Job one for Trump, sow confusion... only then present the ask
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Summary
To try and figure out what President Trump wants out of Canada, and what Canada should do about it, author and political economist Brian Lee Crowley joins me to talk to me about what he thinks is going on with the Trump administration's trade war with Canada and Mexico.
Transcript
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Welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show of the Western Standard, with me
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today to try and figure out what President Trump wants out of Canada, and what Canada
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should do about it, is author and political economist Brian Lee Crowley. Brian is founder
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of Ottawa's leading think tank, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and also of the Washington-based
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Center for North American Prosperity and Security. Good to have you back on the show, Brian.
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It's always great to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Nigel.
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Brian. Tariffs on tariffs delayed. Tariffs off for Mexico. Oh, no, just kidding. Tariffs off on cars.
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Tariffs off on cars, but only for a month. Last we heard at lunchtime, before we came on the show,
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that Canada was to be excused tariffs for another month. Everything about this trade dispute looks
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crazy. But do you see a grand plan behind what Donald Trump's doing in his trade war with Canada
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and Mexico? Could the confusion about his goals itself be the grand plan to soften up our governments
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to achieve some other objective altogether? Well, I think this is a very interesting framing for the
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discussion, Nigel. Let me start by saying that I think in order to understand Donald Trump, we have
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to look at what he has told us about himself. And I know that you have there on your desk a coffee,
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the art of the deal, which I hope you'll wave around. There you go.
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Oh, there you go. One of the things that Donald Trump says in the book, I'm paraphrasing a bit,
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but he says, you know, one of the things I do is I like to soften up my, you know, my bargaining
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partners on the other side of the table by essentially convincing them that I am the craziest man in the
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world. And if they don't give me what I want, I will tear down everything they value. And I have to say
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that this is pretty effective strategy for him. And the very worst thing that we can do,
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I think, is to fall for his bargaining tactic in the sense of he wants people to panic. He wants
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people to be frightened. He wants people to be afraid of him. And I think it would be far better
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for Canadians instead of taking and accepting his invitation to be frightened of him. If we took a
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step back and said, well, okay, he may want us to be frightened, but let's not do that. Let's be calm
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and analytical and see what we can understand about what Donald Trump is trying to do. So I've already
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said what I think he's trying to do from a negotiating point of view. But the other thing we need to talk
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about is what is it that he wants to negotiate to? What is his objective? And I think there are two
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things that, at bottom, Donald Trump desperately want. One is to be the champion for all those people
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in the United States who feel that they have been abandoned by the last 30 or 40 years of free trade,
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globalization, open borders, etc. People who feel that they've lost their jobs, they've lost their
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standard of living, that they become prey to fentanyl and organized crime. The sort of people
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that J.D. Vance, his vice president, wrote a very famous novel about based on his own
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life experience. It was turned into, I thought, a very moving film. And I think when people look at
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Donald Trump and see what they feel is the extreme lengths that he's willing to go to, I think it would
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be helpful if we understood the desperation and the lives of so many Americans that he is trying to
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respond to, and that he has set himself up to be the champion for.
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Let me just interrupt. I know you've got a second point to make there, but let me just
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come back. One of the things that so many commentators have been saying, and I think I may
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have said this myself, is, all right, well, look, you know, we certainly need to take better care of
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our border. And if fentanyl is coming in from Canada to the United States, it's a matter of
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Canadian honor that we should deal with that. But we're dealing with it. And in fact, we've even
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had some suggestion that we're dealing with it rather well. And yet, still, there is this
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this drumbeat from the president about fentanyl. So this is not actually about the amount of fentanyl,
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so much as it is a recognition among, you know, the, can I call them the rust belt class without
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demeaning a whole couple of million people, who have been drawn into that whole low-end
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lifestyle of which fentanyl is a part, and which, as you say, the vice president has personal
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experience. So is it like fentanyl is not the problem, it's a message?
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Yeah, and I didn't mean to suggest that fentanyl was the key here. I think fentanyl is a symptom.
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What we're looking at is a whole group of people spread throughout the, especially the rust belt
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states, whose jobs were offshore, to use the term of art. You know, they saw their plants close,
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perhaps they think they moved to Canada, perhaps they think they moved to Mexico, perhaps they think
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to move to China. But the point is that people who, you know, up until sometime in roughly the 1970s,
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early 80s, enjoyed, you know, a stable employment situation, you know, there were plants in every
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community, people had jobs, they had a decent standard of living. And all of those things
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have disappeared. I'm not saying that Trump's, you know, analysis of how this happened is
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necessarily correct. But I don't think that we can dispute the fact that community after community
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throughout the rust belt was devastated by some of the changes that have happened. And fentanyl is a
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part of the symptoms of that devastation of communities. So, you know, you quite properly say,
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well, you know, okay, so Trump's pressing us to do something about fentanyl. Yes. And I think we are
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responding to that. And we should, as you say, I think, when when a good neighbor says, look,
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I have a really serious problem. And part of it's happening on your territory, can you help me?
