The Elephant In The Canadian Room

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

At first glance, the current American-Canadian trade "war" is absurd. We are neighbors with a long history of close friendship, speak the same language (for the most part), and spring from the same British civilization.

Nearly one million Canadians reside in the United States.

Given the two countries' natural affinities, Canadians are nearly indistinguishable from Americans.

Both sides have reasonable grievances over trade policy.

Americans don't like Canada's perennial trade surpluses of more than $50 billion in a supposedly free-trade zone.

They resent the fact that non-free-market China exports subsidized cheap steel and aluminum through Canada, giving Canadian auto and truck exports a price advantage.

The United States also objects to Canada imposing a surcharge on American digital media companies to subsidize Canadian Indigenous and French-language content.

Americans further resent Prime Minister Mark Carney's backing out of an apparent deal at the eleventh hour. He apparently hoped to gin up Canadian nationalism on the eve of two key elections in Alberta and Quebec by attacking Trump, who is unpopular in Canada.

Ascendant separatist movements in both provinces threaten to unravel the Canadian nation.

Moreover, Carney expects the dispute to damage Trump on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections, which might reduce his leverage over Canada.

Canada, in turn, resents American demands concerning its importation of Chinese goods as an infringement upon its sovereignty.

It increasingly believes that the sheer size of the United States next door - 13 times larger in nominal GDP and nine times larger in population - threatens to overwhelm Canada's unique culture.

Canada maintains that its trade surplus results largely from U.S. imports of Canadian oil sands petroleum - a mutually beneficial arrangement. It is also tired of Trump's trolling and mockery.

But even these differences could easily be resolved, given our centuries of friendship.

So what is the unspoken source of the acrimony?

The United States is leaping ahead of other Western countries in ways few anticipated several decades ago, while Canada is stagnating.

America is the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas.

Its technology, software, biotechnology, digital media, satellite, and numerous other companies dominate global rankings.

American GDP is roughly $10 trillion larger than either China's or the European Union's. Yet China has four times the population of the United States, while the European Union has 100 million more people.

The U.S. military is the world's most lethal and is now being rebuilt with even greater defense spending.

Moreover, the United States has not been shy about warning its Western friends that their socialist paradigms and leftist policies threaten their very existence.

The EU suffers from unsustainably low fertility.

Massive and often illegal immigration threatens the very culture and values of Europe.

Green hysteria has nearly wrecked the German and British economies.

Until Russia invaded Ukraine and Trump began his harangues, European NATO members were de facto disarming.

Yet Canada - especially under the globalist prime ministers Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney - has adopted much of this ossified European model.

The result is a sluggish economy. Also left unspoken is Canada's growing reliance on the U.S. market, American continental defenses, and the general goodwill of the United States.

Until last year, Canada had refused to honor its NATO commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense.

It has thrown open its border even as the United States is closing its own.

Some 45 percent of Canadian residents are either foreign-born or the children of immigrants.

The majority come from impoverished, non-Western countries and immediately depend upon a vast social welfare system that the present anemic economy cannot sustain.

Utopian think tanks speak grandly of a Canadian "Century Initiative" that would bring in enough immigrants to increase the population to 100 million. But sheer numbers will hardly remedy the country's underlying demographic and economic stagnation.

How mostly non-Western immigrants are to be integrated, assimilated, and acculturated in a country that has forsaken anything remotely resembling the idea of a melting pot is never explained.

The tragic irony is that Canada once punched well above its demographic weight, with a formidable military and a dynamic economy.

Not anymore. Its per capita GDP is now among the lowest in the industrialized West.

Yet Canada has the fifth-largest oil and natural-gas reserves in the world, even as green restrictions and provincial infighting nullify those natural advantages.

In timber, metals, and mineral resources, Canada ranks among the world's top five nations.

Apparently, Canada believes that opening its economy, insisting upon legal, meritocratic, diverse, and measured immigration, and fully developing its natural wealth would be a bitter medicine worse than even its present maladies.

For all America's unsolicited advice and tough-love attitude, the United States would prefer a strong Canadian partner to a dependent one.

That growing asymmetry explains much of this otherwise inexplicable melodrama.