Western Standard - Job one for Trump, sow confusion... only then present the ask

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show of the Western Standard, with me

00:00:24.960 today to try and figure out what President Trump wants out of Canada, and what Canada

00:00:30.560 should do about it, is author and political economist Brian Lee Crowley. Brian is founder

00:00:38.360 of Ottawa's leading think tank, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and also of the Washington-based

00:00:44.660 Center for North American Prosperity and Security. Good to have you back on the show, Brian.

00:00:51.140 It's always great to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Nigel.

00:00:53.740 Ah, you're so welcome. First, however, a word from our sponsors. This episode of Hannaford

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00:01:43.860 Brian. Tariffs on tariffs delayed. Tariffs off for Mexico. Oh, no, just kidding. Tariffs off on cars.

00:01:55.540 Tariffs off on cars, but only for a month. Last we heard at lunchtime, before we came on the show,

00:02:02.660 that Canada was to be excused tariffs for another month. Everything about this trade dispute looks

00:02:08.660 crazy. But do you see a grand plan behind what Donald Trump's doing in his trade war with Canada

00:02:17.620 and Mexico? Could the confusion about his goals itself be the grand plan to soften up our governments

00:02:24.900 to achieve some other objective altogether? Well, I think this is a very interesting framing for the

00:02:32.420 discussion, Nigel. Let me start by saying that I think in order to understand Donald Trump, we have

00:02:40.900 to look at what he has told us about himself. And I know that you have there on your desk a coffee,

00:02:46.900 the art of the deal, which I hope you'll wave around. There you go.

00:02:49.700 Oh, there you go. One of the things that Donald Trump says in the book, I'm paraphrasing a bit,

00:02:57.380 but he says, you know, one of the things I do is I like to soften up my, you know, my bargaining

00:03:05.460 partners on the other side of the table by essentially convincing them that I am the craziest man in the

00:03:11.620 world. And if they don't give me what I want, I will tear down everything they value. And I have to say

00:03:18.740 that this is pretty effective strategy for him. And the very worst thing that we can do,

00:03:26.420 I think, is to fall for his bargaining tactic in the sense of he wants people to panic. He wants

00:03:34.820 people to be frightened. He wants people to be afraid of him. And I think it would be far better

00:03:41.620 for Canadians instead of taking and accepting his invitation to be frightened of him. If we took a

00:03:49.060 step back and said, well, okay, he may want us to be frightened, but let's not do that. Let's be calm

00:03:56.340 and analytical and see what we can understand about what Donald Trump is trying to do. So I've already

00:04:03.300 said what I think he's trying to do from a negotiating point of view. But the other thing we need to talk

00:04:08.100 about is what is it that he wants to negotiate to? What is his objective? And I think there are two

00:04:14.980 things that, at bottom, Donald Trump desperately want. One is to be the champion for all those people

00:04:25.620 in the United States who feel that they have been abandoned by the last 30 or 40 years of free trade,

00:04:31.140 globalization, open borders, etc. People who feel that they've lost their jobs, they've lost their

00:04:37.780 standard of living, that they become prey to fentanyl and organized crime. The sort of people

00:04:45.460 that J.D. Vance, his vice president, wrote a very famous novel about based on his own

00:04:52.340 life experience. It was turned into, I thought, a very moving film. And I think when people look at

00:05:01.300 Donald Trump and see what they feel is the extreme lengths that he's willing to go to, I think it would

00:05:11.300 be helpful if we understood the desperation and the lives of so many Americans that he is trying to

00:05:18.420 respond to, and that he has set himself up to be the champion for.

00:05:23.620 Let me just interrupt. I know you've got a second point to make there, but let me just

00:05:28.580 come back. One of the things that so many commentators have been saying, and I think I may

00:05:34.340 have said this myself, is, all right, well, look, you know, we certainly need to take better care of

00:05:40.340 our border. And if fentanyl is coming in from Canada to the United States, it's a matter of

00:05:44.820 Canadian honor that we should deal with that. But we're dealing with it. And in fact, we've even 0.78

00:05:50.740 had some suggestion that we're dealing with it rather well. And yet, still, there is this

00:05:57.220 this drumbeat from the president about fentanyl. So this is not actually about the amount of fentanyl,

00:06:06.100 so much as it is a recognition among, you know, the, can I call them the rust belt class without 0.98

00:06:12.100 demeaning a whole couple of million people, who have been drawn into that whole low-end

00:06:20.100 lifestyle of which fentanyl is a part, and which, as you say, the vice president has personal

00:06:24.980 experience. So is it like fentanyl is not the problem, it's a message?

