Conrad Black: Trump’s unfair tariffs are an opportunity for Canada

U.S. President Donald Trump, left, welcomes Prime Minister Mark Carney outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 7, 2025. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

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It is not clear why the Trump administration keeps scraping the tariff barrel. The latest tariff elevation reaches back 96 years to an obscure provision entitling the president to impose tariffs on countries that discriminate against U.S. commerce. Canada’s offence in this regard is apparently our odious system of supply management, our retaliatory tariffs against American cars and provincial alcohol bans. Another 60 countries were also threatened with new duties under a law entitling the United States to impose tariffs on countries that import from other countries that employ slave labour. It was an ingenious method of skirting around the Supreme Court’s decision that the administration could not impose its “Liberation Day” tariffs on the grounds of a national emergency.

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This was an understandable ambition, and U.S. President Donald Trump has improved the comparative American trading position with almost every economically serious country in the world except China and Canada. He had reduced the absurd trade deficit in goods of almost $1.3 trillion in 2025 to an extent that justifies the slight inflationary pressure that was counterbalanced by a generally declining inflation rate until the numbers became skewed by the Middle East war. Trump would surely appreciate less agitated relations with Canada, though that was not discernible in his high-handed treatment of the new bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ont. That was an annoying episode, compounded by Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pretense that he made a good deal of it.

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We do have the ability, gradually, to reduce trade with the United States as a percentage of our economic activity. But it requires disciplined policymaking and execution. Prior to the First World War, trade with the United States was equivalent to around 40 per cent of our economy; by the early 21st century, it rose to roughly 80 per cent and is now down to approximately 64 per cent. The lower figure represented John A. Macdonald’s National Policy based on building East-West trade within Canada by completing the Canadian Pacific Railway and building Canadian manufacturing to supply the domestic market behind relatively high tariffs. This led to the reciprocity election of 1911, in which Wilfrid Laurier proposed freer trade with the United States but was rejected by voters.

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Tariffs were a huge issue in many industrialized countries for many decades, and it was one of the principal issues in the American presidential elections from 1876 to 1892, which were all close in the popular vote. The Republicans, like Macdonald in Canada, liked tariffs to build industry and profits and create jobs, and the Democrats, like Laurier, preferred lower tariffs to produce a lower cost of living for people of modest incomes. These were both reasonable positions. Because the population of the United States tripled, from 31 million to over 90 million between the Civil War and the First World War, the American domestic market became so immense, trade only accounts for less than 25 per cent of the American GDP, not a third of the total in this country, so the United States can be more cavalier in this area than most other countries.

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Only a trade wonk could comment authoritatively on the series of partial free-trade agreements that Prime Minister Carney has been buzzing around the world announcing. But it is not clear that freer trade with Norway or Turkey or Myanmar is going to accomplish much: Norway is an astronomically rich petro-state whose sovereign fund earns enough each year that it could simply salary the entire adult population. This would be too much of an affront to the Nordic Lutheran ethos and mass idleness has its hazards. Instead, almost everything is free, starting with education and health care, and the sovereign fund keeps growing. I doubt that Turkey and Canada have much to trade with each other and under its present government Turkey is a dodgy political enterprise. Myanmar, which is part of the ASEAN bloc that Carney is negotiating with, is a primitive pariah state.