Conrad Black: Canada must mature as a nation

The trade imbroglio with the United States is escalating and ramifying in ways that are potentially dangerous. The Carney government refuses to release the final offer or produce the conclusive evidence that, contrary to the American version of events, Carney was reacting to provocative and discreditable American attempts to change the deal at the last minute. It has been written here and elsewhere that since the prime minister can resolve this issue and is not doing it, and his explanations have shifted, though as a patriotic matter, we give him the benefit of the doubt, no one should be unaware of that doubt and that the American version of these events is not implausible. As long as this doubt exists, it is going to be difficult to conduct the war that our prime minister has instigated. The anger that is manifest in juvenile acts such as booing and shouting down the U.S. national anthem at sporting events is stirring up unprecedented hostility to Canada in the United States. Of course we must pursue our national interest, but we will not do ourselves a favour by infuriating an entire country of 350 million people with a GDP of US$32 trillion.

Sign In or Create an Account

If the rejection of the final trade proposals was justified, there has never been one word of justification for breaking off negotiations. Even the trade proposals that were rejected gave this country unequalled access to by far the greatest and most swiftly growing market in the world, an access the world has envied. Of course, we must be prepared to resist American pressures and reply to them, but with this uneven correlation of forces, it is poor tactics for us to escalate the disagreement. If our complaints are well-founded, this is an opportunity for Canada to come of age, and to demonstrate the moral strength that it has always had. This could be a chance to end the nagging suspicion that not only Americans and other foreigners, but many Canadians have had that this is not a mature nationality and that it has still not produced an adequate raison d’etre. Ninety per cent of Canadians live within two hundred miles of the U.S. border and 75 per cent speak the same language. Mr. Carney is trying to lead us on a historic journey; he won’t achieve it by self-impoverishment.

Given the heroic legend that we have managed to make of the Gilbert and Sullivan disturbances of Mackenzie and Papineau in 1837, we do have the potential, if our cause is a righteous one, of re-orienting this country on a more independent course and demonstrating to ourselves and to the world that Canada is an autonomous force to be reckoned with.

American complaints about a trade deficit with Canada are rubbish: when the oil we sell them is subtracted, there is no deficit, and that oil is bought below the world price and the U.S. sells it on at a handsome profit. The U.S. does have a legitimate grievance that we have been importing Chinese auto parts and inserting them into cars that are returned for completion to the United States. This is a violation of the spirit and perhaps the text of existing agreements. This also reinforces President Trump‘s own view that since all components of an automobile are available in the United States, they should be entirely fabricated there. If that is what the Americans wish to do, they have the ability to do it, but then we should produce our own automobiles for ourselves., by an agreement with a foreign manufacturer, such as Sweden and/or China, in formerly U.S.-owned factories in Canada.

Matters like this are normally worked out between mature countries with a minimum of public histrionics in a compromise that reflects the balance of the competing interests. What is happening now is a sort of primal scream therapy expressing 150 or more years of Canadian frustration at our smaller population and lesser influence in the world than the United States, and particularly our inability to rival or emulate the American genius for the spectacle and for self-glorification. The Declaration of Independence led directly to Hollywood and the Super Bowl: the Declaration was beautifully written, but three quarters of it was complete fiction, but America has electrified the world these 250 years. Canada has not been electrifying, but it has kept pace with American growth, until the last 10 years, a remarkable achievement.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that a considerable impulse in the Canadian position is derived from the socialistic and dirigist tendencies of our prime minister. Carney seems to take himself for the global David firing his slingshot at the orange-tufted Goliath of the American president. He is overtly doing his best to hurt Trump in the midterm elections in November and while bandying recondite but irrelevant asides about the ancient Greeks, he is trying to fill the role of Trump-tamer of the world. This isn’t Finland resisting Russia in 1940; it is more like Romania declaring war on Germany in 1915, (without the inducements provided by the Allies). If this brinkmanship goes much further, it will not be sane.

Carney is pushing a “war” against the country to which we sell about 70 per cent of our exports, the country upon which we are completely dependent for our own military security. And Carney appears to be much more the continuator than the reformer of the helter-skelter immigration policies that have put terrible pressure on housing costs for Canadians of modest incomes. The fact that nearly 45 per cent of Canadians are foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents heaps tremendous social costs on the country. Canada’s fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world and we are the assisted suicide capital of the world with the beaming encouragement of our terribly inadequate public health-care system.

Diversification of Canadian trade is an admirable objective; leaping into the arms of the Chinese, who attempted to disguise the nature and extent of the Covid threat for which Chinese negligence, if not malice, was responsible, is not an acceptable answer. The Chinese are conducting a form of genocide on the Uighurs, and have meddled in Canadian elections, and profess to be the proud continuators of the greatest murderer in history: Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the deaths of 70 to 90 million of his countrymen.

Does anyone really want to replace the U.S. with China, even if that were possible? It is our self-destructive immigration, economic and energy policies that have caused us to tumble down the charts of the world’s most prosperous countries per capita. The United States did not compel us to adopt European-style socialism, disorganized mass immigration, absurdly subsidized green energy, effective disarmament through negligence. The Americans didn’t tell us not to have children or limit our health care costs by promoting the virtues of suicide: we have ourselves to thank for those inspirations.

Carney apparently thought he was facing an open opposition goal mixing it up with Trump, who is rebuilding American foreign policy with its principal allies being countries that pursue parallel goals by parallel means, such as Argentina, United Arab Emirates, and Japan. He has little time for freeloading, piously moralizing pseudo-allies. Canada likes to reply to Trump’s annoying insults, but in any sort of nonviolent conflict with the United States, we are greatly more vulnerable than the adversary: the U.S. accounts for half of our GDP; the reciprocal figure is only about three per cent. We saw hints of this in August when Canada lost 42,000 jobs while the United States gained 160,000.

I do not accept the argument of some of Carney’s critics that he is motivated by concern for separatist sentiment in Alberta and Quebec. But it is becoming increasingly worrisome that the Canadian government is embarking on open-ended abrasion with the U.S., with little thought to how to bring it to a successful conclusion. The prime minister’s enthusiasm for Europe is obvious and is what made his term at the Bank of England a failure. The European Union has gloriously ended war in Central and Western Europe, but it has not been an administrative success, and it is economically stagnant. The EU is overly authoritarian and the executive apparatus is not answerable to the European Parliament. For notorious historic reasons, the EU pays Danegeld to the working and agricultural classes. North American class relations have been much more serene. In 2010, the European Union GDP was 115 per cent of the U.S. Now the U.S. is 140 per cent of the EU’s and is growing four times as quickly.

The coherence of the prime minister’s policies is not made more convincing by the fact that 91 per cent of his own investments are in the United States and two of his daughters live there.

The country will support our government standing up to and responding to bullying, if it is happening. It will soon show its displeasure with a complete loss of any sense of geography, history, or arithmetic. A workable strengthening of Canada’s independence and stature (rather than continuing to be the “world’s most woke country”) will be widely supported. Pompous invocations of ancient Greece and crowds of Canadian sports fans jeering like idiots at the U.S. national anthem are no substitute for building a convincing and mature ethos for this country; it certainly needs one.

National Post

This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.