00:06:30.740 Yeah, and I didn't mean to suggest that fentanyl was the key here. I think fentanyl is a symptom.

00:06:37.620 What we're looking at is a whole group of people spread throughout the, especially the rust belt

00:06:47.140 states, whose jobs were offshore, to use the term of art. You know, they saw their plants close,

00:06:57.060 perhaps they think they moved to Canada, perhaps they think they moved to Mexico, perhaps they think

00:07:01.780 to move to China. But the point is that people who, you know, up until sometime in roughly the 1970s,

00:07:11.300 early 80s, enjoyed, you know, a stable employment situation, you know, there were plants in every

00:07:19.540 community, people had jobs, they had a decent standard of living. And all of those things

00:07:25.300 have disappeared. I'm not saying that Trump's, you know, analysis of how this happened is

00:07:33.620 necessarily correct. But I don't think that we can dispute the fact that community after community

00:07:39.140 throughout the rust belt was devastated by some of the changes that have happened. And fentanyl is a

00:07:44.740 part of the symptoms of that devastation of communities. So, you know, you quite properly say,

00:07:52.180 well, you know, okay, so Trump's pressing us to do something about fentanyl. Yes. And I think we are

00:07:57.780 responding to that. And we should, as you say, I think, when when a good neighbor says, look,

00:08:06.100 I have a really serious problem. And part of it's happening on your territory, can you help me?

00:08:12.020 We are honored bound to try and help. But you see, it goes way beyond fentanyl. When you think about the

00:08:19.700 tariffs, for example, that Donald Trump is trying to apply, think about them in terms of the auto

00:08:26.820 industry. You know, what Trump has said is, I want to put tariffs on the auto industry to force them

00:08:33.700 to bring these plants that they have moved overseas that used to be in these rust belt communities.

00:08:40.260 We want them to come back. This is the so-called reshoring. We want to create opportunities for these

00:08:47.380 people who, for a generation or more, have been left behind by the changes that have happened in

00:08:53.940 America and around the world. And so it's really this whole set of issues that he's trying to

00:09:00.180 respond to. Now, he's doing so in a ham-fisted way that is not only obviously damaging Canada,

00:09:07.620 but I think will not help the people that he's trying to help. So I don't want anybody to think

00:09:15.140 that I'm making excuses for Donald Trump and saying, oh, well, what he's doing is completely justified.

00:09:20.420 I'm saying that what he's trying to achieve for the people that he cares about is a legitimate

00:09:27.060 issue that he wants to deal with. So I think part of what we need to do is we need to figure out

00:09:33.300 how we can help him respond to those issues without it dragging Canada down some

00:09:41.060 terrible road that we don't want to go down.

00:09:45.460 Brian, I think there may be another strand to that from what you've been saying elsewhere.

00:09:51.700 I like to look back to the Second World War when, you know, America was famously the arsenal of 0.53

00:09:59.780 democracy and whatever you needed to fight a war, you could manufacture in the lower 48.

00:10:06.420 Now, it sounds from what you're saying is that that is no longer the case. And I wonder if the

00:10:14.580 the desire to return industry to the to the United States is actually part of a wider strategic

00:10:23.780 objective. Now, what what would you say to that?

00:10:27.780 Well, that was the second point I wanted to I wanted to raise and we got off on this very interesting

00:10:32.980 expansion of the of my first point about the, you know, the the desperate lives of people in many

00:10:39.140 of these Rust Belt communities. The second point, which you quite properly brought us back to,

00:10:43.540 Nigel, has to do with Trump's preoccupation with China and what he thinks of as an economic and

00:10:54.980 certainly an economic conflict with China and potentially ultimately a military conflict with

00:11:00.660 China. He feels that, you know, the preoccupation, say, with Russia and with Europe is old hat,

00:11:08.900 that's that's now Europe's problem. He, you know, Europe doesn't need America to deal with

00:11:13.940 with Russia and what's going on in Ukraine and so on. Whether he's right is a different issue.

