BONOKOSKI: Liberals foolishly poke the bully in U.S. trade snit
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The Trudeau Liberals, afraid that big, bad, bully Donald Trump will demand all the NAFTA candy or walk out, have done what cry babies are known to do when fearful of not getting their way.
They’ve run to mommy.
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Instead of riding out the NAFTA negotiations process, they’ve preemptively gone whining to the World Trade Organization with a document citing some 200 cases, many dating back two decades, where the biggest kid in the room, the United States, got in bully-boy trade disputes with dozens of other countries.
Apparently, they see no danger in this.
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If their end game is to convince the Trump Administration it had best play fairer, the Trudeau crowd missed the mark entirely.
The United States, especially Trump himself, does not take kindly to either childish threats or behind-the-back shenanigans.
The United States’ lead NAFTA negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, was understated in his response to Canada running to the WTO.
He called it “ill-advised.”
Now, we all know what happens when a bully is provoked, and it usually doesn’t end well.
So, what did the Liberals hope to achieve?
We’ve heard the Trudeau Liberals complain consistently about being accused by the U.S. of “dumping”— as in Canada exporting goods into the U.S. with artificially low prices because of home-front subsidization.
Think of softwood lumber, for example, which is primarily harvested from Crown land with arguably lower costs and taxation associated with ownership, and jetliners from Bombardier, a Quebec-based company that would have been bankrupt long ago if not for government largesse.
And, most recently, newsprint — a product which, like softwood lumber, is sourced primarily from Canada’s abundance of Crown land.
The end result, much to Canada’s dislike, has the Americans applying a tit-for-tat of high tariffs on those products.
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If the United States knows how to play anything, particularly with Trump’s Protect America agenda, it’s how to muck it up in the corners and make the game even harder to win.
The U.S. doesn’t think much of the WTO, for example, which is no surprise to anyone in the know, and it has used its economic might to keep vacancies open in the WTO’s appeal court, thereby limiting the agency’s ability to hear the squabbles and deliver decisions.
It’s the next best thing to having a veto.
Why the Trudeau Liberals think running to the WTO with a pile of trade complaints against the United States involving piles of other countries is therefore a head-scratcher.
It’s not exactly the friendliest of gestures.
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s lead NAFTA negotiator, has been avoiding direct comment about the possibility of the United States pulling out of the NAFTA talks, what with Trump being Trump and his mouth being unwilling to wait until his brain clicks in.
“Shithole countries” is just the latest example.
But, when Canada first went running to the WTO back in January with its long list of complaints, the United States warned Canada straight up to be careful what it wished for.
Should the WTO rule in Canada’s favour, the quid-pro-quo from the United States would likely bring about the halt of Canadian imports of various Canadian products, for example, and the beginning of replacing them with goods emanating from China.
This makes it even more curious, of course, since Canada’s complaint to the WTO also recounts how the U.S. placed high tariffs on Chinese products that it believed were subsidized by the country’s Communist government and therefore artificially under-valued.
It is impossible to see Canada’s winning this without losing.
Poking the bully by running to mommy is never the wisest of tactics.
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