Trump’s Tariffs And Annexation Threats Have Been A Blessing For Canada

In early 2025, weeks after we sent water bombers to help extinguish the Los Angeles wildfires, the second Trump administration launched an unprovoked economic assault on Canada accompanied by repeated threats to annex us, including through “economic force”. A year onwards, we have become a stronger country as a result.

Shaken awake from our dream that we could relinquish the development of our own economy and military by eternally relying on the USA as a reliable trading partner and protector, Canada has begun in earnest the project of becoming a truly independent, sovereign nation rather than a weak and subjugated American protectorate.

Much progress has been made towards knocking down those pesky interprovincial trade barriers that cost the Canadian economy more than $32 billion per year according to one Fraser Institute study. Throughout the summer, we saw somewhat humorous announcements heralding the advent of “free trade” between various provinces – something you would typically see between countries.

In the fall, the federal government and all provinces and territories signed the Canadian Mutual Recognition Agreement, eliminating barriers on thousands of products – with the notable exception of food, which has proven to be a particular sticking point which will hopefully be addressed in the future.

On the federal level, a new Buy Canadian policy was passed in September, giving priority to Canadian businesses and Canadian content for major federal procurements.

This is the kind of obvious, common sense policy that is clearly in the national interest and yet perhaps may have never been implemented if it were not for Trump’s barrage of tariffs and threats. Canadians should push for this Buy Canadian policy to be extended to all federal procurements rather than just major ones, and for provinces and municipalities to pass their own policies enshrining the principle of national preference in all procurement decisions.

Then, there is the effort to diversify Canada’s economic relationships – one kind of “diversity” that I can get behind. The oft-quoted statistic is that nearly 80% of Canadian exports go to the US – a clear demonstration of the danger of putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Again, this issue of unhealthy dependence on the US was quite simply not generally discussed prior to the second Trump administration’s economic aggression against Canada. Now and again, a nerdy academic or a diehard Canadian nationalist of the Dominion Review genre mentioned it, but they were totally ignored.

Do you remember when Canadian professor and commentator Trevor Tombe wrote a piece in The Hub warning that Canada’s dependency on the US in the realm of trade would come back to bite us? Neither do I. He wrote it in February 2024 (not February 2025, when his argument had become a truism). This prescient advice was ignored at the time, but has now become household knowledge – nearly everyone, even those with little interest in economics or politics, freely admits that Canada needs to reduce our dependence on the US.

So, the Liberal government is charging ahead, with Prime Minister Carney going on a seemingly permanent tour of the globe to forge new trade agreements with an endless kaleidoscope of new countries.

There are legitimate questions to be asked about some of these agreements. Will reduced trade barriers with China come with a commensurate crackdown on China’s cruel intimidation of its diaspora and its critics on Canadian soil, its meddling in our elections, and the shocking proliferation of Chinese police stations inside our borders?

More fundamental points of criticism should also be levied. First and foremost, while trade diversification is unquestionably the correct path for Canada, why are we not at the same time seeking to reshape our economy from the ground up by specializing in homegrown, value-added industries? Spreading our eggs into different baskets is good sense, but we must also remember to tend to and care for our our chickens so that they produce tastier, healthier, more attractive eggs such that more hands holding baskets will stretch out to Canada rather than us having to constantly hawk our eggs on all the highways and byways of the world.

To make a strange metaphor more concrete – why does BC focus on the export of raw logs rather than finding an inventive way to turn wood into a value-added industry? Why does Canada generally not refine its own gas (something so obvious that even Elizabeth May of all people has called for it)? Have we so thoroughly internalized the false stereotype of Canadian underachievement and inferiority that we do not yet have the confidence to build our own industries, preferring to focus on the export of raw resources and the wooing of foreign investment?

A fuller development of Canada’s economy lies further down the path of Canadian independence, a trail that we have only taken a few steps along thus far. For now, the focus on trade diversification on its own marks a substantial deviation from our previous policy of ever-deepening integration with the American economy.

On the military front, Trump’s campaign against Canada has also produced great results. We are now finally treating the strengthening of our army, navy, and air force as a matter of urgency. With the world becoming truly multipolar as Sam Huntingdon predicted in 1996 in Clash of Civilizations, and the US showing itself to be an increasingly erratic and unreliable security partner – and very possibly, a security threat – there is finally enough will among Canada’s political elite and the general public to bolster our military.

The Carney government has committed to spending 5% of our GDP on defence. There is some creative accounting here, such as reclassifying the Coast Guard as part of the Department of National Defence, but there really will be many new dollars devoted to the military – the Defence minister has told arms makers to prepare for a flood of new spending.

The federal government has also put Canada’s purchase of F-35 fighter jets from the US under review, and is currently mulling an alternate bid to purchase Gripen jets from Sweden’s Saab, which is promising that it would bring 12,600 jobs to Canada by making the planes here. A recent poll shows that Canadians favour the Gripen by a wide margin. Cancelling the F-35 purchase and going with the Gripen instead would indeed be a major assertion of Canada’s sovereignty and military independence.

Trump’s tariffs are inflicting real damage on our countrymen, particularly in Ontario’s auto sector. But in the long run, they have awakened us to the fact that Canada has for too long abandoned the project of nation building in favour of ever-deepening integration with the US, which was in reality the slow-motion economic and cultural colonization of Canada by the US.

The era that began in 1988 with Mulroney’s Canada-US free trade deal is now over, and Canada is on a new road – economic nationalism.

As CS Lewis aptly put it: “If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man”.