Translating Trump's tariff threats

Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book, The Coddling of the American Mind, begins with the author trekking miles into remote mountains, to seek counsel from a Himalayan guru, who tells him: “Always trust your feelings”

As psychologist Dr. Haidt shows, this is spectacularly bad advice, but it is highly relevant to our reaction to Donald Trump.

To glean context for his pugilistic posturing about tariffs, I am reading Donald Trump’s self- congratulatory 1987 book: Trump. The Art of the Deal.

You may already have noticed that Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is sweeping the globe. Some so dislike the Great Pumpkin that they switch off their brains and are driven entirely by feelings of disgust and rage. This is always a pitfall for those who vote emotionally. See my Freditorial essay Trump Terror II” the Sequel for more on TDS.

Many voters want to elect politicians they like personally, so they shun those they see as obnoxious (Trump), cold (Harper) or angry (Poilievre), in favour of those who espouse awful policies, but seem cuddlier.

This is how the disastrous Notley, Gondek, Biden and Trudeau regimes got elected. Emotional voting.

I therefore urge you: Voters, engage your brains for a few minutes and think about policy. You aren’t going camping with these politicians and will probably never meet them. Their skin colour, socks, hair and voices do not matter, but their policies do.

Political leadership is not just an emotional, tribal or symbolic issue. It is largely an economic task. Government policies have a huge effect on our cost of living, job prospects, kids’ futures and yes, even our feelings.

Let’s pay attention to policy and stop obsessing about disliking the politicians themselves. We should also stop pretending that our superficial style concerns about one candidate who is not in power, outweigh the disastrous, real record of one who has been in power for a decade. Rewarding incompetent, corrupt governments with further support only perpetuates incompetence and corruption.

(Orange grenade image: BBmilitaria.com)

Donald Trump likes to lob a verbal grenade over the fence before negotiations start, as he did by announcing he may impose 25% tariffs on Canada. As Trump planned, Canadian media and politicians have been lighting their hair on fire, before even knowing what, if anything, Trump will actually do. All of those politicians and most in the media have their own political agendas, which colour their views and credibility.

Remember when Trump the First was going to build a “big, beautiful wall” on America’s southern border, funded by Mexico? That did not happen. Pure bluster.

Pre- presidential Art of the Deal author Donald Trump offered this standard negotiating advice: It is never good to seem too eager. In that vein, he is currently claiming that America doesn’t need Canadian oil.

This is just a negotiating tactic. The USA produces about 14 million barrels of oil per day and consumes 19 million barrels per day.

Trump’s Drill, Baby, Drill policies might boost US oil production to close that gap somewhat, but America really does need the better part of 5 million barrels a day of oil from someone.

That oil supplier might as well be Canada, because Canada is quasi democratic, nearby and already supplies the cheaper, heavy crude that many American refineries prefer to process. That was the impetus behind the Keystone XL pipeline, which previous Presidents Obama and Biden cravenly delayed and then cancelled.

So how did Canada’s oil and gas industry come to be so heavily dependent on America to buy most our energy exports? Other than that fact that the USA needs a lot of oil and gas and is right next door?

Suggested caption: “Anyone from Nova Scotia couldn’t possibly be evil, right?” (Image: CBC)

It wasn’t that Canadian energy producers didn’t try hard to diversify their client base. Under the malevolent influence of his university buddy, sulphurous svengali and former Chief of Staff, Gerald Butts (above), Justin Trudeau worked very hard for a decade to sabotage and phase out Canada’s oil and gas industry. These policies are detailed in Freditorial’s essay:

A Loathsome Lightweight’s Lame Legacy.

Trudeau cancelled one approved pipeline (“Northern Gateway”), encouraged protestors by propagating the mythical concept of social license, reorganized the regulator, who then changed the rules to stymie a second pipeline (“Energy East”), banned tankers on one coast but not another and imposed production caps on oil and gas companies, whose product is, by far, the largest source of Canada’s export revenues. In each pipeline case, the regulatory process had already taken a decade and cost proponents about a billion dollars each, by the time Trudeau stuck the knife in.

Eventually, the Government of Canada bought one pipeline, the trendily named “Trans Mountain”, which could easily have been funded by private investment, if not for Trudeau’s policies having deliberately made the approval process impossibly long and expensive.

No other government in Canadian history, except possibly Trudeau’s father Pierre’s, has been this ideologically blind and economically masochistic.

Beelzebub Butts, (who was forced to resign over his role in Trudeau’s sickening SNC-Lavalin justice obstruction scandal) and current Trudeau Chief of Staff Katie Telford are said to have slithered into the Liberal Party leadership campaign of crafty carbon crusader Mark Carney, whose unsuitability for high office Freditorial described at length here:

The Man Who Would Be King.

Meanwhile, President Trump complains that America’s trade deficit with Canada represents unfairness, which is false. That deficit just means that Canada sells more billions of dollars worth of stuff, like oil, aluminum and car parts, to the USA, than America does to Canada.

