Blame Canada? Trumps trade tiff is way out of whack and harming US, too

Canada has always been an inoffensive country, and how is that working out for it?President Donald Trump has made more threatening sounds about Canada than about Russia.He is wielding a weapon — sweeping 25% tariffs — that would almost certainly drive our Friendly Neighbor to the North into a recession, while he is making its leaders and people honestly fearful of the United States.The madman theory has much to recommend it ..

.when dealing with Hamas or the Houthis.No one heretofore has thought it has similar benefits when handling relations with Ottawa.It’s important to realize the magnitude of the threat Trump is making.

About three-quarters of Canadian exports go to the United States, accounting for 20% of Canadian GDP.The Canadian free-market think tank, the Fraser Institute, notes that 25% tariffs would subject the Canadian economy to “the biggest external shock in a century (apart from during the initial phases of the COVID pandemic).”This is the kind of thing a much larger country does to a miscreant nation when it is punishing it for pursuing an illicit nuclear weapon, invading a neighbor or engaging in vast human-rights abuses.Canada’s sin is to be party to a free-trade agreement — the USCMA — that it negotiated in good faith with the same US president now browbeating it.Defenders of Trump’s approach to trade tend to cite China as an example of how pure free-trade theory doesn’t work in the real world — China is an authoritarian society, engages in massive intellectual theft and other unfair practices, and can’t be trusted not to cut off supply chains on a crisis.None of this applies to Canada, a friendly, English-speaking country that shares our values and fights wars alongside us, not against us.That doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate complaints about Canada.But the fentanyl trade and illegal border crossings aren’t really among them (Canada is not Mexico).It’s true that Canada protects politically sensitive sect...