Language matters.
The President is empowered by a Congress controlled by a narrow majority. Rather than the individual they have chosen, I am pissed at the Republican party. And disappointed in the American people. The guy? He was always that way and would have continued to be so at a safe distance from the levers of power without his enablers.
It is the American and especially Republican relationship with Canada that is important in this situation. Those are what endure, that person is only momentarily significant. So, where we can choose the narrative, I think that’s important to focus on.
Plus I suspect he likes the sound of his own name.
Canada is not going to damage the American. 74.5% of Canadian exports and 56.2% of imports are with the US. On the other hand Canada makes up 14% of US imports and 15.8% of exports.
If any plan killed the American economy every one else is going down too.
Copypasta my other comment:
The bulk of Canadian exports to the US are oil. We can certainly tariff US goods, but export tariffs on Canadian oil and hydro electricity to the US will probably be a big component of the Canadian response.
Even with a big increase on hydro power exports to the US, it’s still cheaper than most other sources of electricity, so they’ll still happily pay it.
As to oil, there are some refineries in the US that are set up to process Canadian bitumen. Canada’s long history of just exporting raw materials and re-importing finished goods give a pretty outsized room to manuever here. This refineries will probably just pony up and pay more.
Where the damage will come is in areas like the auto sector, where there are tightly coupled supply chains.
Paul Krugman points out in his article The End of North America that there is probably already damage done to the concept of North American manufacturing.
Trump is going to do a whole lot of damage, we’re going to take some of that damage, but my favourite quote on the topic:
Of the 14% of Americas imports that are from Canada under half are in energy or transport fabrication. The energy hits are much quicker to fix by importing more fuel from other nations.
I agree that the US auto sector hit will be harder but as for energy high enough tariffs will lead to a complete rejection of Canadian energy imports for US companies. This will be a loss for the US. But it will hurt Canada more. Tariffs are a zero sum game. The only way to win is to get everyone to agree to not play.
https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/import/usa/can/show/2022
Hence my quote:
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Mexico is the US’ biggest trading partner.
Both Mexico and China have the advantage of selling cheap goods to the US due to low labor costs.
Canada can hurt the US but the approach has to be different. The US backed off on the 25% tarriff on oil because they know it would hurt a little too much. Canada should impose an export tax on oil so that Americans in Northern states feel the pain when gas is a dollar more per gallon.
Mexico didn’t do some blanket tariffs they didn’t need to throw their weight around that hard. They stopped an Obama admin policy by hitting like 6 major products and when Trump did his bullshit they got a NAFTA 2.0 (which was basically just an updated with slight shifts for the US on some fronts but basically is 95% the same as the old one) operating the same way. They don’t need blanket tariffs, they just need to hit a few particular spots, which Canada is more than capable of doing.
Again, desperate, maybe the world needs a reset?
I don’t know. I don’t want anyone to suffer or hurt, but at this point it seems inevitable.
So how do we mitigate the suffering and pain, but still create progress and block fascism?
How do we Luigi but not have it be a slippery slope?
Trump can never beat the WEF allegations then