The Inroads listserv was established in 1997 as a means to connect Inroads readers and others interested in policy discussions. With more than 100 subscribers, it offers one of the few opportunities for people with diverse views to engage with social and political issues in depth. To subscribe, write to Inroads at inroadsjournal@gmail.com, and we will add your name to the list.
Donald Trump’s tariff threats and musings about making Canada the 51st state upended Canadians’ political choices, buying habits and travel plans. Not surprisingly, Trump’s designs on Canada galvanized the Inroads listserv as well. The exchange began on February 5 with Reg Whitaker’s stark declaration: “We are at war.”
February 5
REG WHITAKER
We are at war. It’s as simple and as frightening as that. Tariff talk is just about strategy and tactics for the conflict ahead. Like the Ukrainians facing Putin who first denied that Ukraine has any legitimate national existence, then invaded, Trump has sneered at Canada as anything other than a future 51st state, then declared economic war. The only difference is that Trump’s arms are economic force instead of Putin’s bombs and guns (although, of course, the former could at any point morph into the latter).
When you are at war, you must understand your enemy. Invading warlords will cite pretexts (Putin’s claims about “denazifying” Ukraine; Trump’s claims about fentanyl, illegal migrants, trade imbalances, U.S. bank restrictions). These are all total horseshit, sheer propaganda mainly directed at their ignorant, credulous followers at home. Trump’s and Putin’s wars are not about this crap. They are about power – the power of the stronger to crush the weaker, the power of the Big Man to flex his muscles before his adoring acolytes and boast of “victory” over targeted powerless minorities (undocumented immigrants for Trump) or smaller, less powerful neighbouring countries, the low-hanging fruit for his war machine (military for Putin who has little economic power; economic for Trump in the first instance).
What I am saying here is that both Trump and Putin are essentially fascists. When facing fascists, as in facing bullies in the schoolyard, you have to understand that diplomacy, negotiation, and compromise are not tools at your disposal – they are just signs of weakness to the aggressor who smells blood and pushes harder.
There is something else about fascists: they do not follow the logic of economic rationality. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Peter Drucker, wrote in his 1939 book The End of Economic Man, “The Nazi agitator whom, many years ago, I heard proclaim to a wildly cheering peasants’ meeting: ‘We don’t want lower bread prices, we don’t want higher bread prices, we don’t want unchanged bread prices – we want National-Socialist bread prices,’ came nearer explaining fascism than anybody I have heard since.” To the very end of the war the Nazis kept desperately needed railway supply lines tied down with transporting millions of Jews to their deaths in the extermination camps.
Trying to bargain with Trump over bank regulations and trade “imbalances” is a futile game of Whack-a-Mole: there will always be something else popping up. Trump is all about self-aggrandizement via the perpetual enlargement of MAGA, itself a myth without 21st-century material foundations.
You have to hit back with enough force to be felt beyond the hermetically sealed White House MAGA bubble. In our case, that means export embargoes on 50 per cent of the imported oil and gas from Canada, which accounts for 40 per cent of U.S. refineries geared to processing Canadian heavy oil. It means embargoes on electricity exports, rare earth minerals, nickel and uranium, all of which the Americans are dependent upon.
Will this hurt? Of course; it will hurt like hell. But that’s war. If Danielle Smith wants to stay offside or try to be a quisling for Trump, she should be overridden.
Will it happen? Probably not. But it may finally come to that when Trump makes it happen. You can trust fascists to overreach. They have a track record of doing that.
ANDRÉ BINETTE
While I believe that Reg’s fears may be exaggerated in the short term, I do think the existence of Canada may be in play in the coming decades, when the climate catastrophe will become ever more alarming and likely raise the degree of American hysteria we are now seeing even higher. Manifest destiny may evolve into a pressing and overriding need for habitable living space and vital resources, such as water, once the South, the West Coast, and even the Midwest are subject to ever-greater natural catastrophes. I believe we vastly underestimate the social and political instability that climate change will cause. Already, I am reading that the goal of a 2°C rise must be abandoned, after 1°C and 1.5°C. If we are heading for a 3°C or 4°C rise, all bets are off and, quite frankly, I am not even sure democracy remains viable.
MARVIN SHAFFER
It is not surprising and not altogether wrong for us to focus solely on what Trump’s America is doing to Canada. With his unjustified and treaty-breaking, open-ended threats to impose 25 per cent or higher tariffs on Canadian goods, Trump has in effect declared economic war. He apparently would gladly take us over, but he is quite prepared to destroy our economy if he can’t.
