Of pics and porcine politics

There’s an old saying in politics that if you wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and, the pig likes it. Welcome to negotiating free trade with Donald Trump.

This is the unenviable position Canada finds itself in, a year and a half into a radically changed relationship with the United States. How do you negotiate with a president who practises the art of the steal? Is it principled to compromise with corruption simply to satisfy a president who is bankrupt of any principles except making money?

Answering these questions will say as much about us as it does about them.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest tariff threat makes this starker. He is imposing 50 per cent tariffs on $28 billion worth of Canadian exports, covering more than 500 product categories.

The formal rationale is that Canada discriminates against American booze, dairy, and cars. The real rationale is that we have not bent the knee to U.S. trade goals. Trump is retaliating for our retaliation.

“We have a tariff, which is, again, a natural consequence of the Canadian retaliation,” said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.

What if we didn’t retaliate but rather offered concessions? To help pave the way for a renewed CUSMA, Canada has dropped its digital services tax and rolled back its Online Streaming Act. It made a deal to open the Gordie Howe International Bridge. The Trump administration’s response was, “you don’t really get credit for doing something bad and then undoing it.”

Pocketing concessions without anything in return and retaliating because we responded to their initial retaliation against us, shows there is no good faith way to negotiate with Trump and the United States. That raises the stakes for both sides, economically and politically.

Since we cannot trust the word of Donald Trump now, can we trust any signature he puts to keeping a new trade deal with Canada? That’d be like saying pigs can fly.

Canada should know now what it is up against.

There is no special political relationship with America anymore. No deep well of friendship and respect we can draw from to protect ourselves from the Trump administration’s ‘America First’ worldview, which sees allies as encumbrances and friends as freeloaders.

We need to shake off any lingering notion that history and geography count for capital in the Trump White House. They don’t.

Here’s why. Monday’s announcement of new 50 per cent tariffs targets us but is aimed at the rest of the world.

It is a shot across the bow of every other country that dares to stand up to Trump. The administration dug deep into the history books to dust off an almost 100-year-old law — the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act — to find the legal basis to levy these new tariffs.

Having been told by the Supreme Court in February that it could not use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to justify last year’s Liberation Day tariff-palooza, it is rummaging through every legal nook and cranny to find legal justifications that will stick. Using Section 338 of Smoot-Hawley is one answer, never mind it has never, ever been used for this purpose.

Another justification came Thursday, when the U.S. announced the results of a Section 301 investigation under the U.S. Trade Act. It is imposing 10 per cent tariffs on a range of countries, including Canada, for insufficiently ensuring forced labour is not used in its supply chains for goods exported to the U.S. Although this measure won’t meaningfully impact Canada because of our CUSMA protection, it is meaningful that we were not exempted.

Carney has been criticized for not being successful in corralling Donald Trump into a new trade deal.

Given he ran and won the last election very much on the message that he, in fact, was that guy, this charge will not disappear soon. Increasingly, though, the question is becoming “Can anyone?”

This doesn’t excuse the prime minister from his obligations. Canada needs to preserve as much market access as feasible with the United States.

But it also needs to diversify away from the dependence on the United States.

It’s not one or the other, it’s both, at the same time.

This is where Carney is in better political shape than the headlines suggest. Every Trump trade tirade is a reminder that the U.S. may be a big trading partner but is not a reliable one. Increasingly, Canadians get this. A poll last week by Abacus Research showed 69 per cent of Canadians want Canada to hold firm on its negotiating positions with the U.S., even if this means persistent uncertainty.

Getting the right deal matters more than getting any deal. After all, you can’t fatten the pig on market day, can you?

Canada is banking on two things in the weeks and months ahead to fatten the pig: a change in power and a change in attitude.

If the November mid-term elections return a Democratic Congress, Trump is weakened.

And the more economic pain and uncertainty that occurs in the U.S. because of tariffs raising prices and costs on families and businesses, then a change in attitude towards economic interdependence with Canada may blossom.

Prime Minister Carney has repeatedly said, “no deal is better than a bad deal.” Based on U.S. behaviour, he may need to amend that to “no deal is the same as any deal.”

Otherwise, we’d be buying a pig in a poke.

» David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.