Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, a post-nationalist for global governance, wants unrestricted access to the US market for Canadian steel, aluminum, cars, and everything else, just as he believes in free access to the cheapest products from the sweatiest of sweaty Asian sweat shops to the Canadian market.
Donald Trump, an American nation-state democrat, wants to restore America's manufacturing base and restore working class prosperity by all necessary means including trade protectionism. In particular, Trump wants to restore prosperity to the rust-belt states of America upon whose defection from the Democratic Party his election depended. Hence Trump's imposition of tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from, among other places, Canada.
Faced by this departure from the liberal gospel of global integration and the abandonment of nation-state democracy and sovereignty, Trudeau appears to be at a loss. He talks of the inevitable return of logic and common sense to US policy, as if Trump were the moron and he the political genius in the equation.
But the more Trudeau and Canada's state broadcaster the CBC disses Trump, the more cheerfully will Trump be inclined to trounce Canada's fantasist trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, with next, perhaps, a duty on imported cars and car parts. And why not a tax on imported energy including Canadian oil, as long ago advocated by the American nationalist and speech writer to several US Presidents, Patrick J. Buchanan.
So Trudeau is stumped. Canada's chief trade partner doesn't give a damn about Canada's sappy globalist ideals. Trump simply aims to make America richer and stronger, a project that seems well on its way to accomplishment by a combination of four policies.
First, to cut corporate taxes, thereby promoting the patriation of profits of US-based international companies and investment in American manufacturing.
Second, to lift restrictions on US oil and gas extraction, thereby sharply raising US GDP.
Third, to use import tariffs to boost the profitability and hence growth of American industry.
Fourth, to impose control and selectivity on US immigration, thereby increasing the productivity of America's immigrant human capital.
For Trudeau and the CBC to express their disdain for Trump's intellect and common sense only ensures that whatever damage US policies cause Canada will be applied more relentlessly. Indeed, Trudeau's adherence to the Obaman policy of dismantling the sovereign democratic Western nation state, flooding the West with however many people from the Third World can reach Western shores, and undermining Western workers living standards by opening markets to the products of sweatshop labor abroad is now a sure-fire loser.
Trudeau's short and foolish reign is thus surely near its end. Who will succeed him? Who knows, but it is interesting to note that former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, aged 84, who said on his departure from Parliament that like England's William Ewart Gladstone, he would return in his eighties, has recently made a public reappearance. Dino, as George Dubya Bush named Chrétien, would be a match for Trump, and would surely be able to clinch a deal on trade.
But then the Tories may perhaps be wondering about Brian Mulroney, undoubtedly the most able Conservative politician of recent decades, a friend of Trump's, an expert on trade who presided over the negotiation of the Free Trade Agreement.
Could we be about to see North America return to the Mesozoic, an age of the gerontocrats*.
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*Mohamad Mahathir, the newly elected Prime Minister of Malaysia is 91 years old, just a little younger than the blind Venetian Doge, Enrico Dandolo, who personally led the naval force that trashed Constantinople, the capital of the Western Roman Empire, on November 24, 1202.
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