Donald Trump may be right about a lot of things.
He was very right to go after Iran’s nuclear ambitions and, as he said, earlier presidents should have stepped up and done it when it would have been easier to do. But he had the backbone to do it and has prevented Iran from proving itself to be one of the world’s worst dictatorships who would have used nuclear weapons far and wide. Had Trump done everything else wrong, but took on Iran, he would have been a great president, not only for the U.S., but for the whole world.
He was also very right to close the U.S. southern border with Mexico. Not only to close one, (and only one), of the open doors to criminals with drug and human trafficking operations, but also to reduce the costs of housing, healthcare and education for millions of immigrants from all points on the globe that the U.S. can ill afford.
He is also right to recognize that the American government has a chronic case of poor management within its operations which again, it can’t afford. The U.S. is certainly not the only country in the world with that problem, but it is very likely the only one with a national debt of forty trillion dollars, an amount which was just reached last week.
So he’s right on many things.
But he’s not right on everything.
He’s not right on Canada.
I don’t know what it can be with him, but he has seemed to have a bad itch towards us ever since he came down the escalator, and you know how it is, sometimes you get an impression over things that are very unimportant. It’s that way with me in one respect.
There used to be a tradition, only a tradition, not a requirement of any kind, that a newly elected U.S. president would make their first foreign trip to Canada or at least they would come to Canada in their first year in office. Reagan did it. George H.W. Bush did it. Clinton did. George W. Bush did, and Obama did. It obviously wasn’t important enough for Donald Trump to do it, and he didn’t.
Now I may be the only Canadian, out of forty or so million, who was offended by it, but I think you can see a pattern between an insignificant tradition and a statement that says “Canada doesn’t have anything we need.” Quite a statement from a country that bought $382 billion worth of goods from us in 2025. The U.S. must have needed whatever it was that they were buying, I don’t think they were just sending donations up here.
Which then really makes us wonder what’s going on in the trade discussions. Especially when we put another Trump quote into it when he says, as he did on the weekend: Canada wants the benefits of being an American state without being a state.
He’s got it wrong. As I said above, he’s not right on everything. And he couldn’t be more wrong on his line about us wanting the benefits of being an American state without being one, because I think I am right in the view of most Canadians in that we are not interested in the benefits of an American state if we had to become one in order to obtain them. We would rather obtain those benefits another way, such as by purchasing them from another country other than the U.S., as Mark Carney has been suggesting we will do if the U.S. doesn’t want to trade with us.
All of which should make us ask ourselves this question: what is it that the U.S. is up to in making Canada so upset at the last minute of the trade negotiations?
I don’t know what the answer to that question is, but I know that the Canadian conspiracy theorists, who are not too fussy about the U.S. in general, have lots of answers as to what the U.S. is up to.
One of the favourite answers the theorists have is that the U.S. is not interested in trading with us, they are interested in owning us. Controlling us. And getting us for nothing in the trade negotiations, with Canada just agreeing to everything they ask for. And thereby getting our steel and aluminum, our lumber and our critical minerals. And our electricity, especially that from Quebec which today heats the homes of much of north-eastern U.S.
So if the conspiracy theorists are right, it would have been with considerable surprise that the American negotiators saw the Canadians walk away from the table on Friday night. After all, that’s a Trump tactic, straight out of Donald’s book, ‘The Art of the Deal.’
When it will get real interesting will be when the Canadian retaliation tariffs against the U.S. are announced. Will they retaliate even further against us? If they do, it will only speed the process of Canada making other trade deals with other countries. Finding new markets for our products and new sources for those things we need.
Three or four months ago I mentioned that Donald Trump has done many things for Canada that we could never do for ourselves, one of which was showing us the danger of being too trade dependent on one country. It’s kind of ironic that the real world proof of his point is Canada being too dependent on his country. This latest episode in the negotiations just further illustrates that point.
It may be that the U.S. suggests re-starting the trade talks. And if they do, our team should be very clear that Canada will not be controlled by any other country, even the U.S., with whom we have a long and friendly history. If the Americans ever do want to control Canada, they should consider carefully what they did wrong this time. It could be very instructive.
Any further talks should also include that the opinions expressed at that table are not only the opinions of the negotiators, but also the opinions of the Canadian people. The people who stopped buying American booze and travelling to American resorts. People who have been Canadians, are Canadians, and want to always be Canadians.
And we might be people with long memories.
