Trump turns his anger towards Canada

Someone must have told Donald Trump recently that the NAFTA treaty that he abhors and has promised to repeal almost in its entirety is not just a bilateral commercial trade agreement between the USA and Mexico. There is also a third party involved, which is Canada. And someone must have told Donald Trump that if NAFTA is going to be overhauled, Canada must also give its approval to any drastic changes made to the multilateral treaty, which complicates things quite a bit since any drastic changes will require not only the approval of the US Congress on which Donald Trump relies being a Republican Congress sympathetic to a Republican President, but it will also require the approval of the Mexican Congress which is now taking a  hostile stance against the anti-Mexican attitudes of Trump and which may end up becoming a leftist Congress in a country ruled by a leftist President next year after the presidential elections in Mexico in 2018. And to make matters worse for Trump who demands a speedy overhaul of NAFTA, Canada must also undergo a complex and lengthy legislative procedure before any major changes to NAFTA are ratified by the Canadian Parliament. Even worse (for Donald Trump and the USA as a whole), if the USA pulls out of NAFTA unilaterally, that doesn't mean that Canada and Mexico will withdraw from the treaty which would now become a bilateral treaty between Canada and Mexico leaving the USA out as a trading partner. In other words, even after Donald Trump, there would still be a NAFTA, with the USA kicking itself out of the club.

The realization that as far as NAFTA goes Trump cannot blackmail Mexico into yielding to Trump's harsh rhetoric and threats without the consent of Canada as an ally of Trump's whims already has an unexpected and unanticipated effect: President Donald Trump has also turned against Canada. In a speech he gave at a tools factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday April 18, Trump said:

“NAFTA has been very, very bad. The fact is that NAFTA has been a disaster for the United States and a complete and total disaster. [I]n Canada, some very unfair things have happened to our dairy farmers. We're going to work on that very hard, we're going to work on it immediately. In fact, starting today. We're going to make some very big changes or we're going to get rid of NAFTA once and for all. It's a terrible thing that happened to the farmers of Wisconsin.”

Even if the USA pulls out of NAFTA, Canada and Mexico can still remain as trading partners, there is absolutely nothing that Donald Trump as President of the USA can do to prevent it from happening.

On the Mexican side, many Mexican politicians of most major political parties are convinced that Donald Trump is going to pull the USA out of NAFTA anyway, and preparations are already underway in Mexico to make Mexico less dependent on its trade with the USA. This is certain to have major repercussions hitting hard big segments of the US economy. The first ones who will be hit the hardest will be precisely the farmers in the rural areas whose vote in the Electoral College gave Donald Trump his presidency despite losing the popular vote. It turns out that Mexico is one of the top buyers of US corn. Mexican senator Armando Rios Piter, who leads a congressional committee on foreign relations, is the author of a bill under which Mexico will buy corn from Brazil and Argentina instead of the United States, hitting US farmers where it hurts them most, in their pockets. We are talking of tens of thousands of farmers who are destined for bankruptcy under the new Trump era. Where else would they sell their corn? Europe certainly doesn't need it. And in Asia, the major staple is rice, not corn. So the bankruptcy of many US farmers in the rural areas, precisely those who allowed Donald Trump to become President, is a bankruptcy of those who are in line for what will most likely become a major economic catastrophe for which they will have no one else to blame but the man to whom they gave their vote believing his promises of a “Greater America”. Yes, all those farmers can deny Trump their vote four years from now and kick him out of the Oval Office, but by then it will be too late, which is very little consolation.

But the above is just for starters. If Trump, besides considering Mexico an enemy of the United States, also wants to consider Canada an enemy of the United States, thereby opening two fronts, Canada has a lot of areas open for retaliation. The combination of all these factors may be more than enough to put the breaks on the sustained economic improvement under President Obama that allowed the US economy to recover from the Great Recession, an economic recovery that took eight long years to materialize, an economic recovery that can be sent down into a tailspin by just one man. In the end, with the US economy collapsing, it is possible that the US Congress may decide to proclaim President Trump unfit for office and attempt to remove him from power, although being the Commander in Chief he may be cuckoo enough to go against a Congress he has ignored so far as evidenced by his flurry of executive orders without consulting the US Congress at all in any of them.

Under Donald Trump, gone are the days of the iconic photograph of Nelson Eddy (famous for his interpretations of “Indian Love Call” and Song of the Mounties”) playing the role of a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Phoey! If Trump also plans to go against Canadians in the USA as he is now doing in the case of Mexicans, it may not be long before he decides that the USA also needs a Big Wall in the USA border with Canada reversing previous historic aspirations of the USA that somehow Canada could perhaps be enticed to end up being swallowed as part of the USA under a continuation of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. With a harsher stance against all Canadians, a stiffening of legal entry requirements of Canadians into the USA could become a reality, and Trump could soon be asking Hollywood to “Buy American, Hire American” (something which the Trumps themselves are not very fond of doing). Why hire some foreign actor such as William Shatner, when there are many other actors just like him or even better in the USA? Why hire a TV host from outside the USA such as Alex Trebek, when there are so many unemployed would-be TV hosts in the USA eager to do the same job? And why bring into the USA someone like Michael J. Fox, when there are better alternatives in the USA looking for work? And why hire any Canadian scientists or engineers such as the ones who designed the Canadarm when there are many fine graduates from American universities who can do the same job or even better (never mind that many of them with graduate studies are actually professionals from other countries)? Trump has already taken a first step in this direction by issuing an Executive Order regarding H-1B visas, which applies not just to people from other parts of the world but also to the only two neighbors the US has, i.e. Canada and Mexico. Talk about being a good neighbor!

Canadians would do well to learn from the Mexican experience with Trump and begin taking steps to reduce trade dependence with the USA, looking overseas for other more stable and predictable markets such as Asia where China may now be an even bigger and more profitable market than a country verging near the edge of bankruptcy with an unpayable national debt now hovering close to 20 trillion dollars, a country ruled by an unpredictable and whimsical US president under whom things may end up being far far worse before they can get any better.