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While we’re all waiting for something resembling a Team Canada approach to 
materialize in the looming U.S. trade-war catastrophe, let’s begin with a 
quick account of just how close Canada has come to failed-state status.

The House of Commons has been padlocked since Jan. 6. The successor to 
Canada’s disgraced prime minister will not be known until the Liberal 
party’s leadership vote on March 9. Within days of the House of Commons’ 
March 24 return, an anticipated non-confidence vote would officially 
dissolve Parliament, triggering an election campaign that can legally 
carry on for 51 days.

Our prime-minister-in-waiting is Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, but 
for now we’re all obliged to play along with the idea of Justin Trudeau as 
our PM, which is a true thing only in the strictest constitutional sense. 
In the meantime, American president-elect Donald Trump has pledged to 
sabotage Canada’s economy by imposing a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian 
exports to American markets upon his inauguration in Washington on Jan. 
20.

This will immediately threaten hundreds of thousands of Canadian jobs. It 
won’t be until some time in May that we’ll have a genuine prime minister 
and a functioning Parliament, giving Trump a four-month advantage in his 
declared objective of exerting “economic force” to annex Canada as the 
51st American state, the madhouse notion behind his pretext involving 
border security and drug trafficking, which Ottawa is still playing along 
with.

In the meantime, formulating some sort of defence falls as much to 
Canada’s provinces as it does to the country’s lame-duck federal 
government. There’s a resounding multi-partisan consensus that Trump’s 
grievances with Canada are concocted and contrived. That’s almost where 
Canadian unity ends.

A trade response would ordinarily mean retaliatory tariffs, which are 
constitutionally Ottawa’s prerogative, and Foreign Affairs Minister 
Mélanie Joly says everything should be on the table. But Saskatchewan 
Premier Scott Moe says nothing should be on the table: “Any export tariffs 
or restriction of products that Canadians produce and provide to anyone in 
the world is simply not on.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, head of the Council of the Federation, says 
those wide-open options should include shutting off energy supplies: 
“Depending how far this goes, we will go to the extent of cutting off 
their energy, going down to Michigan, going down to New York state, and 
over to Wisconsin.” But Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says that any 
retaliation that encumbers Alberta’s ability to sell oil and gas to 
American buyers would incite a “national unity crisis.” Her reasoning: 
“Oil and gas is owned by the provinces, principally Alberta, and we won’t 
stand for that. I can’t predict what Albertans would do.”

It’s in Alberta that a clear Conservative claim to the mantle of national 
leadership against Trump’s belligerence could easily founder. Poilievre is 
an Albertan, and the Conservatives out-poll the Liberals in Alberta at a 
wider margin than in any other province — 62.4 per cent to 12.9 per cent. 
Poilievre’s response to Trump’s provocations has been measured, clear and 
unequivocal: “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period. We are a great 
and independent country. We are the best friend to the U.S.” At the same 
time, Poilievre has made it plain that whatever Smith or Moe say, as prime 
minister he would definitely retaliate, and Canada’s energy should be on 
the table.

Canadian oil and gas already sells at a discount in American markets, so 
it makes no sense even from an American perspective to get into a tariff 
war, Poilievre points out: “I would say to President Trump, I will 
retaliate with trade tariffs against American goods that are necessary to 
discourage America (from) attacking our industries. I’d rather we work 
together, though, because if we do, we can have a bigger, stronger 
economy.”

Doug Ford has adopted precisely that line. So has Ottawa. Energy Minister 
Jonathan Wilkinson is in Washington making the case for a Canada-U.S. 
energy and resource alliance in the face of mounting global threats, 
particularly from China. But it’s not at all clear that Trump can be 
persuaded. “We don’t need their fuel,” Trump said last week. “We don’t 
need their energy. We don’t need their oil and gas. We don’t need anything 
that they have.”

It didn’t help appearances that Smith’s travelling companion at Trump’s 
Mar-a-Lago resort last weekend was the reality-television investment guru 
Kevin O’Leary, who calls himself a Canadian when in Canada but has 
recently moved to Florida from Boston, the city he calls his “hometown.” 
O’Leary has long been advocating for some sort of North American “economic 
union” with a common currency and a shared Canadian-American passport.

And Smith has been lathering up her case for an Alberta oil exemption from 
Trump’s tariffs on the grounds that it was because of “eastern 
politicians” that Alberta’s hopes for the Northern Gateway pipeline to the 
West Coast and the Energy East pipeline to Quebec were dashed, confining 
Alberta’s oil and gas expansion to American buyers in the first place. 
It’s “outrageous” that anyone would propose retaliating against American 
tariffs by scaling back or shutting down American access to Alberta’s oil, 
she says.

That tells only half the story. The Energy East project’s profitability 
was based on the presumption of oil prices at $100 per barrel. TransCanada 
cancelled the project in 2017. As for the Northern Gateway pipeline, which 
would have run twinned pipes from Bruderheim, Alta. to Kitimat on the 
coast, at least two-thirds of B.C’s Conservative voters wanted oil tankers 
banned from B.C.’s north coast and the Enbridge-led project fizzled during 
the Harper government’s final years. The B.C. government, led by Christy 
Clark at the time, was against it, too.

The NDP’s Jagmeet Singh and B.C. Premier David Eby say Canada should 
consider blocking American access to critical minerals and other 
resources. B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad says Canada should reopen 
trade offices in China, which is as painfully weird as Christy Clark’s 
claim, contradicted by the evidence of her own several public statements 
last year, that she’d never joined the Conservative party.

While B.C. premier, Clark signed North America’s only “Belt-and-Road” 
agreement with Beijing, and while her bizarre comments about her 
assignation with the Conservatives was what dealt her out of contention to 
replace Trudeau, her affection for failed Conservative leadership 
candidate Jean Charest, a favourite of the Chinese Communist Party, should 
be understood as genuine.

Lastly, as if to dispel any doubt that Trump has the market cornered on 
politics as infotainment, Trudeau’s personal economic adviser, Marc 
Carney, Team Trudeau’s pick for a successor, showed up on Comedy Central’s 
hipster-left The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in New York on Monday night. 
“I’m an outsider,” the Liberal insider’s insider told Stewart, coyly 
confirming his plan to take a run at it.

You’d think we were already the 51st state or something.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/canada-grows-ever-closer-to-failed-state-
status