The trade deficit just reflects our different societies’ needs and comparative advantages. This is what trade is for. So Trump complaining about this is also a tactic, because he is surrounded by advisors who, unlike Trudeau’s, actually know better.

To Trump’s credit, again unlike Trudeau, he wants to boost economic activity in the private economy, rather than just infinitely expand the economic millstone of government. To that end, Trump has reversed many of Sleepy Joe Biden’s anti carbon policies and cancelled electric vehicle mandates and subsidies, making Trudeau’s wildly expensive battery plant subsidies look even more feckless.

Wind and solar power are both unreliable and inflationary because they are intermittent. Backup natural gas generation needs to be built to supply power when wind and solar generate nothing, as often happens at night, when power demand is highest. This belt and suspenders approach is very expensive, leading to energy poverty in Germany and the United Kingdom, among others.

President Trump has no interest in applying tariffs to Canadian oil, which would just needlessly raise gasoline prices in the American Midwest and anger voters there, at a time when Trump has declared that American energy costs need to fall, not rise.

Various Canadian politicians and pundits are calling for “unity” and a “Team Canada” approach in response to Trump’s tariff threats. Appeals for unity, like calls for “tax fairness” always make my spidey sense tingle, that my wallet is about to be lightened by a government. Canada is a democracy, where unity is not the natural state of things.

(Image: CBC)

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been heavily criticized by Trudeau and the other premiers for travelling to meet the Orange Menace before his inauguration. Smith has spent two long years pandering to rural voters and failing to explain the benefits of her provincial pension idea, provincial police force notion and dismantling of Alberta’s behemoth health bureaucracy, AHS. Now, she stands accused by non-Albertans of weakening Canada’s hand in dealing with President Trump II.

After almost ten years of Justin Trudeau brutalizing Canada’s energy sector, with BC and Quebec being allowed to block pipelines that are federal jurisdiction, and Mark Carney, another carbon crusader, poised to take his place atop the Liberal Party, Smith’s reluctance to entrust Alberta’s fate to “Team Canada” is completely justified.

No other province has been mocked, sabotaged, beaten and milked as Alberta has by the Trudeaus, father and son. The amount of private investment chased away from Canada’s energy sector, by Junior Trudeau alone, is at least $150 Billion, as detailed in my Loathsome Lightweight essay.

For Alberta, the much greater risk than a Trump tariff aimed at Alberta oil, is a cynical response by Trudeau/Carney to some Trump tariff that offends Ontario or Quebec, where most of their Liberal Party’s remaining support resides.

Trudeau/Carney would like nothing better than to label Smith selfish, impose an export tax or embargo on Alberta oil and exploit the opportunity to campaign against “selfish, rich, carbon spewing Alberta” in the next election. They will probably also dig up the old Liberal chestnut that a Conservative Party win would put abortion rights at risk, because although untrue, that claim works every time with Ontario voters.

Carney, who has been advising the Liberal Party for almost 15 years and works pro bono as a United Nations dissuader of oil and gas investment, would jump at that chance.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, if you worry about the “Climate Emergency!”, or whatever its current brand name is, remember: It is the consumption of hydrocarbons that generates almost 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, not the production. The world needs oil and natural gas and will for many years to come.

Of course, Carney told Jon Stewart on American television that Canadian oil and gas companies need to “clean up” their production practices, which he says are the major source of emissions. Not true.

This deliberate Carney lie makes it clear that, under Carney, the infinitely cynical Liberal Party of Canada will ditch its unpopular consumer carbon tax and instead hammer Canada’s energy producers with a new tax. Although such a tax would be passed along to consumers, it would be less visible to voters, many of whom will be conned by the move and then blame energy companies when their bills rise.

Trudeau and Carney’s sabotage of and advocacy against Canada’s leading export industry make them unfit to lead this country. They are much more deserving of the “traitor” label than is Danielle Smith.

In the meantime, we should consider what Trump has already said, while we wait to see what he actually does. Trump has already voiced his objection to several major flaws in Canadian policy:

1. Border security- Trudeau deliberately left a hole in the Canada/USA border at Roxham Road in Quebec for several years and admitted over 50,000 “irregular” migrants, probably so that he could accuse his critics of racism. We lack credibility on border security.

2. Dairy Cartel- Trudeau and Freeland refused to change Canada’s indefensible “supply management” anti-competitive system when Trump raised it in 2018, because the Liberals favour Quebec dairy farmers over Canadian consumers. Canadians have long paid much more than necessary for dairy, because the cartel restricts competition. Enough, already.

3. Defense spending- Canada has cynically ridden on the coat tails of the US military for decades, egregiously underfunding Canada’s own military. Trudeau has been silent on this despite Trump raising it repeatedly, because Trudeau sees no votes in military spending. Canada’s military deserves better equipment and support in a more dangerous world.

Canadians need to resist the urge to react with anger or hurt feelings to Trump’s threats. He is obnoxious, but he makes some good points. For our own sake, we need to fix the many things Trudeau has wrecked or neglected and be vigilant that Carney doesn’t get the chance to do more of the same.