In the National Post (but linked from his personal website), Conrad Black warns of the danger of assuming that Trump is just blustering on his trade threats:
Justin Trudeau struck just the right Canadian note of our gentle nature but refusal “to be pushed around,” and he predictably will reap the short-term reward for standing up for the country opposite the ideal American bogeyman, the blustering billionaire president who has been a Garry Trudeau caricature of the Ugly American for 25 years. (It is a very incomplete picture, like most caricatures, but it works for Trump and he often cultivates it.) The boycotts of American goods and holidays will be a bonus to Canada economically and the anti-Trump American media will be along within two weeks to lionize doughty Canada like “Gallant little Belgium” in 1914 and “Plucky Israel” in 1947, and it will strengthen Canada’s always fragile self-regard opposite the United States.
On the other hand, Trump isn’t just a blowhard; all his career he has known how to go for the jugular and his reference to 270-per-cent Canadian tariffs on butter is a valid complaint that threatens to tear the scab off this egregious payoff to the comparatively small number of Quebec dairy farmers who mainly profit from it. The same issue was hammered hard by Martha Hall Findlay when she ran for the federal Liberal leadership in 2013 and by Maxime Bernier when he ran narrowly behind Andrew Scheer for the Conservative federal leadership last year. The issue died down after their unsuccessful campaigns, but if Donald Trump is incited to hammer that theme, he will roil the domestic Canadian political waters and English-French relations in the country generally.
Presumably our trade negotiators will not become so intoxicated by the prime minister’s peppy talk and spontaneous popular boycotts of the U.S. that they forget the correlation of forces. An aroused American administration could do serious damage to Canada’s standard of living, and it could be a tempting tactic to expedite more important negotiations with Mexico and the principal Asian and European powers. The United States is now enjoying three times as great a rate of economic growth as Canada (4.8 to 1.5 per cent), has lower tax rates, 11 times as great an economy, and more unfilled jobs than unemployed people.
Behind the peeling façades of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney, the United States is a monster, and not always an amiable monster. If Canadians are blinded by their visceral dislike of Donald Trump, as the antithesis of Canadian criteria for likeable public figures, they will be exposed to the ruthless pursuit of the national interest that in his own career propelled him from technical insolvency to immense wealth and celebrity and then, against all odds, to control of a great political party and to the headship of the most powerful country in the world. If these talks blow up, the U.S. doesn’t have to settle for WTO rules; it can impose outright protectionist measures. Justin Trudeau has been agile, and the country has responded admirably. But Canadian policy-makers must understand that they are playing for almost mortal stakes with potentially dangerous protagonists who have no sense of fair play and no interest in what Canada thinks of them.