Some of the more extreme among us would say we are the Ukraine of North America. Just as Putin sees only an obedient, Russified Ukraine or a physically destroyed country, Trump would seem to see only an obedient, Americanized Canada or an economically crushed territory.
However, as tempting as it is to go down that quite reasonable – albeit self-pitying – road, I believe that would be a major mistake. Of course, we must prepare for the economic warfare Trump has brought upon us, both through our short-term lobbying efforts to delay and ideally eliminate the threat of tariffs (the threat itself is seriously damaging to the economy) and through our longer-term efforts to reduce our dependence on the U.S. market. But we must also prepare for what could be the greater calamity – the end of the United States as a stable, reasonable country and leader in Western and world affairs.
Trump isn’t just declaring war on Canada and Mexico. He is declaring war on reason and fact-based policy; on human rights; on the environment; on justice and impartial application of the law; on critical international institutions, agreements and respect for territorial integrity. Fundamentally more important for Canada and the world than the war Trump has declared on us, Trump has declared war on the United States itself and the many positive contributions it has made in leading the Western world. The United States has never been perfect – far from it. But it has been an important model and leader in many respects, arguably more than any other country over the last hundred years.
The question for Canada is not just how we protect ourselves. It is what we do to develop new alliances and new leaders to champion the values, institutions and international understandings that are essential for the world to cooperate on the fundamental problems we collectively face: climate change and protection of the environment; control of weapons of mass destruction; eradication of extreme poverty; identification of and protection from virulent disease; respect for territorial integrity and peaceful resolution of disputes. It may be that Trump and his supporters recoil at “globalist” concerns and actions, but the fact is we are one world; we have shared challenges and opportunities, and they are growing in importance every day.
Canada is a small country, but we are not alone. There are many countries in this world that share our basic values and concerns. We need to reach out to them, not so much to help us in our “war” with the United States, but rather to address and respond to the war Trump has unleashed on the values his own country once stood for.
February 8
JOE MURRAY
In a rough corporate restructuring, pieces that are not essential to the vision of a slimmed-down, more focused future are sold off or shut down, and their staff fired. This can provide great opportunities for other firms to buy distressed assets, enter new fields and scoop up hard-to-get talent.
Canada should be looking for great new opportunities, not just defensive plays against the threats from the Trump reordering of the U.S. government and economy and the broader world order. We have strengths as well as weaknesses from our middle-power status, geographically and historically diplomatically adjacent to the United States. English Canada’s embedding in American news, culture and social media empires also make it easier for us to recruit and enculturate expats from the United States, especially its blue coasts.
Perhaps Canada and its allies in the old social democratic and liberal West can pick up the pieces from the rupturing of U.S. higher education and research, as well as various soft-power programs, such as public health. Other valuable and venerable institutions are going to be targeted in the coming weeks, months and years.
There is a growing recognition that for Trump and Musk, breaking the U.S. constitutional order is a feature, not a bug, of Project 2025. If the reworking of the U.S. public sphere grows past the multigenerational impact of Roosevelt’s New Deal toward a Lincoln-like division among parts, who knows, there may be seceding parts of the United States that are for the rule of law and against personal executive rule. They could be interesting applicants for an enlarged Canadian federation. Maybe we could seriously but not (yet) literally troll Trump with an invitation to (California Governor) Gavin Newsom to become Premier Gavin Newsom.
Formerly solid institutional mortar crumbles in times of historical change. Alberta has always had a stronger leaning toward American political culture than the rest of Canada. I would discourage the federal government from reigniting its resentment and separatism by making it bear an undue burden of the fight against American tariffs. Sovereigntists in Quebec need to have demonstrated to them that their interests are better served by not going it alone with a rampaging, unpredictable Goliath next door, without precluding their recognized rights to determine their own future.
Republican voters are pleased with Trump’s initial actions. It’s a wave of deeply transformative institutional change in 2025, not a 2017 media circus around an individual in the Oval Office, ineffectual at marrying his musings to the workings of his government.
HENRY MILNER
This is very good. It is seldom noted how so much of American economic success came from its scientific and technological advances and many were achieved through the contribution of scientists and technologists fleeing oppression. This time, the brain drain will be reversed, and Canada could certainly benefit.
OWEN LIPPERT
Sorry, Joe, you are dreaming. For starters, should Canada retreat from the American economy, its status as middle power passes. The coming bill for the decade’s public sector spending binge ensures as much. Existing credit may cover social welfare payments, but no new fancy investments. Universities are in trouble already. Our economy is a petrostate with a large service sector in need of clients. The automobile industry belongs to North America, not Canada.
