I'm not the only American to have spent the past month wondering - what on earth did Canada ever do to Donald Trump?
Indeed, growing up as I did close by the Canadian border, I got to know a lot of Canadians and enjoyed a lot of Canadian culture - the bigger football fields, the small cans of pop, the much cooler flavors of potato chips, the fact that a cheap American beer is an "import" at a bar in Winnipeg. Not to mention serious appreciation - like Canada's outsized contributions in World War 2.
So - why is Trump throwing down the gloves with Canada? The whole thing almost seems like a couple of "enforcer" goons chirping before they drop the sticks. Their tariffs weren't that much different than the rest of the world's, for the most part. And if you leave out energy imports, we actually have/had a positive trade balance with Canada. Why all the chirping about making Canada the "51st State" - guaranteed to insult the bejeebers out of Canadians?
Why ratchet up the tariffs on a nation that has generally been a low-friction trading partner?
And above all, why use that friction to high-stick Pierre Poilievre's conservative campaign to replace Justin Trudeau - which seemed like an open-net power play goal just a few months ago?
Why?
We may have our answer. The Canadian version of the American "red/blue divide" is between the West - especially energy-rich Alberta and breadbaskets Saskatchewan and Manitoba - and the "blue" east, especially Ontario and Quebec.
And having a liberal, Liberal government even more, well, liberal than Trudeau isn't solving that problem at all:
Attending a recent independence rally in Edmonton, Alberta, Calgary-based management consultant James Albers found that “One could scarcely miss the parallels between the plight of Alberta today and that of the American colonies before 1776—only now the offending party is Ottawa, not Westminster.” Albers compares the Stamp Act of 1765 to Canada’s infamous National Energy Program that eviscerated Alberta’s economy, and the Tea Act of 1773 to Bill C-69 (the No Pipelines Act). As for the four Coercive Acts of 1774, we have the Emissions Cap, Equalization (the redistribution of wealth from the West to the East), the Net Zero fantasy, and the Tanker Ban.
What all this means should be obvious to any sentient person. “Our freedoms—of speech, of enterprise, of provincial autonomy—are being strangled under a national bureaucracy.” Canada no longer works for Alberta and the West. “Injustice by Ottawa,” Albers concludes, “has long since moved from aberration to institution,” as it did for the American colonies in the 1770s.
Though diehard loyalists will disagree, it is now time for Western Canada, in particular Alberta, to get its revolutionary act together. There is no longer any doubt that Canada is a broken, dysfunctional country, a disjointed collection of ten semi-independent provinces and three sparsely populated northern territories, superposed upon a chasm-wide divide between the East-Central “Laurentian” elite of bankers, Crown corporations, government agencies, media Jacobins and powerful political families on one side and the agricultural and energy-producing, partially rural-based, Texan-like, hardworking and self-reliant prairie West on the other. The West was never fully integrated into the Confederation as an equal partner, being consistently exploited by the Upper Canadian Anglo-Presbyterians, Québécois grandees, and their descendants who still rule the upper tier of Canadian politics.
Canada's national unity has taken some hits recently - the central government's response to the farmers' protests during the pandemic exacerbated the divide described above.
How badly?
Glenn Reynolds points out that the western provinces did not support Carney, and that while the liberals may not have specifically legislated to try to antagonize the West, it's hard to figure how they'd have done the job differently if they had been trying to - Trudeau's greenhouse gas and Net Zero measures were a hockey stick pointed at the heart of the Western Canadian economy, and Carney appears ready and willing to squeeze every Loonie possible out of the West. Leading Reynolds to wonder:
Maybe Trump dissed Trudeau specifically to cause the liberals to win, leading to a breakup. Then we get the oil, gas, and grain-producing provinces and the remnant-Canada gets angry Frenchmen.
I'm skeptical until I have a good reason not to be. But the incentives - more, cheaper energy and a neutered Liberal Party? I'm listening.
It seems like a stretch, but it seems plausible. Maybe even a worthy goal to shoot for.
