A Pointless Economic Attack on America’s Northern Neighbour

By Jonathan Kay

Canva.

When Donald Trump was first elected US President in 2016, the share of Canadians expressing “confidence” in him polled at just 22 percent. (For Barack Obama, by contrast, the corresponding figure had been 83 percent.) Four years later, perceptions were similar: In advance of the 2020 election, only 15 percent of surveyed Canadians expressed support for Trump. Even among supporters of Canada’s right-of-centre Conservative Party, Joe Biden was more popular than Trump by a 47–33 percent margin.

But the tide shifted in the run-up to last year’s Presidential election: A September 2024 survey indicated that while a majority of Canadians still held negative views of Trump, the Republican candidate was more popular than Kamala Harris among Canadian Conservative voters. Many of these new Canadian Trump fans had come to admire his willingness to speak hard truths (as conservatives view them) about DEI, biological sex, drug policy, and immigration—viewpoints that Canada’s own (less outspoken) conservative politicians often treat as taboo.

Moreover, the 2024 US election took place at time when Canadian voters of all stripes were growing fed up with Canada’s outgoing Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau—especially his (often sanctimoniously expressed) enthusiasm for progressive causes such as mass immigration, carbon taxes, postmodern intellectual fads (specifically, “postnationalism”), expensive anti-racismprograms, incessant “2SLGBTQI+” boosterism, all-ages drag shows, Black Lives Matter, land acknowledgments, gender equity, and intersectionality.

On all of these issues, Trump and Trudeau stand at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. And as Canadians’ patience with Trudeau’s late-2010s-era progressive dogmatism grew thin, it was natural that some would begin to see Trump—the anti-Trudeau—in a more sympathetic light.

Not to suggest that Trump cares what anyone outside the United States thinks of him. But if he did, he might have been pleased to learn that he had ideological allies in Canada who were rooting for his success.

But in light of the crippling 25 percent tariffs that Trump is threatening to impose on Canadian (and Mexican) exports, that uptick in north-of-the-border support for Trump now seems painfully misguided. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a Conservative, perhaps put it best in an unguarded comment made on Monday: “On election day, was I happy [Trump] won? One hundred per cent, I was. [But] then the guy pulled out the knife and [expletive] yanked it into us.”

While Canada and the United States have fought many trade battles over the decades, it’s unlikely that any were initiated on so flimsy a pretext as this one. The White House claims that the “extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency.” But it’s estimated that less than one percent of fentanyl consumed in the United States originates with Canadian smugglers. And while the number of migrants gaining access to the United States from Canada has gone up recently, it’s still a rounding error on America’s total influx.

Canada responded to Trump’s threat by announcing a countervailing set of tariffs on American products. As in all trade wars of this type, consumers in both countries would be made poorer. To quote US Republican Senator Rand Paul, “tariffs are simply taxes. Conservatives once united against new taxes. Taxing trade will mean less trade and higher prices.”

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