Victor Davis Hanson: Canada Wants a Fight It Can’t Afford

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to the Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:08)
The point I'm making is Canada rightly assumes that they're next to the United States, and no one is going to invade Canada, and no one is going to shoot a missile at Ottawa or British Columbia without the United States knocking it down. We all know that, but yet it will not pay its fair share.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. We're in another spat with our northern neighbor, Canada. Kind of a psychodrama again, we were at the penult stage of a new trade agreement, just expanding on the prior trade agreements when at the last moment, Prime Minister Mark Carney pulled out, and he cited that there were unfair demands that adjudicated whether Canada as a sovereign nation could trade as it wished and import and export as it wished. And then he said there was cultural appropriations that we were demanding certain curtailments of the full expression of Quebec culture.
We like to have good relations with Canada.
We speak the same language. We come out of the same original font from the English speaking world in England. We remember the great relations we had with Prime Minister Mulroney during the Bush administration. I think Stephen Harper, who was the model of a prime minister between 2006 and 2015, was the acme of Canadian-American relations.
But right now, Donald Trump got very angry, and he said that he was going to rename Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes, Lake America. I don't think that's going to hold just because 60 percent of the water acreage of the five great states rest in Canada. Lake Ontario itself, I think, is 55 percent Canada, and it's been Ontario for a long time. But it's symbolic of the anger that's building. Carney was not quite honest in what he said to the Canadian people. First of all, Canada runs a chronic $50 billion surplus. Sometimes it goes up to 70, sometimes it approaches 100, but it's pretty much solid in that territory of 50 to 70, no matter what happens. And under this administration, it knew that the United States wanted symmetrical trade, roughly, you know, $10 or $15 billion either way.
So that was the original and remaining issue. The other thing that was very, I think, disingenuous by Carney, who, by the way, has told his European Union friends, he has no relations to speak of with the Trump administration, and in particular in America in general. But it only affects 5% of all trade. 95% of trade is unaffected. And why were we trying to get this deal, and why did Canada suddenly back out? Well, there was a political reason, and then there was an issue reason. The issue was, we were saying that, like Mexico used to do, you bring in dumped below market price Chinese products, and you send them over here, as Mexico did with cars, appliances, technology. It got stuff from China, cheap, without tariffs, and then it assembled it below the cost of production, basically, in the United States, by using this second hand or this run around, wrap around, whatever you want to call it, from China. Canada does the same thing. They import cheap aluminum and steel from their Chinese partners. They put it into products like automobiles, trucks, and they send it to us. And we say, well, that's not really your product. You're using materials from our chief rival, which we have sanctioned, and you're abating and abetting them. And it didn't do Carney any, you know, it didn't do him any favors when he has said before that he wanted a new relations with China, basically at the expense of ours. The other thing about the Canadian sovereignty, culture, civilization, and the French language was completely bogus. Basically, our social media companies and sales companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, you name them, Google, they wanted to slap on a 5% tax, I should say, a surcharge, on all of their revenues in Canada, on the idea that they were impinging on the cultural integrity of Canada. It was just a way to shake down our companies and get money. And we don't do that to Canada, we don't do it to other countries, we expect them not to do it to us. There was also a political reason why now there are two plebiscites among the provinces of Canada. One is in Alberta and one is in Quebec. And for different reasons, they're very angry at the central government. Besides the fact that Canada has a lot of problems, number one, Alberta is energy rich and has enough money to stand as its own. And it's more pro-American usually than the other provinces. And two, it can't fully extract its natural oil and natural gas and rare minerals except because of strict Canadian environmental laws and other reasons that the other province restrict pipelines to their territory, et cetera.