After bluster on both sides, a deal will be reached. Canada will pay more for access to the U.S. market. Americans will pay more for Canadian goods. It will make no sense for economic productivity and growth. It will for U.S. politicians looking for money to spend.
Canada will have a breather. It should not waste it on daydreams. I don’t fault you for wishing.
February 10
PHILIP RESNICK
ANSCHLUSS
Words like old soldiers
are supposed to fade away,
yet a number may be acquiring
a new lease on life.
At a conference of far-right parties in Madrid,
one hears talk of Reconquista – shades of 1492 –
of expunging Islam from the European continent,
re-Christianizing societies
which through secularism and liberalism
have lost their way.
Closer to home,
the matamore in the White House
has repeatedly voiced a desire
to turn his northern neighbour
into a 51st state.
In March of 1938
in the heart of Europe
there was an ominous term to describe
this great power game of territorial imperative –
Anschluss.
We need to start calling
what our overbearing neighbour has in mind
by its proper name.
MARIO POLÈSE
My parents were there in March 1938 when Adolf marched into Vienna. The big difference with the Anschluss is that Trump is unlikely to be received by adoring crowds in Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver. As my mother tells it, Adolf was welcomed in Vienna as if the saviour himself had descended from above – total hysteria. A fifth column in Austria had long since prepared the ground for annexation. No such fifth column exists in Canada. And (most) Austrians did think of themselves as Germans, the small Austrian republic seen as a temporary aberration by many. Hitler, let us not forget, was an Austrian.
JOHN RICHARDS
I had not thought of Anschluss as equivalent to Trump’s musing over integrating Canada into the United States. You write, “No such fifth column exists in Canada.”
I’m not as confident as you that Canada will avoid crumbling into MAGA. The present premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan are not interested in preparing tactics to defend Canadian independence. Both premiers believe that their citizens have a God-given right to enjoy above-average incomes by exporting resources, such as oil, gas, and uranium.
FRANCES ABELE
For once, I am agreeing with you, John.
Premiers Moe and Smith have a base. An unknown (but not insignificant) proportion of the base in Alberta would be absolutely fine with being absorbed into the United States, at least until they saw their health care disappear. I saw a poll reporting that 20 per cent of Albertans would accept absorption. I doubt that the figure is that high, but still, it looks like the basis for a fifth column to me.
Most Albertans are alarmed by this, and the NDP has been knocking itself out to change the channel, so to speak. They almost won the last election.
JOE MURRAY
It’s hard to know where to start with a post like yours, Owen. Any reduction of our trade with the United States would mean Canada would no longer be a middle power? Hmph.
Canada’s general government debt (all three tiers) as a percentage of GDP is in about the middle of the G7:
- Japan 250%
- Italy 135%
- S. 123%
- France 111%
- Canada 107%
- K. 101%
- Germany 63%
After the pandemic, we’re also fairly standard in starting to reduce this (Figure 1).
FIGURE 1: RATIO OF GOVERNMENT DEBT TO GDP, G7 COUNTRIES, 1950–2023
Do I think Trudeau focused too much on redistribution and not enough on productivity improvements? Does this leave us in a weaker position facing a tariff war? And without significant capacity to take on major new expenditures? Yes on all fronts.
My post is about seeing the opportunities that the disruptions in U.S. institutions offer others, especially including Canada. I predict the attacks on the pinnacles of the U.S. higher education system will be particularly ferocious, as it is an opposing power base to Trump.
The most speculative part of my previous post is the potential for there to be secessionary stirrings in blue states as a result of Trump’s breaking the U.S. constitutional order. It is very possible that Congress and the courts will acquiesce, and a new U.S. constitutional era discontinuous with the past will take hold. It is also possible that in this context, states will play an outsized role in pushing back.
I learned a lot about wedge politics from working closely with Wayne Samuelson when he was political action director and then president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, but the technique here is one I learned from Rick Anderson while collaborating with him on electoral reform. Jiu-jitsu allows smaller and weaker opponents to win fights by using the strength and momentum of larger opponents against them. Subtly accentuating and redirecting their opponent’s attacks allows the smaller and weaker combatant to turn the very advantages of their opponent into disadvantages, destabilizing and overbalancing them.
Where is the incredible strength, speed of action and momentum of the Trump regime’s flood-the-zone strategy going to produce exploitable openings for Canada?
