TORONTO – For eight months Donald Trump has been kicked around by mainstream media – here, there and everywhere. There has been so shortage of diatribes, warranted or not as he slowly but surely is beating back the seemingly unstoppable counter culture movement of this decade. In the process, he has given life to a methodology in decision-making that harkens back to a rationality that questions the wisdom of “change for the sake of change”.
Like him or not, Trump has re-established the primacy of the USA in the world order. At the risk of appearing parochial and disinterested in issues that should be of concern to us all as Canadians, the USA has sidelined us from matters of international economic consequences, of our sovereign approaches to “development” and military impact in the realm of peace and security.
His Ambassador to Canada has as much as said “you have overplayed your hand, and we’ll get to you when we get to you” on tariffs and on Defense spending. Meanwhile, Canada will be invited only as a part of a larger invitation… that does not include China, a country we appear determined to push away.
The USA has structured a meeting with Russia to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Part two of that encounter resumes with NATO partners and Ukraine convening for “consultation” before the next Putin-Trump discussions on how and when stability will be returned (and defined) in the area. Unless we were not paying attention, the price of membership expressed in terms of military expenditures as a percentage of GDP rose from 2% to 5%. For Canada, the effective change has gone from 1.4% to 5% a three hundred and fifty percent increase. A brutal poker game consequence is that “if you do not pay, you do not play.” We are there to listen.
The other “partners” around the table collectively provide us with a commercial market value of about 25% value represented by two-way commerce with the USA. Europeans have not been insensitive to their own self interests, and other nations, emerging and not, are no less pragmatic. Last week Canadians (and those partners) “learned” that 85% of their products (later revised to 95% by Canadian officials) are effectively tariff free. Not many European nations will “feel our pain”.
Today, in this context, voters in the Alberta riding of Battle River – Crowfoot will decide whether the [current] leader of the Official Opposition will earn the right to go to Ottawa to address some of these issues or not. The two hundred + ideologues, who claim to defend democratic principles by placing their name on a ballot, may well prove their point.
I hope they will not be contributing Canada’s fading towards irrelevance.
