Vancouver (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Just about every day, the U.S. president does something that is incompetent, dangerous, or stupid. Often all three.
His decision to proceed with tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China, is all of the above.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Canada will hit back hard at the U.S. after the president launched a trade war by slapping a 25 per cent tariff on virtually all Canadian exports. Canada’s first counterattack is a tariff on $30 billion worth of American goods and a promise of $125 billion more in three weeks’ time. Trudeau said that non-tariff measures are coming if Trump doesn’t immediately back down.
Trudeau said Trump is trying to prompt a collapse of the Canadian economy because he thinks that will “make it easier to annex us,” something the U.S. president has repeatedly said he wants to do, even referring to Canada as the “51st state.” Trudeau said that will never happen and that Canada will not back down from a fight in the face of “completely bogus and completely unjustified” trade action that has the potential to ruin bilateral relations and prompt job losses, economic devastation and higher inflation – on both sides of the border.
The president’s main excuse was that there is supposedly a huge flood of both illegal immigrants and drugs from Canada (and Mexico) and the tariffs were supposed to be a form of leverage.
Trudeau pointed out that the attempt to use fentanyl as an excuse for the tariffs was a phony “justification” to use emergency presidential trade powers to invoke tariffs that clearly violate the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) – an agreement that Trump himself signed in his first term. In fact, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently released data showing that there has already been a significant decrease in seizures of fentanyl from Canada:
- “The CBP’s own data registered a 97 per cent drop in January compared to December 2024 at the northern border — evidence, the Canadian government says, that its new border security measures are bearing fruit and the Americans are being unreasonable.”
Even before these new efforts, Canada represented less than one per cent of all seized fentanyl imports into the U.S., according to federal data. About 19.5 kilograms was seized at the northern border last year compared to 9,570 kilograms at the southwestern border. Seizures of fentanyl attributed to the northern border by U.S. customs represented 0.08 per cent of all fentanyl seized by American officials in the last fiscal year.
Both Canada and Mexico agree that the tariffs violate CUSMA agreement. For her part, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said that retaliatory tariffs are coming Sunday.
According to the CBC, Trudeau said Trump is doing something “very dumb” by attacking Canada like this, given there will be serious ramifications for American workers and consumers with higher prices on everything from food, car parts and fertilizers to pharmaceuticals and paper products. American importers will have to pay the U.S. government a 25 per cent tax, and those added costs will be passed on to American consumers, pushing up prices.
Trudeau continued, “The United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest ally, their closest friend, at the same time they are talking about working positively with Russia.”
Not surprisingly, about 79% of Canadians now have a negative view of the U.S. president.
There is widespread agreement among many sectors of the Canadian population that it is time to stand up to Trump. Lana Payne, the president of Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, issued an “economic call-to-arms” in what she’s calling “a full-on trade war.” Already, hundreds of thousands of Canadians have cancelled plans to visit the United States, and millions more are boycotting American products, while buying more goods from Canada, Mexico, and other countries.
There have been demonstrations at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa. Ontario Premier Doug Ford – a Conservative – said he concurs with Trudeau’s assertion that Trump is trying to provoke an economic collapse in Canada. And like Trudeau, Ford averred that he’s prepared to “fight like we’ve never fought before.” (His first move was to end a deal that the province had with Elon Musk’s Starlink).
The CBC notes, “Ford added that he is prepared to go through with some more draconian measures, including possibly levying an export charge on every megawatt of power Ontario sells to the U.S. in the coming days.” He also said he’s open to cutting off energy supplies entirely to plunge some 1.5 million customers in the U.S. into darkness, if necessary.”
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business called the trade war “a massive economic threat.”
The Grain Growers of Canada said the trade war, “could push many family farms to the brink.”
The Business Council of Canada said Trump’s actions have left the trilateral trade deal that he himself negotiated in his first term in tatters. “No one wins in a trade war and the tariffs imposed today by the Trump administration will hurt workers, farmers and families,” the council said. It added: “Canada, the United States and Mexico have the best trade agreement in the world – one which President Trump negotiated and signed during his first term. Any issues or irritants that may exist can and should be managed within the terms of that agreement, which includes a review clause designed for that very purpose.”
Charlie Angus, a member of Parliament with Canada’s New Democratic Party, explains that, “This isn’t a trade war – it is an existential threat.”
And many American analysts agree that this tariff is a lose-lose situation. NPR reports that:
“Americans will be stuck with the higher prices. An analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation found that the tariffs now imposed on the three countries would amount to an average tax increase of $1,072 per U.S. household.”
“Self-Harm,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / IbisPaint / Crop2Comic, 2025
NPR quotes Erica York of the Tax Foundation as saying, “It means incomes and returns to shareholders in the U.S. economy are lower instead, because if businesses have to eat those higher costs, it means they have less to pay their workers…It means they have less to hire and expand employment, or less to invest…it’s Americans who are hurt by the tariffs.”
The investment bank Jefferies estimates that the proposed tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China would add about 6%, or $2,700, to the average U.S. vehicle price.
Trump, having received enormous push back from US automobile manufacturers, on Wednesday announced a one-month pause on tariffs on Canadian and Mexican cars.
Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, explains that American refineries are mainly set up to use the heavier oil that comes from Canada and can’t easily switch to the lighter oil that’s mainly produced in the United States. He predicted a hike of 10 or 20 cents a gallon under a 10% tariff on Canadian crude…There’s no winning a trade war.”
Some U.S. Midwest refineries are entirely reliant on heavy crude from Alberta, and the Americans don’t produce nearly enough oil on their own to meet demand. Canada exported more than four million barrels of oil a day to the U.S. last year.
Overall, as former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich points out, “Tariffs on their own do not create more American jobs or lead to more US production. In fact, Trump’s last trade war cost roughly 300,000 jobs. All these new tariffs will do is give corporations cover to jack up prices and pad their profits at our expense.”
Even the Wall Street Journalcalled Trump’s trade action against American allies “dumb”.
Stock prices plummeted this week on the DOW, S&P, and NASDAQ.
And ironically, the Canadian dollar actually gained relative to U.S. currency.
Of course, these dangerous trade wars are only one aspect of MAGA’s deranged foreign and domestic policies. The situation that we are facing is summed up in this poem by poet and academic Phillip Resnick of the University of British Columbia in Canada.
- The World Turned Upside Down
As the veneer of civilization peals away
and neighbours with which we thought we were familiar
revert to the brute forms
that characterized an earlier era,
as the unspeakable and the unthinkable
become the glue for multitudes
basking in the cult of an untrammeled leader,
no need for prophets from the desert
or preachers from the pulpit
as we sense for the first time in our lives
that the horrors we had only heard about
in stories from afar
exhort us against deeply ingrained instincts
to fight fire with fire.
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