00:11:18.020 But this is his thinking. His thinking is the people I'm trying to deal with now, the people who

00:11:24.420 pose the main threat to the United States are the is the People's Republic of China. And part of his 0.99

00:11:32.340 way of responding to that is he he sees but so much what has what has been traditional economic

00:11:39.460 activity in the United States has been has been offshore to China and America has become dependent

00:11:47.620 principally on China, but also on lots of other countries for things that he thinks of as strategic

00:11:53.220 elements of a an American ability to be strong and to respond to the threat of China.

00:11:59.140 So this is why he's talking all the time about, for instance, steel production, aluminum production,

00:12:06.260 you know, he sees he sees things as strategic elements in America's ability to be

00:12:15.060 a superpower that does not rely on anyone else, that it is master of its own fate and has brought within

00:12:24.340 the the 50 states the capacity to produce anything that America needs to respond to the threat from

00:12:33.460 China. So this is the second thing I think that's driving Trump's plan.

00:12:41.620 Now, it seems as the way you describe it, it seems a very obvious priority for a U.S. president,

00:12:47.540 and yet we've had a number. We're leaving aside Mr. Biden, who's doesn't really make the case for

00:12:53.540 anything. But, you know, Mr. Obama is not a fool. You may not agree with everything he says, but he's 0.96

00:12:59.540 not a fool. George Bush is not a fool. Clinton is obviously a very bright guy and Bush senior. 0.98

00:13:10.900 All of these people would have been confronted by the same realization that we can build like

00:13:17.300 three quarters of a tank with the stuff that we need that comes from overseas. Now,

00:13:22.580 why would they not have responded to that very obvious trigger?

00:13:32.020 I think part of it has to do with the fact that, you know, all of our thinking about China, about

00:13:40.260 globalization, about free trade has evolved. You know, it hasn't stood still. When we were thinking

00:13:47.540 about the early days of globalization, you know, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, you know,

00:13:53.300 we thought there was a serious opportunity for the spread of democracy, that there were lots of

00:14:00.100 economic opportunities for everyone, that we would move the production of many things to low-cost

00:14:07.780 jurisdictions in order to lower costs in America and Canada and elsewhere in the developed world.

00:14:14.180 And nobody in those early days was thinking of China as an adversary. They were thinking of it as,

00:14:24.500 you know, a rising country, potential for democracy, increased trade, brings about movement

00:14:33.140 to liberalization. All of these things were very much in our mind. And many of those things didn't

00:14:39.300 pan out. It did not turn out the way that we hoped. But we started something that had its own momentum

00:14:47.780 behind it. And while China turned out to be a pretty obdurate adversary, you know, China's not at all

00:15:00.340 interested in becoming anything like the Western democracies. The fact of the matter is that

00:15:08.820 Walmart, to pick an example, I'm not picking on Walmart because we could generalize this almost

00:15:14.020 across the entire American economy. But Walmart became so powerful in the United States because they were

00:15:20.740 able to offer, you know, blue-collar, low-income people in the United States access to a wide range of

00:15:29.380 Chinese manufacturers at a very low price. And that too got its own momentum behind it. And it became

00:15:38.500 difficult for American manufacturers to compete against low-cost jurisdictions like China and so on.

00:15:45.300 So much of this capacity moved offshore and it resulted in lower costs for American consumers. So

00:15:53.300 it was pretty hard to push back again. It's only as China's true nature has become revealed through 0.98

00:16:00.260 its action that we realize that perhaps we've been rather naive in the way we've dealt with China.

00:16:05.780 Isn't that just how often we get fouled up on our own good intentions? There's a whole sermon in that,

00:16:15.780 Brian. But that brings us back to where we started. Canada, the United States. All right,

00:16:23.300 now we have a better idea of what is going on in the president's head. What do we do here in Canada?

00:16:29.860 Yeah. Well, for me, the starting point is to remember that, you know, this is not the first

00:16:36.980 time there have been tariff and trade wars. In fact, of course, in the depression in the 1930s,

00:16:43.060 one of the major contributing factors was that people started to throw up tariff barriers and try

00:16:49.460 and force their trading partners out of their economies to bring everything home. And I remember R.B.

