The Trump tariffs are bringing out the worst in Canada

All sorts of terrible nationalist ideas are back in style

Trump’s odd and unanticipated obsession with imposing tariffs on imports from Canada has dominated Canadian headlines for weeks, clouding the country’s politics with the same Kafkaesque frustration that, as Anne Applebaum described recently in the Danish context, has made crafting public policy feel “arbitrary, pointless, even surreal.” What Trump’s tariffs even exist to do, after all, is a question only answerable with hunches and armchair psychoanalysis. Are they punishment for Canada’s lax border policing? Economic warfare preluding annexation? The beginnings of a new Washington revenue regime where tariffs displace income taxes? Partisan vindictiveness at Trudeau’s woke government? An empty threat from a fundamentally unserious, mercurial boy-king?

Whatever the case, the mere threat of tariffs have already been hugely damaging to US-Canada relations and an enormous setback to the cause I believe in more than most — the deepening integration, on all fronts, of the United States and Canada.

An American administration imposing tariffs on Canada is a provocation that validates multiple preexisting Canadian theories of anti-American nationalism whose proponents are forever hungering for a pretext to implement their agenda. If tariffs are imposed, and especially if they become a permanent reality of North American relations, then it’s safe to assume one of Canada’s nationalist factions (or some medley thereof) will either gain or presume a mandate from Canadians to begin happily reversing the gains of decades of continental integration and return to historically failed, impoverishing ideas that continental integration arose to redress in the first place.