Trump's Tariffs To Shatter North American Trust And Norms

In his first term, Trump repeatedly threatened tariffs (including the absurd assertion that Canadian aluminum imports represented a national security threat ) to browbeat Canada and Mexico on trade and immigration. Back then, we could still imagine that Trumpism was an aberration.

Canada acted appropriately for the time. Threatened with tariffs, Canadian officials responded in kind .

From this perspective, the lesson today for Canada seems clear: don't panic, don't be afraid to target vulnerable and politically important American industries and figure out what will make Trump happy.

This approach might work in the short run. But it only makes sense in a specific context. In 2016, it was possible to hope that Trumpism would be fleeting, Democrats would return to power and equilibrium would be restored.

The world can no longer make that assumption. Trumpism has been institutionalized in the Republican Party. Even if - and that's assuming free and fair elections - the Democrats regain the White House in 2028, the two-party system in the US means the Republicans will eventually regain power.

Chronic, systemic instability in the US is now the best the rest of the world can hope for. But it's next to impossible to make solid plans on instability. Canada, for its part, can no longer rely on the rules and norms that have underpinned Canada-US relations since the Second World War.

As I've written previously , the United States-Mexico-Canada trade deal's renegotiation clause, embraced by both Democrats and Republicans , deprives Canada and Mexico of the protection from coercion that trade agreements usually provide smaller countries.

Such protection traditionally means the larger country cannot use access to its market (which Canada and Mexico depend upon) to force smaller countries to adopt their preferred policies.

But the renegotiation clause of the current agreement keeps coercion on the table, moving North America away from a treaty-based rule-of-law approach to economic relations toward one focused more on raw power.

Trump's bombastic threats turbo-charge the problem of institutionalized coercion. The trade deal may still be renegotiated as scheduled in 2026, but a treaty violated at will by one party is no treaty at all.

Trump's willingness to hold the Canadian and Mexican economies hostage for a deal on drug trafficking and migration also shatters another foundational norm.

In a relationship as complex as Canada's with the United States, there will always be problems. But these haven't previously paralyzed the relationship because of a tacit commitment between both countries not to link unconnected issues, ensuring one party can't strong-arm or blackmail the other.

That norm provided Canada with significant protection from its much-larger neighbor. This norm, as well as formal trade rules, gave Canada a degree of autonomy in dealing with the US.

Despite perennial problems like softwood lumber, it allowed the US and Canada to come to reasonable arrangements supported by a commitment to domestic laws and international treaties.

As the region's dominant power, the US can remake the broader North American relationship as it sees fit.

This is the third American remaking of the continent in 40 years. The first was its embrace of a globalization-focused free-trade model in the late 1980s, resulting in NAFTA. Then, post-9/11, it unilaterally decided that border security, rather than continental economic integration , was its top priority.

Post-2001, many pundits and analysts, fearful of what this new American focus on security would mean for Canada, claimed that Canada had no choice but to integrate more deeply with the US in case the Americans, in the words of Canadian military historian Jack Granatstein , became“unhappy with us” and“bring our economy to a crashing halt.”

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In the end, these fears were overstated. The US did not crash Canada's economy once the Liberal government of the day opted against following it into Iraq or joining its Ballistic Missile Defence system, two of Granatstein's imagined red lines.

As I explored in my dissertation on the subject - eventually reworked in my book,“Copyfight: The Global Politics of Digital Copyright Reform” - Canada was protected by NAFTA and by shared norms regarding the non-linkage of unrelated issues, as well as the shared respect for the rule of law.

Asset becomes a vulnerability

Those arguing in favor of appeasement - that Canada must do whatever the US wants to avoid retaliation - should not delude themselves that Canada would be integrating more deeply with a fellow democratic country, protected by shared norms and the rule of law.

To integrate further with a country that has rejected the rule of law would be to surrender Canadian sovereignty. Deep integration with the US, once our greatest asset, is now Canada's greatest vulnerability.

Canada-US relations experts know this relationship is fundamental to Canada's prosperity and survival. Canada will find a way to manage this relationship because it has to.

But it must do so within a context in which the question“Is it legal?” no longer makes sense. Instead, the question confronting Canada is:“How can a liberal-democratic nation survive next to a much more powerful country with no respect for the rule of law?”

The difference between these two questions is the distance between democracy and authoritarianism. It is here that Canada now finds itself.

Blayne Haggart is associate professor of political science, Brock University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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