Why Should We Hate Canada?
Canada has been one of our closest allies for over a hundred years. They fought alongside us in both World Wars, the Korean War, and even several times when we were in the Middle East. They sent aid during Hurricane Katrina and regularly send firefighters to help us with wildfires. But during Trump’s second term, tensions against them have escalated to the point of his renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America just to spite them.
Is any of this justified? Or are we the aggressors in this?
Let’s do a deep dive into Canada and Trump’s main complaints against them.
The White House posted a list of reasons we should dislike Canada on their website, and you can find it by searching for the article name “President Trump is Finally Ending Canada’s Free Ride”. At first glance, it looks pretty convincing. It mentions that Canada has been afflicting us with discriminatory tariffs and compares Canada to China in the very first point. The basic gist of the article is that Canada is entitled, so they are discriminating against American goods with tariffs, and this is taking advantage of us.
But there are a lot of factors that it neglects to mention.
Six out of eleven of the reasons listed are tariffs and embargoes that Canada imposed against us within the past two years, in response to our own tariffs against them. They are even angrily compared to China for refusing to take our bullying and choosing to make their own tariffs against us in retaliation.
But how is a country supposed to respond when it is economically attacked by one of its allies? In 2020, we made a new free trade pact, USMCA, that replaced the expired NAFTA, with Mexico and Canada that protected trade between us. Then, in the last two years, we have broken that pact and slammed them with tariffs averaging around 50%. This is huge, considering we are Canada’s largest export destination.
Imagine a country that buys around 70% of our exports making a rule that they now cost 50% more. If that happened to America and we did not make retaliatory tariffs, we would be called weak. I can’t judge another country for making that same decision.
The rest of the reasons call Canada “protectionist” for supply chain management that benefits its own industries. An example of this is in its farm goods, like dairy, poultry, and eggs. Canada wants to promote its local farmers, so there are limits placed on the amounts of these things that can be imported, so that people are encouraged to buy locally first. Once the import limit has been reached, people can still choose to import more, but there are huge tariffs that go into effect. This is called a Tariff-Rate Quota.
The US uses this exact same type of system to protect our local agriculture. We use it on sugar, dairy products, peanuts, beef, and more. It is massively hypocritical to criticize another country for the same thing that we do. Moreover, how can we criticize a country for protecting its own industries over foreign ones? That’s a good thing, right?
The article also mentions two more points. The US has a trade deficit with Canada, which means that we import more than we export, and that the US economy is thirteen times larger than the Canadian economy and is home to over eight times as many people, so we have a “clear leverage”.
Around 75% of American manufacturers make things that stay in our own country, so very little is exported. This is just how our economy works and it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing that we are so self-sustaining. But this does mean that the number of countries we do not have a trade deficit with is remarkably small. And if you do not understand how our economy works, I guess that trade imbalance can look like a bad thing.
The remark about having a “clear leverage” against Canada feels unnecessarily hostile. Trump has also made comments suggesting that he wants them to become our 51st state. Why are we threatening one of our closest allies, who has done nothing wrong, except retaliate to our bullying? Protecting your own nation’s interests is something that we should commend, not attack.
And this brings us to the latest chapter in President Trump’s feud with Canada. He has renamed Lake Ontario because it shares the same name with a Canadian city. The only problem is that Lake Ontario is an Iroquois Native American word that means “sparkling water”, and the city was named after the lake several years later. I don’t appreciate erasing history, especially not for something as uncalled-for as this.
Canada is our ally. All of the arguments against them are propagandized retellings of their policies that protect their country, policies that we have as well. Americans and Canada buy over $400 billion in goods from each other yearly. We enjoy visiting Niagara Falls and they enjoy the Grand Canyon.
Why fix what isn’t broken?
Taryn Ogletree is a local small business owner and author with previous experience of several years in finance.