A trade war Canada will lose to its larger, louder counterpart

At any rate, while we are testing this theory, matching the U.S. tariffs we decry as madness and ruin with mad, ruinous tariffs of our own, it is our consumers and businesses who will be the victims. This is the other problem with trade wars. In a real war, the guns are pointed at the other guys. But tariffs are self-inflicted wounds.

This is a hard point to get across in the heat of battle. Suggest that retaliation is unlikely to work against them and certain to hurt us, and the response is a volley of patriotic oaths: We have to do something! So you’re saying we should just sit there and take it? You have to stand up to a bully! Why don’t you just take out U.S. citizenship then?

It is neither appeasement nor treason to refrain from costly, futile measures that at best are unlikely to succeed and at worst will trigger an escalating series of attacks and counter-attacks. It is simply facing facts. The U.S. economy is more than 10 times as large as ours. Its exports to Canada account for two per cent of its GDP; our exports to them are 25 per cent of ours.