Asked this week whether he was considering lifting tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, Prime Minister Mark Carney said ‘it’s not that simple.’Liam Richards/The Canadian Press
I will go to my grave still hollering crankily that there is no such thing as “Canada’s team,” an idea that surfaces every time there’s one Canadian team left in the NHL playoffs.
And the reason it’s not a thing for anyone but the most casual bandwagon-jumper is exactly what’s ripping the trade version of Team Canada apart at the seams at the moment.
In sports, your team is a matter of who you love, of which colour blood runs through your veins, but it’s also about who you cheer against, and all the history and rivalry that feeds that. That doesn’t evaporate just because there’s one Canadian team left standing.
“Canada’s team” is a feel-good idea that doesn’t hold up in the real world, in other words, because it ignores the fact that the people most invested in the issue at hand have more intense individual motivations than simply wishing their countrymen well.
Campbell Clark: Team Canada shoots on its own net in trade talks with China
This is why fissures of anxiety and frustration are erupting among the trade version of Team Canada all of a sudden. No region or sector of the economy is cheering against another out of spite like you would in sports, but as the mad king’s trade war becomes more intractable, different interests are colliding in a way that feels like someone has to lose for someone else to win, or even survive.
That was made explicit last week by the Chinese ambassador. Canada must drop its 100-per-cent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles – imposed alongside the U.S. a year ago, when that country still looked like a pal and manufacturing partner – if it wants Canadian canola and pork producers released from their own steep retaliatory tariffs, he warned.
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew wrote an open letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to “seize the opportunity” to stanch the bleeding in two agricultural industries key to his province.
“While protecting our automotive sector is important, the current approach has created a two-front trade war that disproportionately impacts Western Canada,” the Premier wrote.
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe underlined that with Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand in China this week, it was time to sort it out.
Enter Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whose province is home to Canada’s auto sector: “I respect what they’re doing, but there’s no damn way we should drop tariffs on China.”
He professed sympathy, saying “I get it” on other premiers advocating for their own industries – but he emphasized 157,000 direct jobs and $46-billion in new investment in auto manufacturing as his own reasons for doing the same. Mr. Ford is also insisting that Canada should leverage retaliatory tariffs on the Americans again, rather than being “nice, nice, nice.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford this week broke from his counterparts in Manitoba and Saskatchewan when he said tariffs on China should remain.Blair Gable/Reuters
Higher U.S. tariffs kicked in this week on softwood lumber, and British Columbia’s David Eby was the next premier to remind everyone of the pain points at home. When auto or steel workers in central Canada have their jobs threatened, “it’s treated as a national emergency, and rightly so,” he said, but his province has its own lifeblood that doesn’t seem to get the same airtime.
“What we’re asking for today is that same respect, that same concern, that same sense of emergency is shared for the forest sector in this country,” he said.
Mr. Carney was asked on Thursday whether he was considering lifting the EV tariffs given the Chinese ultimatum, and he unspooled an unusually pointless non-answer. When reporters pushed him – yes or no? – he bristled that it was “naive” to boil a relationship with another country down to one or two issues.
“It’s a deeper set of conversations that are going on,” the Prime Minister said. “So it’s not that simple, and nor is the relationship in the auto sector that simple as just, open a door here with China, with no impact on the relationship with the United States and the impact on activity here in Canada.”
This bobbing and weaving suggests that kiboshing the EV tariffs is not on the table, given the risk of derailing U.S. negotiations, which Mr. Carney’s government keeps indicating are close to some kind of payoff. For the same reason, he ruled out Mr. Ford’s demands to resume retaliatory tariffs.
U.S. automakers on track to pay $10-billion in tariffs by end of October
That pugnacious nationalism that everyone shared back in the winter and spring, when we were all flipping our middle fingers to the south and purging our grocery carts of anything made in the USA, was real and necessary. A better and more complete solution to all of this still seemed possible then.
But now, the federal government has shifted into harm-reduction mode, making concessions (killing the U.S. retaliatory tariffs, perhaps holding the line on the Chinese EV tariffs) and focusing on negotiating a U.S. tariff reprieve for the industries it believes will have the greatest impact (energy, steel and aluminum).
It makes sense strategically, but it’s precisely why some are feeling like they’ve been thrown under the Team Canada bus, while others are sitting up front next to the coach. We’re no longer in the realm of the hypothetical or even the hopeful now; the damage is real, accumulating and uneven.
But there’s a blood sport other than hockey that offers a playbook for how Canada might navigate this with more solidarity, and it’s an arena Mr. Trump loves: reality TV. Every halfway skillful reality TV producer knows that the surest way to stoke conflict is to make resources scarce and give some competitors an apparent advantage – which is where Canada has landed this week.
On the other hand, the best way to connect people is to give them a mutual enemy to despise, focusing all the tension in the air like a sunbeam passed through a magnifying glass. Reality TV producers do this each time they cast an obnoxious, preening whackjob on a show and give them unlimited camera time, so that everyone else can seethe together about how much they hate them, unable to look away.
The whackjob has already been cast for us. Canada should be talking a whole lot more about who is the shared villain here.