By Ray Rivers
August 2nd, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
“Time to grow up! Batten down the hatches and expand to new markets. Trade east west. Remove restrictions in our own country…Refine our own oil! Buy nothing from USA. Thank you Trump for a new tomorrow!” (Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish)
There are a number of Canadians still in denial, including Premiers Ford and Moe and federal Conservative leader Poilievre They think that Mr. Trump will relent and drop the tariffs he’s introduced, and we’ll get back to business as per 2024. They believe they can change Mr. Trump’s mind by bending a knee, like Mexico’s president has done, or playing hard ball with punitive counter-tariffs to hurt American consumers.
Mayor Parrish clearly doesn’t see it that way. Trump is not going to change. He’s been talking tariffs for decades and with a compliant Congress and subservient Supreme Court – he does whatever he wants. Besides, he’s convinced that America’s economy is booming thanks to those tariffs. So, unless we are prepared to accept the deal he dictates, confronting or appeasing him is pretty much a humiliating waste of breath.
We have already paid a high price for thinking we can trust America as a reliable economic partner.
Mulroney’s experiment on North American economic integration is over. Canada’s future lies in our own hands, not across the border. We should never have let down our guard and trusted the elephant next door the way we did. We have already paid a high price for thinking we can trust America as a reliable economic partner.
A 2001 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass.,found that jobs fell by 15 percent, from 1989 to 1996, within Canadian industries affected by the biggest tariff cuts. And during that same time, imports from the United States of products previously blocked by high tariffs soared by 70 percent. The Americans were the real beneficiaries of Mulroney’s deal.
There is no question that there will be some dislocation in a higher tariff trading future, particularly for those engaged in lumbering, raw metals, autos and possibly agriculture. But Mayor Parrish insists that Trump has done us Canadians a favour in the long run by forcing us to look after ourselves.
If I read the mayor right, when CUSMA/USMCA expires next year we should just let it lapse. Trump is unlikely to renew it in any case, given his present state of mind. In the meantime, it has thankfully provided a cushion from the shock of the inevitable. But that agreement probably will be gone come mid 2026. So Canada’s future rests on using many of the tools of the past; for example, stricter Canadian broadcast content rules; greater control over foreign investment; and more of the kinds of moderate and reasonable protectionist tariffs Mr Carney has introduced for the steel sector.
Donald Trump: A more global response might have tempered the power crazy old fellow.
It is unfortunate that only Canada and China appear to have confronted the Donald with counter-tariffs, over his tariff escapade, while other nations have just put up their hands and capitulated. A more global response might have tempered the power crazy old fellow, particularly since some of these tariffs have little to do with trading per se.
Good examples of this include: Trump imposing a 50% blanket tariff on Brazil, a nation where America has a large and growing trade surplus, to punish them for prosecuting the insurrectionist former president for plotting a coup. Also, Trump levied a slightly lower fentanyl-related tariff on Mexico than Canada. Yet it is the Mexican border, not the Canadian one, where Americans get almost all of their fentanyl. But when did facts ever matter to this president?
Ray Rivers, a Gazette Contributing Editor, writes regularly applying his more than 25 years as a federal bureaucrat to his thinking. Rivers was once a candidate for provincial office in Burlington. He was the founder of the Burlington citizen committee on sustainability at a time when climate warming was a hotly debated subject. Ray has a post graduate degree in economics that he earned at the University of Ottawa. Tweet @rayzrivers
Background links:
Parrish – Mulroney – Canada’s Tariffs
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