Victor Davis Hanson: Canada’s Anti-American Gamble Is About to Get Expensive

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)

And I would just caution Mr. Carney, the one thing you do not want to do is so gin up this war that you get on the wrong side of the American people. But all that invective, all that cheap booing, all that grandstanding, all of your flirtation with this communist people, lethal government is not going down well. And for the first time, people are starting to notice.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. I'd like to offer an update on the Canadian-American trade spat. Earlier, I had staged it. I said stage one was surprise on both sides of the border that two neighbors who spoke the same language had the same civilizational origins in Britain and were close neighbors and had largest undefended border in the world were at a point of very angry disagreement.

The second stage was Prime Minister Carney started to suggest that the United States was solely culpable, was a bully, and had forced him if he had agreed to the agreement, which he canceled at the 11th hour late on a Friday afternoon without warning. And he said that the United States tried to impugn or intercede or limit prune back whatever term you use, Canadian sovereignty, both by telling Canada that it couldn't import cheap Chinese EV vehicles or it could not import cheap steel and aluminum from China that were really, to be fair, dumped below the cost of production as a way of getting around American tariffs via being used for assembling autos or vehicles in Canada and then shipped in the United States at a cheap price. And he accused us of trying to squelch Canadian and indigenous Canadian expression. In other words, our digital media companies were so successful in bringing the news and social media accounts to Canada that people that wanted to get the indigenous voice out and the French voice out couldn't, and therefore he was going to unilaterally tax us 5% on top of corporate income tax, which nobody else does. We don't tell Canadian broadcasting or Canadian newspapers, we're going to tax you so you include the particular culture of the San Joaquin Valley of California. We feel that you don't know anything about it, and so you're going to have to pay a tax to operate in our country. It's absurd. So then the second stage was this war on the United States. The third was sort of a recalibration. People said, well, Carney hasn't really digested the actual details of why he walked out. He's been mysterious. He's been murky. He won't tell us exactly. And why would he side with a totalitarian communist government with Maoist roots that has a million wagers and camps, destroys international trading protocols with dumping product before the cost of production, asymmetrical mercantile trade surpluses, money and currency manipulation, copyright and patent violations? Why would he want to side with them over the largest, the longest democracy in the world? Its neighbor, its English speaking neighbor, it doesn't make any sense. Why would he do that? And I also suggested in stage three that one of the reasons he was doing that is Canada has not utilized its treasure house of natural resources. I'm talking about precious metals, potash, timber, oil, gas, you name it. It's a socialist, ossified, calcified, European style economy plagued with 45% of the population was not born in Canada or their parents were not born in Canada and they have enormous social welfare needs that that ossified European socialist economy cannot meet. And so because it is failing, it has to have trade surpluses with the United States and it has to have the United States protect it and it resents the United States thinking that we caused their problems. We didn't cause their problems. Alberta can't make a pipeline to British Columbia because of us. It can make a pipeline into Washington. It can make a pipeline into the United States in the Midwest to sell its oil, but it can't do it between provinces. So if you want fossil fuel products into Quebec or Ontario from Alberta, then they're going to come through the United States pipeline system. We didn't do that.

We had nothing to do with their insane immigration policies. We had nothing to do with their net zero insane Green New Deal solar and wind. We experienced all that, but we stopped it, and we told them to stop it. So that was stage three, a second look at Carney's narratives. Stage four is more serious to Canada. The jobs report came out. We've lost 41,000 jobs just in one week of the tariff war. We created 160,000 in August.