The controversy over tariffs between Canada and the United States—and the partially related issue of illegal migrants, drugs, guns, and other objects crossing the Canada-U.S. border—is having the beneficial effect of causing Canadians to think about making this country more independent of American influence and also a more efficient economy for competition in the world.
As I touched upon here last week, the most irritating aspect of the current controversy is the flippant manner in which Canada was likened to Mexico, and the official conduct of the two countries was implicitly deemed by the U.S. government to be equally objectionable. President Trump made it clear that his principal grievance in the case of both countries was illegal immigration and drug imports, which as a practical matter has nothing to do with tariffs. Nor is what crosses the border of a sovereign country a legitimate subject of complaints by that country, since every country has both the right and the duty to make its borders as easy or as difficult to cross for people and goods as it wishes.
Trump’s real complaint is with his predecessor, who threw open the southern border and admitted over 12 million illegal migrants, including scores of thousands of violent criminals, among whom were embedded many child traffickers and importers of 20,000 tons of dangerous drugs. At the same time, Mexico was luring American factories into Mexico with promises of tax holidays, subsidies for construction of plants, cheap labour, and the ability to sell finished goods via NAFTA back into the country that they had deserted.
None of this applies to Canada, which is a fair-trading country. The number of people that the United States says entered improperly from Canada is a very small fraction of those crossing the southern border; and more than 500 times the quantity of illegal drugs that entered the United States from Canada over the last several years entered the United States from Mexico.
There is reason to hope that the controversy will de-escalate and be resolved in the usual form of bilateral discussion. Irritating though they are, these new issues in Canada’s relations with the United States have generated patriotic considerations that have not arisen much in the recent era of the political class naively declaring a post-national world.
In examining what we might do to make our country stronger and less susceptible to capricious and annoying U.S. behaviour, one of the most obvious matters to address is the extensive number of obstacles to interprovincial trade within Canada. To some extent this is a matter of different standards of health and safety regulations, the required ingredients in products, and over-generous agricultural price supports. The problem is so complicated that it is impossible to incite any public interest in the elements of it, but in times like these, when the fundamental economic strength of the country is under threat and there is legitimate interest in what constructive steps we can logically take, there naturally arises a consensus that internal differences should be resolved to make the whole country a stronger entity, especially if we are now entering a climate of a much less supportive attitude from our large neighbour.
It is a notorious fact that there are many doctors either in Canada or seeking to come to Canada who are being delayed in being qualified to practice for spurious or protectionist reasons, even though every informed person in this country knows that our health-care system is a shambles and that its two greatest problems are an insufficient number of doctors and chronic excessive administrative personnel.
In the case of the maze of agricultural price supports, the logical answer is for those provinces who wish to top up the income of their farmers to do so in direct payments and not inflict absurdly elevated prices on the consumers of the country. This is one point that President Trump has commented on directly as an egregious affront to any notion of free trade, and he is correct.
With these should come all the power that the federal government can exert, including in the administration of transfer payments and the moral authority the prime minister will possess, to raise the flag and demand a higher level of rational efficiency from governments at every level to end these parochial internal barriers. If this were highlighted in the context of what would be a comprehensive and essential program of national self-strengthening, all of the provinces would ultimately be resistless against the logic of reducing these barriers.
In the present difficulties there is an opportunity to make Canada stronger by governing better. We must not squander that opportunity.
