EDITORIAL: Federal blunder makes it harder to fight tariffs

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The fact that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail best describes the Trudeau government’s response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war against Canada.

Since the only weapon we have is counter-tariffs, of course we must use them, while recognizing that a long tariff war will damage us far more than the U.S. because of our much smaller economy.

We now know that in the six weeks since Trump became president, the endless visits to the U.S. by the prime minister, cabinet ministers, premiers and government officials to enlist potential American allies on our behalf to get Trump to see reason have failed.

Given that Trump is denouncing trade deals he approved under the Canada, U.S. Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) he signed as president in January 2020 — and which he praised at the time as great deals for America — it’s impossible to know what will satisfy him and he isn’t saying.

We do, however, know that what the Trudeau government did wrong over its decade in power and what has put us in the worst possible position today, was its failure to pursue and develop international trade markets to sell our goods and services globally, most crucially the sale of our vast oil and natural gas resources to an energy hungry world.

The fact that the U.S. buys almost all of our oil exports and 45% of our natural gas exports at huge discounts, because its our only major customer, makes us a sitting duck in Trump’s tariff war.

The main reason for this has been the Trudeau government’s obsession with curtailing the expansion of Canada’s oil and gas sector because of its radical climate change agenda.

While the Trudeau government boasts about having saved the construction of one pipeline — TMX — to get Canada’s oil to tidewater and the start-up of one LNG plant to do the same for liquified natural gas later this year, the Americans have been building enough new oil and gas pipelines to, as then president Barack Obama put it in 2012, more than encircle the earth.

A tariff war with Trump is bad enough. Fighting it with one hand tied behind our backs — because we tied it ourselves — is even worse.