conscious economic planning.”

Wise words from a Canadian Cassandra! 

Macdonald’s tariffs of 17.5 to 20 per cent put cheap manufactured goods from the United States at a disadvantage to protect Canadian industry, which was in its infancy, getting it off to a good start notwithstanding a lot of complaining out here on the Great Plains. 

Maybe we should think about how to Make Canada Great Again!

NOTE: Prof. Watkins wasn’t around to ask permission, but I have taken the liberty of inserting one small punctuation edit into this passage, for clarity, which surely he would have agreed to had I been his editor in 1985. DJC