00:16:58.820 Bennett, who was the conservative prime minister of Canada in the early 30s, he said he was going

00:17:04.980 to use tariffs to blast our way into the markets of the world. The problem was everybody else was

00:17:10.100 using tariffs to blast their way into the markets of the world. And the reason I say all this is

00:17:15.140 because the experience that we've had every time that these tariff wars have happened is that they

00:17:21.220 have devastated everyone's economy. They have brought about recessions and depressions and raised the cost of

00:17:32.900 living for everybody. So I personally think that this will be no different and that eventually everyone is

00:17:45.060 going to realize that the tariff wars and the trading of, you know, if you raise your tariffs,

00:17:50.340 I'll raise mine in return. Ultimately, this is a beggar thy neighbor policy that also beggars you.

00:17:58.420 And I think we will have to all step back from the abyss. We're not there yet. People are still too

00:18:04.580 emotional about it. There's still too much tit for tat. There's too much macho posturing around it.

00:18:14.500 Eventually, though, we're going to have to have a plan for what happens when this all fails. And I think

00:18:22.340 the strategy that Canada needs to be thinking about now is what kind of a grand bargain can we put on the

00:18:30.420 table that responds to America's concerns, to America's legitimate concerns? I'm not saying that

00:18:38.180 we need to indulge them in fantasies about, I don't know, Canada being a massive source of fentanyl to

00:18:45.060 the United States because we know this isn't true. But we do know that it is true that Canada has been a

00:18:51.540 free rider on America's defense effort. We know that it's true that Canada has lost its ability to protect

00:18:58.740 its territory in the Arctic and to project our sovereignty into the Arctic. And there are

00:19:04.820 people circling around the Arctic, like the Chinese and the Russians, who see our weakness, 0.99

00:19:10.740 and America sees that as a point of vulnerability. We know that Canada, through having lost control of

00:19:17.860 a lot of its immigration policy, has allowed a number of rather dodgy people into the country, 1.00

00:19:25.940 and that there are tens of thousands of people that we've allowed in that are now under deportation,

00:19:31.540 or we don't even know where they are. We don't know whether they're in Canada or whether they've

00:19:35.060 left. And America sees this as a vulnerability, not to mention, you know, the interference by the

00:19:43.860 Chinese in our political institutions, which has been so widely, I think, documented. So we have a lot of

00:19:50.180 things that America has legitimate concerns about going on in Canada. I think we need to say to

00:19:56.820 ourselves, okay, we're not going to suddenly stop being America's next door neighbor. We're not going

00:20:04.260 to suddenly be able to unhook our economy from the United States and, you know, invent trade relationships

00:20:14.100 with all kinds of other people that we've never had before. I'm not saying we shouldn't diversify our

00:20:19.300 trade, but I am saying that there will never be any substitute for our relationship with the United

00:20:24.340 States. That is always going to be the core of Canada's prosperity. So if we want to maintain

00:20:30.820 that kind of access to the American market, once the tariff wars have played out,

00:20:37.380 then we need to come back to the United States and say, look, we understand you have legitimate

00:20:44.260 concerns about things that are going on in Canada. We're willing to take action on them.

00:20:48.500 And what we need in exchange is continued, reliable access to the American market.

00:20:56.180 And there are some other things that no doubt we would want to, but those are the key things.

00:21:01.300 And we should be preparing that grand bargain for the United States. This is what we need from you.

00:21:07.620 This is what we're willing to do in return. Because eventually, when the emotions have run their

00:21:13.140 course, we will have to come back to that kind of discussion with the United States.

00:21:19.940 Brian, I think you're exactly right. I'm glad that you have taken this opportunity to join us on

00:21:26.820 the program and lay that out in such succinct terms. You said more in 20 minutes than some politicians

00:21:32.660 I've been watching recently on other channels have said given an hour and 20 minutes.

00:21:38.020 That's good advice. That's paid praise, Nigel.

00:21:46.500 Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Lee Crowley from the McDonnell Laurier Institute, Canada's leading think tank

00:21:54.500 and a fruitful source of knowledge and inspiration to newspapers and governments all over the country.

00:22:02.580 Thank you, Brian, for coming on. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the

00:22:06.900 Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

00:22:19.300 In the last, it was a matter of time with time.

00:22:23.700 If you have been listening soon looking after witnesss, then my notes will be waterfall and

00:22:26.140 firstly, able to awake for the United States.

00:22:28.980 In the last, it was terrifying, najbardziej?

00:22:30.820 Thanks, Brian.

00:22:33.860 No, I'm spacing.

00:22:36.260 Please pause.

Western Standard - March 07, 2025

Job one for Trump, sow confusion... only then present the ask

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