Sorry, I mean Canada. Friedman has been dead for 24 years, and in any case how do you annex a scholar? Canada, however, is still alive, and she is a burr under Donald’s blanket.
Hardly a day goes by that Trump doesn’t fulminate against Canada. That northern neighbour should become the 51st state, he keeps saying. We can do it the easy way or the hard way.
But to get Canada he still has to go through Friedman first, who puts up a formidable bastion of economic logic, with Adam Smith bringing up the rear. You see, Trump justifies his offer (threat?) by appealing to economics, where he runs headlong into the ramparts of wisdom erected by Messrs Friedman, Smith and a regiment of economists in between.
“It’s not fair that we should have a $200 billion or $250 billion deficit [with Canada],” Trump recently complained to the World Economic Forum in Davos. And the intervening fortnight failed to derail his train of thought.
The other day, the president clarified his meaning: “It’s too much. Why are we paying $200 billion a year essentially in subsidy to Canada?” was how Trump posed a rhetorical problem, for which he offered an instant solution: “Now, if they’re our 51st state, I don’t mind doing it.”
The other 50 states might though. As they look wistfully at that eye-watering promise, I can hear them mutter, “And what am I, chopped liver?” California, whose population is almost the same as Canada’s, only rates $162.9 billion in federal subsidies, and the other states much less. And that upstart will get $200 billion? No way, Jose.
Comparing the two numerals Trump mentioned a fortnight apart, he clearly confounds a trade deficit with a subsidy, at which point Messrs Friedman and Smith are up in arms. Eschewing the latter’s 18th century idiom, the former explains the issue in simple words even Trump ought to be able to understand:
“The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is a cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so that we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.”
And, “a sustained trade deficit is the best possible outcome… we get physical goods like cars, flash memory, oil, computers, toys and all sorts of other goods for cheaply produced paper known as currency.”
In other words, rather than being a subsidy the US pays Canada, the trade deficit actually represents a net gain. This is what Americans would call Economics 101, a beginner’s course in that discipline, as taught by conservative scholars. But before Trump takes it, a refresher course in arithmetic would come in handy.
In 2024 America’s trade deficit with Canada was about US$45 billion, less in 2023. That means the number Trump cited, $200 billion a year, is off by an order of magnitude. Someone should remind the president how to do simple sums.
Sorry for adopting this mocking tone, but Trump does encourage it by his logorrhoea. He doesn’t seem to hold his statements down to any tests of logic and veracity.
Trump is often described as a populist, but there’s populism and populism.
It’s one thing to appeal to the people’s common sense over the head of bureaucratic institutions resisting sound ideas, quite another to mouth any gibberish just because the masses might jump up and salute. I’m rather suspicious even of the first kind, whereas the second drives me up the wall and through the ceiling.
Populism based on fallacies is an attempt to dupe the masses, in this case with waffle about protecting American jobs and hence the good old US of A against the grubby fingers of variously hairy foreigners who talk funny — or not, as is the case with Canada.
Has Trump given any thought to the logistics of making Canada a state in the USA? Canada consists of 10 provinces, each fiercely independent and mistrustful of central authority. At least one of those provinces, the Francophone Quebec, has a virile strain of separatism, often expressed by militant means.
Does he think people in Alberta or Quebec will be more receptive to power emanating from Washington DC than from Ottawa? I rather doubt it.
Interestingly, I’ve read all sorts of objections to Trump’s idea except the one that came to my mind first: Canada is part of the British Commonwealth. Her head of state is King Charles III. Her top barristers are called KCs. Her national police force is called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Gendarmerie royale du Canada in French).
Trump often professes undying love for our royal family, including the reigning monarch. Has he considered the constitutional implications of his pet idea? Or does he wish to convert America First into America by Her Lonesome?
I don’t know how to put this without sounding condescending, but it strikes me that Trump sees annexing Canada as a simple real estate transaction, sort of like Penelope and me buying the plot adjacent to ours in France, to make sure no one builds on it.
Or does he see himself as a latter-day Col. Benedict Arnold who in 1775, during the early days of the Revolutionary War, led an expedition into Canada, presaging Trump’s project by 250 years?
Trump has so far forsworn a military invasion, but if he still harbours such notions, he should read up on that expedition and find out why it came to a sticky end. As for Col. Arnold, he later secured a rather questionable place in American history, but let’s not push the parallel too far.
President Trump is doing many wonderful things in America, the kind that make every British conservative sigh enviously. “If only we had…” is the mantra one hears from all and sundry.
Yet the president clearly forgets that it’s not just ships that can be sunk by loose lips. A leader’s pronouncements can sometimes go so far as to demand actions, and if the pronouncements are foolhardy, the action may be ruinous.
If Trump isn’t careful, he can turn America into a pariah, or else a resentful bully. He shouldn’t try so hard to make America great again – she is great already. Most of Trump’s policies can make her even greater, and the rest of the free world more secure.
But some of the things he says, does or threatens to do are fool’s gold or potentially petards to hoist America and the rest of us with. His designs on Canada are among those.
Trump could do worse than remind himself of the prayer originally composed by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the early 1930s: “O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”
Wayne Gretzky would definitely have been a much better governor of Canada than Trudeau despised by many.