Why Trudeau’s economic policies are disastrous in the era of Trump

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Gwyn Morgan is the retired founder and CEO of Encana Corp. He has been a director of five global corporations.

Donald Trump's election victory set off a political earthquake that has deeply shaken Americans. Earthquakes are often followed by devastating tsunamis generating huge waves travelling far beyond the quake's epicentre. Yet, even as those "Trump-quake" waves threaten to sink our economic ship, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems determined to maintain his pre-quake course.

Here are some of the dangerous shoals that lurk along that perilous route:

• Mr. Trump is anti-free trade. His advisers have said that Canada isn’t their target. Even if that’s true, the recent decision by General Motors to move 600 jobs to Mexico demonstrates that Mr. Trump’s protectionist bullets can ricochet across our border. Given his bombastic threats, there’s no way auto makers will move jobs from the United States to Mexico, so their only option is to move those jobs from Canada.

Making matters worse is the new administration's plan to exempt export revenues from income tax, while disallowing imported goods as a tax expense. These damaging actions are occurring even before NAFTA comes up for reconsideration. Mr. Trudeau is pivoting toward China as an offset to Mr. Trump protectionism. But a free-trade agreement with corrupt and opportunistic China would be strategically and ethically unwise.

And given Mr. Trump's animosity toward China, free-trade discussions with China are sure to damage Canada's negotiations with his administration.

• Mr. Trump plans to slash corporate tax rates to 15 per cent, erasing Canada’s previous advantage that saw U.S. companies changing domicile through reverse takeovers. Adding Mr. Trudeau’s carbon tax tips the tax scales in the United States’ favour. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s “Buy America First” policies will be a strong deterrent to creating or expanding operations in Canada that target U.S. markets. All this bad news comes when Canadian business investment has already been dropping for eight consecutive quarters.
• Mr. Trump plans to reduce the top federal personal income-tax rate to 33 per cent, while Mr. Trudeau’s increases on higher-income earners raised the top rate to 33 per cent. Sounds like a tie, until state and provincial taxes are considered. Seven U.S. states have no income tax and, with the exception of California, taxes in those that do are much lower, resulting in combined rates of between 33 per cent and 42 per cent, compared with Canada’s 49 per cent to 54 per cent. This presents a serious impediment to attracting and retaining skilled, highly mobile workers.
• Mr. Trump wants to encourage more oil production to create jobs and reduce imports. Mr. Trudeau recently told Albertans he wants to “phase out” production from the oil sands. Perhaps he’s unaware of oil’s crucial importance to Canada’s balance of trade, generating as much net-export revenue as the next nine of our top-10 exports combined.
• Mr. Trump wants to streamline the regulatory process for new oil pipelines. Trudeau is contemplating a new regulatory process featuring even more extensive “social licence” consultations that have already seen economically important projects stymied for many years.
• Mr. Trump wants more natural gas hydraulic fracturing, a key contributor to jobs in some of the country’s poorest states. Meanwhile, Canada’s federal government continues to hand some $18-billion a year in equalization payments to the four so-called “have not” provinces that have banned fracking. Perversely, the funding of those payments has come almost entirely from tax revenues of oil and gas producing provinces.

But now the economies of those provinces, and the federal tax revenues from them, have collapsed. Under the three-year rolling average calculation of the equalization formula, payments to the four frack-shunning provinces will start a precipitous drop at the same time as Trump-quake takes its toll on Canada's economy.

• Mr. Trump supports coal-fired power generation. Mr. Trudeau wants to replace coal-fired power with much more costly “green” alternatives. That will add more challenges to the struggling economies of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which don’t have hydro-power alternatives.

The federal government recently released a study projecting three decades of continuous budget deficits that would double national debt to an incredible $1.5-trillion. That's an unconscionable legacy to leave on the shoulders of young Canadians. And the federal study didn't consider the above Trump-quake impacts that are certain to make that debt scenario even worse.

I'm one of many Canadians who detest Donald Trump as an uber-egotistical, narcissistic, lying bully with ethical values vastly below those of our Prime Minister. But the reality is that virtually all of Mr. Trudeau's policies are economically suicidal in the face of Mr. Trump's avowed actions. Clinging to those policies in the face of Trump-quake could prove to be the biggest mistake made by any prime minister in Canadian history.