Victor Davis Hanson: Why Is Mark Carney Preparing for an American Invasion?

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)

When he said the latest, Carney said the latest about a veritable war, the American people's ears perked up. And you can talk all you want in Canada about elbows out and how chauvinistic you are and how you're going to cut off the tar sands oil of the United States and all the terrible things you're going to do, and you're going to get China on your side, and they're not going to do it.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

I am going to mention Canada again. I know we're getting tired of this subject because after all, Canada's was, is our closest ally, closest friend, the country that is most alike the United States or so we've been told. But Mark Carney is doing things that we have never seen or heard before in Canada. His latest is he tells a reporter that, yes, he has thought of preparing the Canadian military to prepare for an invasion by the United States. That is absolutely insane when the United States has protected since World War II the entire North American continent. Canada has never had missiles launched into its airspace. It has never had its claims extravagant, though they are in the Northwest Passage and the Arctic, challenged by China or Russia or any hostile power due to the US military. The idea that the protector of Canada, the protector who allowed Canada to disarm, is preparing an invasion is absurd and it's an insult. And Carney is doing this once again to jack up opinion in Canada for a new nationalism to avoid the great dissatisfaction in Alberta and Quebec, and especially to try to influence the midterms of the United States and to otherwise mask his unpopular socialist globalist agenda. But when he said to the world that the United States, he thought, could invade Canada militarily, and when he reached out to Communist China and has basically seen them as one of its two new trading partners, given its record in cheating on trade, its human rights violation, and the horrendous legacy of the Communist Party since Mao Zedong in China. And he's preferring that now over to the tradition of American friendship. And then at the same time, as he warned the world that he was preparing or he could prepare for an American invasion, the same time he's reached out to the EU, the European Union, Canada has 75 percent of all of its trade and its exports with the United States. It has five percent, five percent with the EU. And yet he's reaching out for a new trade partner as if he thinks the EU, which is one of the most protectionist entities in the world, is going to drop, drop, drop its tariffs and its barriers to benefit Canada's five percent trade with the EU. This is insane.

More importantly, he doesn't quite understand that in this dispute it's over two percent. The tariffs are over two percent of the trade, which everybody agrees was almost tariff free. All the United States was saying is that we're tired of 250 percent tariffs once we get over a certain number of exports into Canada. And we don't like the 11th hour slapping 5 percent on our digital media companies so that we have to subsidize your acculturation in Canada or promote the French language or indigenous people. And these are American companies. We don't do that to Canada, of course. And we did resent at the last moment telling us that you were going to allow cheap Chinese metals to come in to your economy so that they can be reassembled and sent as finished vehicles into the United States and therefore allow China to avoid tariffs.

We resented that, but it still only represented 2 percent. And yet that sent Carney wild.

He doesn't realize, though, what he's getting into, as I said. Not only do his children live there in the United States, not only did he go to school as they did in the United States, not only did his 91 percent investment portfolio reside in the United States, but Canada is the most favored nation of all the nations in the world as far as tariffs go with the United States. Canada is the only country, as I've said before, where you can come into the United States without a visa and work immediately for six months as one million Canadians do as I speak. Canada doesn't have to deal with 10,000 illegal immigrants coming from Latin America on their way into North America. It doesn't have to deal with the dangerous cartels that kill 100,000 Americans in some years. It doesn't have to deal with Chinese fentanyl going into Mexico to be packaged as designer drugs to kill Americans. It doesn't have to deal with that because the United States is a barrier to Canada. It has the longest unenforced border with the United States. We don't treat Canada the way Mexico treats us. Or rather, we ensure that Mexico doesn't treat Canada the way it treats us. People in Mexico, in Canada, are not sending back 65 billion dollars out of their economy.