Richard Nixon once embarrassed himself when he was President by saying that Japan was our biggest trading partner. He was wrong, of course. Most Americans I’ve randomly asked while traveling this weekend thought the right answer was China.
That was just as wrong. No, there’s another country that is a far bigger market for the United States, bigger, in fact, than what we sell to Japan, China, and Great Britain combined. That country is Canada, which we think of as spanning our northern border, except in Detroit.
Windsor, as the map shows, is just a little bit to our south. Sadly, relations between the United States and Canada seem to have been going south since Donald Trump took office.
He isn’t the first U.S. politician or President, to have irritated Canada, although they have usually done so out of condescension and what you might call malign, rather than benign, neglect. Trump seems to delight in attempting to insult our most important trading partner and geopolitical ally, and especially its charismatic young prime minister.
Now, there wasn’t anything wrong in pressing for a renegotiation of what we still call NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Frankly, it needed overhauling; the world has changed, and NAFTA was essentially signed in a world where e-commerce didn’t yet exist.
Nor was it wrong to disagree with Canada, even sharply disagree, over what were perceived as that nation’s protectionist policies over dairy products, for example.
But to go out of his way to insult Canada, and to act as if Ottawa was less a friend than North Korea was not only uncalled for, and frankly insane; it made our country look humiliatingly stupid. When I traveled on vacation throughout the Canadian Maritimes this spring, I expected to find Canadians expressing anger at me for my nation’s behavior.
Instead, I found they more usually felt sorry for us. I actually feel a little sorry for the United States myself, and wondering how many decades it will take to live down what’s happening now. But I am also embarrassed at my country’s oaf-like behavior.
Not all of this, I must say, stems from Donald Trump. Canada, which has barely a tenth of our population, is currently footing nearly the entire bill for the new, multibillion dollar Gordie Howe International Bridge which will soon be rising over the Detroit River.
The Michigan Legislature refused to even consider paying our fair share, in part because of Matty Moroun’s control over them; instead, Canada is supposed to be eventually reimbursed out of Michigan’s share of the toll revenues. Some might count that a good business deal, but to me, this makes our state and nation look embarrassingly weak.
Similarly, Trump’s threat to conclude a new NAFTA agreement without Canada was just embarrassing, and to slap new tariffs on Canada during the negotiations was both insulting and stupid, the more so given that Canada is one of the few nations with which we’ve actually had a trade surplus. “There’s no reasonable argument to have imposed these tariffs on Canada … it is actually absurd,” Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland told American journalists a few days ago. “And that’s why we said that we would impose retaliatory measures, and we did.”
Freeland added, “So Canada’s position is, lift these tariffs now. They are hurting everybody.” She was totally right. We live in an uncertain and sometimes frightening world, and one thing is very clear. The United States and Canada are much better off as partners, having each other’s backs as healthy democracies. The sooner we get back to that, the better off we’ll all be.
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