President-elect Donald Trump speaks to supporters at an election night gathering in West Palm Beach early on Nov. 6.HAIYUN JIANG/The New York Times News Service
Now that the people of the United States have elected a fascist to lead them – a felon to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” an insurrectionist to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” a rapist, a racist, and a narcissistic psychopath to hold the country’s highest position of honour – the question on everyone’s lips, naturally, is: what does it mean for Canada?
Everything, would be the short answer. Living next to the United States has famously been compared to sleeping with an elephant, but a rogue elephant is something else again. Everything that makes this country what it is, everything that underpins our way of life, is predicated on the existence of a stable, united democracy to our south: a country we can rely on to come to our defence when needed, at the least a country we do not have to be defended from.
None of that can be said with certainty any more. In the longer term, we will have to wrestle with what it means to live next to a democracy that no longer appears to want to be a democracy, whose capacity to reason together is so broken that one-half of it would wish to do such harm to itself just to get at the other half.
But in the short run the return of Donald Trump to office, in every respect more unhinged and less restrained than in his first term, implies a series of quite profound policy challenges. In no particular order, they are:
The border. Mr. Trump does not believe in many things he has not been paid to believe. But if there is one thing he believes in to the depths of his soul, it is the necessity of sending the police and military to round up millions of immigrants and herd them into prison camps, en route to deporting them to countries which may or may not agree to take them.
The attempt is almost certain to run into massive resistance, and in the ensuing chaos many of those desperate millions, seeking to avoid the camps, may decide to flee northward. Whatever our leaders may say, we have neither the capacity to accommodate them all nor to refuse them – not with a nearly 9,000-kilometre border we have never had to defend until now.
Trade. Mr. Trump has vowed to impose tariffs of 10 to 20 per cent on all U.S. imports, across the board. There has been no mention of excluding Canada, but even if he were inclined to abide by the legally binding terms of NAFTA (as I will call it till I die), he will once again demand a series of demented, unworkable changes to it. We can try as we may to negotiate with him, but dependent as we are on U.S. trade, and impervious as he is to any reasoned argument, we are more or less in the laps of the gods.
The economy. Trade aside, Mr. Trump’s economic policies will present both positive and negative challenges to Canadian policy makers. On the one hand, the deep cuts in corporate income tax rates that are most likely coming will do enormous harm to Canada’s ability, already on life support, to attract investment. On the other hand, the contraction of the U.S. economy that will follow – after the mass deportations, after the tariffs, after Mr. Trump has ordered the Federal Reserve to inflate its way out of it – will cause the usual damage to our own. Nothing in the rickety structure of public and private debt we have erected is designed to absorb this kind of shock.
Defence. It isn’t just that Mr. Trump will demand that Canada make huge increases in defence spending: all of our NATO partners have demanded the same. But as insoluble as that dilemma appears – the money has been spent on other things already, and no party is prepared to pay for higher defence spending with higher taxes – the larger problem is that Mr. Trump is on a mission to destroy NATO: if not to pull America out of it, then to eviscerate its core principle of collective defence. What is our Plan B, as a country with no capacity to defend itself otherwise?
Oh God, I’m nearly at the end and I haven’t begun: there’s also the sudden obsolescence of much of our climate change strategy; the likelihood of another global pandemic, only this time with RFK Jr. as health secretary; the hazards of sharing intelligence with a president who will most likely pass it to Vladimir Putin; and – a tail risk, but not inconceivable – the complete breakdown of civil order in the United States.
All of which leaves me with just one question: Can we join Europe?