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We are honored bound to try and help. But you see, it goes way beyond fentanyl. When you think about the
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tariffs, for example, that Donald Trump is trying to apply, think about them in terms of the auto
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industry. You know, what Trump has said is, I want to put tariffs on the auto industry to force them
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to bring these plants that they have moved overseas that used to be in these rust belt communities.
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We want them to come back. This is the so-called reshoring. We want to create opportunities for these
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people who, for a generation or more, have been left behind by the changes that have happened in
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America and around the world. And so it's really this whole set of issues that he's trying to
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respond to. Now, he's doing so in a ham-fisted way that is not only obviously damaging Canada,
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but I think will not help the people that he's trying to help. So I don't want anybody to think
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that I'm making excuses for Donald Trump and saying, oh, well, what he's doing is completely justified.
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I'm saying that what he's trying to achieve for the people that he cares about is a legitimate
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issue that he wants to deal with. So I think part of what we need to do is we need to figure out
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how we can help him respond to those issues without it dragging Canada down some
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Brian, I think there may be another strand to that from what you've been saying elsewhere.
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I like to look back to the Second World War when, you know, America was famously the arsenal of
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democracy and whatever you needed to fight a war, you could manufacture in the lower 48.
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Now, it sounds from what you're saying is that that is no longer the case. And I wonder if the
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the desire to return industry to the to the United States is actually part of a wider strategic
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objective. Now, what what would you say to that?
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Well, that was the second point I wanted to I wanted to raise and we got off on this very interesting
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expansion of the of my first point about the, you know, the the desperate lives of people in many
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of these Rust Belt communities. The second point, which you quite properly brought us back to,
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Nigel, has to do with Trump's preoccupation with China and what he thinks of as an economic and
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certainly an economic conflict with China and potentially ultimately a military conflict with
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China. He feels that, you know, the preoccupation, say, with Russia and with Europe is old hat,
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that's that's now Europe's problem. He, you know, Europe doesn't need America to deal with
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with Russia and what's going on in Ukraine and so on. Whether he's right is a different issue.
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But this is his thinking. His thinking is the people I'm trying to deal with now, the people who
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pose the main threat to the United States are the is the People's Republic of China. And part of his
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way of responding to that is he he sees but so much what has what has been traditional economic
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activity in the United States has been has been offshore to China and America has become dependent
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principally on China, but also on lots of other countries for things that he thinks of as strategic
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elements of a an American ability to be strong and to respond to the threat of China.
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So this is why he's talking all the time about, for instance, steel production, aluminum production,
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you know, he sees he sees things as strategic elements in America's ability to be
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a superpower that does not rely on anyone else, that it is master of its own fate and has brought within
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the the 50 states the capacity to produce anything that America needs to respond to the threat from
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China. So this is the second thing I think that's driving Trump's plan.
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Now, it seems as the way you describe it, it seems a very obvious priority for a U.S. president,
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and yet we've had a number. We're leaving aside Mr. Biden, who's doesn't really make the case for
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anything. But, you know, Mr. Obama is not a fool. You may not agree with everything he says, but he's
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not a fool. George Bush is not a fool. Clinton is obviously a very bright guy and Bush senior.
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All of these people would have been confronted by the same realization that we can build like
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three quarters of a tank with the stuff that we need that comes from overseas. Now,
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why would they not have responded to that very obvious trigger?
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I think part of it has to do with the fact that, you know, all of our thinking about China, about
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globalization, about free trade has evolved. You know, it hasn't stood still. When we were thinking
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about the early days of globalization, you know, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, you know,
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we thought there was a serious opportunity for the spread of democracy, that there were lots of
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economic opportunities for everyone, that we would move the production of many things to low-cost
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jurisdictions in order to lower costs in America and Canada and elsewhere in the developed world.