OWEN LIPPERT
First, Joe, apologies for being “assertive.” I was in the middle of a difficult journey. To remove any trace of sympathy, however, I write now from a South Pacific beach.
Only degree separates our views on the current manageability of Canada’s debt. We differ on Canada’s ability to improve its First World standard of living. I see dark clouds, and you see sunny days, on the same issue – Canada’s ability to leverage its research genius into commercial success.
I doubt Trump policies will divert entrepreneurial brains and investment money away from American universities, but anything is possible. Canada will not attract them because it has not, to date, done so on a significant scale.
America offers a gamble: hard work and the chance, if remote, to be a billionaire, though more likely a serial failure. Canadian governments offer relative safety: startup advice from bureaucrats, and after many form filings, limited startup funding and tax deductions.
In the United States, the researcher can step out of a lab and start a company with what he or she came up with at university. In Canada, the university (in lieu of the provincial government) owns (to varying degrees) the patents on anything coming out of its facilities. The transaction costs and the inability to pledge intellectual assets undermine the entrepreneurial drive. For a while, the University of Waterloo did allow researchers to own their work outright. The results speak for themselves.
Private investment in the United States disproportionately benefits top schools, creating nodes of excellence. Canadian governments invest in universities not according to their success, but rather according to complex equity guidelines. Excellence is prima facie evidence of inequality.
Canadian governments have repeatedly and exhaustively studied high-tech start-ups. They say more incentives are needed. They never question their own policies of command and control. Startups happen every day in Canada. What drives them to gravitate to America in order to grow is not the lure of more investment capital or a larger market size. It is control over their own enterprise, even more than the tax rate.
Canada will grow exponentially when the federal and provincial governments accept a simple statement: all their policy strategies, propped up by pseudoscientific industrial planning research, lose out to individual self-interest and ambition.
A final word. China’s example feeds the allure of intellectual-industrial planning. It is based mainly on massive intellectual property theft. What was stolen once will be stolen again – China has only itself to blame when its profit margins plunge. The big payoff still rests with the innovator in jurisdictions that respect creative rights and individual economic freedom.
Joe, I see no dispute between us.
February 19
REG WHITAKER
Tuesday’s Speech from the Throne in the BC Legislature twice invoked the fight against the Nazis and the defeat of fascism in Europe while warning that “this is the most consequential time for our province since the Second World War.”
The BC NDP government has got it exactly right: the enemy of BC and Canada is the USA, and the USA is now a fascist aggressor power led by a fascist dictator. Right now, Trump and his blood-stained buddy Putin are busy creating a 21st-century version of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact. Instead of Poland, it is Ukraine being carved up – post-invasion instead of pre-invasion, but the basics remain. Same deal as being struck between Trump and Netanyahu, casually disposing of a couple of million Palestinians after Israeli savagery has reduced Gaza to rubble amid some 40,000–50,000 dead.
But it is we, Canadians, who are first on the firing line as American fascism plays out its inevitable drive toward global expansion, aggression that is embedded in its genetic code. In the face of this, we have the shameful, humiliating spectacle of the premiers trooping down to the Wolf’s Lair in Washington like distant provincial supplicants trying to deflect some of the Emperor’s wrath. They are denied access to anyone even near the Big Man and shunted to some third-grade flunky in a back office who then announces after meeting with the pleading petitioners that it’s “51st state or fuck off.”
If we learned anything at all from the war and the defeat of Fascism Mark One, it is that you don’t and can’t negotiate or deal with fascists. Trump, like Hitler, takes whatever concessions are made available, then grabs for more and more. As for signed deals, nothing but a bad joke. Chamberlain got his “peace in our time” at Munich, then Hitler promptly marched into Czechoslovakia. Canada got a “renegotiated” NAFTA signed by Trump last time, which he has promptly torn up and shredded this time. Yet we still hear voices pleading that now we must renegotiate yet another version of USMCA or SCUMA or whatever acronym you want to attach to this grotesque pile of broken paper promises. So we go to Munich 2, negotiate and sign another such pile of rubbish, only for Trump to tear it up the very next day?
There is no rational alternative to fighting back with what we have. Export tax on oil if the Great Dictator tries to divide us by a side deal exempting Alberta? Damn right, and a poll this week says that three quarters of Canadians are okay with that. Embargo exports of our rare earth minerals, aluminum and uranium to the evil empire that requires them for its war machine.
