Gary Mar is a guy who knows a thing or two about trade between the United States and Canada. As the president of the Canada West Foundation and a former minister dealing with trade for the Province of Alberta, he’s seen a lot — but nothing quite like the current asymmetrical trade dispute between the two nations.
America and our neighbors to the north face a Sept. 7 deadline to reach a new trade deal, or see crippling sanctions go into effect on both sides. But the citizens of each country are not treating this looming crisis the same way at all.
“The 49th parallel [is] like a two-way mirror,” Mar told Fox News Digital this week. “Canadians look through it, and they see Americans. But Americans look at the same mirror, and they see themselves. So we get much more information on what’s going on in the United States than Americans ever get… with respect to Canada.”
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This is a fair assessment. For example, most Americans likely do not know that, since President Donald Trump took office, Canadian grocery stores and pharmacies have aggressive signs pointing out what products were made in America, to boycott them. Nothing remotely like that has happened stateside.
Likewise, in the Great White North, these trade flare-ups are by far the biggest story in the country, fueled by a state-run media that might even hate Trump more than our domestic liberal media does. In America, this story is lucky to hit the C-slot of a cable news show.
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The point is that, from the perspective of public opinion intensity, there is just no comparison. Canadians think they are in an existential fight, while most Americans barely know it is happening.
This asymmetry also applies to the political realities facing Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Trump faces some Democrats all but siding with Canada. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, for instance, said this week, “If you start a trade war with Canada, you are the a——.”
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I asked Mar if this kind of thing could happen in Canada — could conservative politicians like Pierre Poilievre come out in favor of Trump — and not surprisingly, the answer is no.
Speaking on the Canadian right, Mar said, “They can be critical of how the liberal government is conducting their relationship with the U.S., but it would be very difficult for the conservatives to say, ‘We agree with Donald Trump.’”
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It is reasonable to assume that this rally-round-the-maple-leaf moment of unity in Canada accrues to Carney’s benefit in negotiations, and Mar acknowledges that. As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested, Carney may be trying to game the U.S. midterms by punishing swing states like Maine and Michigan economically via tariffs.
But not everything is slanted against Trump in these negotiations. The biggest asymmetry of all is the sheer power of the U.S. economy, and Mar had some sobering words for Canada regarding an all-out tariff battle.
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“What I see now is a discussion of who can inflict more pain on the other side,” Mar said. “The difficulty for Canada getting involved in a tit-for-tat, or a stick-swinging incident — as we might use the metaphor from hockey — is that [the] U.S. has more sticks to swing. They’ve got bigger sticks to swing, and their sticks have spikes on them.”
That about sums it up.
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Both Canada and the United States have good reasons to just make a deal by the upcoming deadline and put this all behind them, at least for now. But with each side blaming the other for the breakdown in talks, it may be too heavy a lift.
If talks fail, the real question won’t be how it impacts the midterms, but rather, whether it leads Canada to lean more heavily on other partners such as China, and whether Venezuela can actually be stable enough to attract oil companies away from friendly, old Canada.
Trump has a few more years to try to perfect his trade regime with our northern neighbor, and there will be bumps along the road. Americans should remember that for us, the trade battle may be a matter of minor national pride, but in Canada, it is absolutely life and death.
How that asymmetry finds its solution, may well tell the tale of the conflict’s end.