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And nobody in those early days was thinking of China as an adversary. They were thinking of it as,
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you know, a rising country, potential for democracy, increased trade, brings about movement
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to liberalization. All of these things were very much in our mind. And many of those things didn't
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pan out. It did not turn out the way that we hoped. But we started something that had its own momentum
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behind it. And while China turned out to be a pretty obdurate adversary, you know, China's not at all
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interested in becoming anything like the Western democracies. The fact of the matter is that
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Walmart, to pick an example, I'm not picking on Walmart because we could generalize this almost
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across the entire American economy. But Walmart became so powerful in the United States because they were
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able to offer, you know, blue-collar, low-income people in the United States access to a wide range of
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Chinese manufacturers at a very low price. And that too got its own momentum behind it. And it became
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difficult for American manufacturers to compete against low-cost jurisdictions like China and so on.
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So much of this capacity moved offshore and it resulted in lower costs for American consumers. So
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it was pretty hard to push back again. It's only as China's true nature has become revealed through
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its action that we realize that perhaps we've been rather naive in the way we've dealt with China.
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Isn't that just how often we get fouled up on our own good intentions? There's a whole sermon in that,
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Brian. But that brings us back to where we started. Canada, the United States. All right,
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now we have a better idea of what is going on in the president's head. What do we do here in Canada?
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Yeah. Well, for me, the starting point is to remember that, you know, this is not the first
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time there have been tariff and trade wars. In fact, of course, in the depression in the 1930s,
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one of the major contributing factors was that people started to throw up tariff barriers and try
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and force their trading partners out of their economies to bring everything home. And I remember R.B.
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Bennett, who was the conservative prime minister of Canada in the early 30s, he said he was going
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to use tariffs to blast our way into the markets of the world. The problem was everybody else was
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using tariffs to blast their way into the markets of the world. And the reason I say all this is
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because the experience that we've had every time that these tariff wars have happened is that they
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have devastated everyone's economy. They have brought about recessions and depressions and raised the cost of
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living for everybody. So I personally think that this will be no different and that eventually everyone is
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going to realize that the tariff wars and the trading of, you know, if you raise your tariffs,
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I'll raise mine in return. Ultimately, this is a beggar thy neighbor policy that also beggars you.
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And I think we will have to all step back from the abyss. We're not there yet. People are still too
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emotional about it. There's still too much tit for tat. There's too much macho posturing around it.
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Eventually, though, we're going to have to have a plan for what happens when this all fails. And I think
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the strategy that Canada needs to be thinking about now is what kind of a grand bargain can we put on the
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table that responds to America's concerns, to America's legitimate concerns? I'm not saying that
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we need to indulge them in fantasies about, I don't know, Canada being a massive source of fentanyl to
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the United States because we know this isn't true. But we do know that it is true that Canada has been a
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free rider on America's defense effort. We know that it's true that Canada has lost its ability to protect
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its territory in the Arctic and to project our sovereignty into the Arctic. And there are
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people circling around the Arctic, like the Chinese and the Russians, who see our weakness,
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and America sees that as a point of vulnerability. We know that Canada, through having lost control of
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a lot of its immigration policy, has allowed a number of rather dodgy people into the country,
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and that there are tens of thousands of people that we've allowed in that are now under deportation,
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or we don't even know where they are. We don't know whether they're in Canada or whether they've
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left. And America sees this as a vulnerability, not to mention, you know, the interference by the
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Chinese in our political institutions, which has been so widely, I think, documented. So we have a lot of
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things that America has legitimate concerns about going on in Canada. I think we need to say to
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ourselves, okay, we're not going to suddenly stop being America's next door neighbor. We're not going
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to suddenly be able to unhook our economy from the United States and, you know, invent trade relationships
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with all kinds of other people that we've never had before. I'm not saying we shouldn't diversify our
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trade, but I am saying that there will never be any substitute for our relationship with the United
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States. That is always going to be the core of Canada's prosperity. So if we want to maintain
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that kind of access to the American market, once the tariff wars have played out,
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then we need to come back to the United States and say, look, we understand you have legitimate
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concerns about things that are going on in Canada. We're willing to take action on them.
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And what we need in exchange is continued, reliable access to the American market.
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And there are some other things that no doubt we would want to, but those are the key things.
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And we should be preparing that grand bargain for the United States. This is what we need from you.
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This is what we're willing to do in return. Because eventually, when the emotions have run their
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course, we will have to come back to that kind of discussion with the United States.
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Brian, I think you're exactly right. I'm glad that you have taken this opportunity to join us on
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the program and lay that out in such succinct terms. You said more in 20 minutes than some politicians
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I've been watching recently on other channels have said given an hour and 20 minutes.
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Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Lee Crowley from the McDonnell Laurier Institute, Canada's leading think tank
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and a fruitful source of knowledge and inspiration to newspapers and governments all over the country.
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Thank you, Brian, for coming on. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the
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In the last, it was a matter of time with time.
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If you have been listening soon looking after witnesss, then my notes will be waterfall and