After Hitler inevitably tore up his pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR, Churchill declared that he would make an alliance with the devil himself if it were necessary to defeat Hitler, welcoming Stalin into a grand alliance with the U.S. and U.K. Time for us to call China in against the United States, which is our primary threat. Drop the ridiculous 100 per cent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for Chinese production of their superior but cheaper EVs in Canada, but slap 100 per cent on imports of Musk’s Teslas. Additionally, ban Musk’s Starlink satellite system as a threat to Canadian national security, as it undoubtedly is. Stepping up trade with China in defiance of the United States need not entail stepping back from protections against foreign interference, etc., but would simply constitute a limited arrangement of mutual interest and convenience for both Canada and China.
Perhaps we are destined to fail. But we have a choice of failing like Denmark or failing like Norway. In both cases fascist occupation followed, but the Danes could put up no resistance, while the Norwegian resistance fought on from abroad and from home, making it uncomfortable and ultimately unsupportable for the Nazis. There was a Quisling regime in Norway (hello, Danielle), but in the end, Norway survived with its honour intact.
Postscript: Athens and Rome
When Canada’s 45th Parliament convened for the first time on May 26, the newly elected Speaker of the House, Francis Scarpaleggia, spoke of Canada’s distinct values. “Our neighbour to the south may be modern-day Rome,” he said. “We are Athens – in culture, values and democracy. This is how we must see ourselves. That is who we must be.” The comparison appealed to Prime Minister Mark Carney: “Yes, we are Athens. They are Rome. We will triumph.”
The Inroads listserv was more sceptical.
May 27
REG WHITAKER
I am always happy to see present-day politicians making classical allusions, but this Athens-Rome tag for Canada-U.S. presents some serious problems.
Athens did not “triumph” over Rome. Actually, it was the reverse: Athens was absorbed, first by Alexander and the Macedonians, then for centuries by the Roman Empire. You might say that Athenian “philosophy and culture” influenced Rome, as it did the Western world in the longer run, but Athens was still in effect the “51st state” of the Empire, and its vaunted democracy was a long-lost memory. As for Canadian philosophy and culture influencing much of the world, including Trump’s USA, well, that’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? Besides, Trump’s USA (say, Nero’s Rome) is deliberately trying to snuff out science, philosophy and culture of any kind in a mass know-nothing witch hunt against learning and thought.
The USA is not Rome succumbing to the invading barbarians – it is the USA succumbing to the barbarians within its own borders. And Canada never was the Athens of the modern world. Sorry, but that has to be said.
None of this means we should not be fighting to preserve our sovereignty and independence from the zombie apocalypse to our south. But let’s not start by inflating our own sense of national identity, even as we face the pretensions of the mad emperor.
PHILIP RESNICK
As something of a classics buff myself, I was rather charmed by yesterday’s invocation of the Athenian model, in contrast to Imperial Rome, by the Speaker, picked up in turn by Carney. If nothing else, it elevates Canadian parliamentary discourse above the parochial level that usually prevails.
But as Reg correctly points out, Athenian democracy lasted a bare two centuries, and Greece in its entirety eventually became a mere province of the Roman Empire for centuries on end. So we don’t really want Canada to go that route.
As for the substance of Athenian democracy, we need to be careful here too. Not only was citizenship restricted to adult males of Athenian lineage, excluding women, foreigners and slaves, but Athenian democracy also fell prey on more than one occasion to the sway of demagogues, precisely the danger we now see south of the border. And Athens was something of an imperial power itself, when it came to the islands of the Aegean – see the famous Melian dialogue in Thucydides.
Yet Athens did provide for a degree of direct engagement by its citizens in public affairs, all too often lacking in our society. And at its height, it is associated with breathtaking breakthroughs in architecture, sculpture, philosophy, theatre and science that we could only hope to build on.
So, if we interpret yesterday’s comments as an invocation of aspects of the Athenian classical age that Canada should cherish, there may well be something to them. With less boasting, mind you, about how wonderful we are, and a serious commitment to doing better than our besotted neighbour in defending the core values of a liberal democratic society in our own day and age.
ANDRÉ BINETTE
As something of a classics buff myself, I always thought the relationship between Athens and Rome instead applied to that between the U.K. and the U.S. As a former constitutional lawyer, I would rank the invention of the rule of law and habeas corpus on a level with the creation of democracy. For what is democracy without the rule of law? For an answer, look south. The United States today is throwing away its civilizational heritage. More modest countries with a better quality of life, including Canada, preserve it. Canada should never try to become a great power at the risk of losing that heritage.
