This week the Canadian province of Ontario sponsored a paid ad intended for a U.S. audience. It had a message:
Tariffs are bad. They cost jobs. Your own Republican president Reagan said so.
A year ago Ontario sent a love note to the newly-elected Trump in the form of a different paid aid. That one said in effect, "We are your friend and ally; let's get along."
Trump responded with a punitive tariff.
Trump sends mixed messages of courtship and threat to Canada. Trump sees Canada as an underdeveloped acquisition property. He tells them to get smart and join the U.S., or else face bad consequences. This inspires Canadian nationalism. This changes the incentives for Canadian politicians at the national and provincial levels. They must be the strong protector of Canadian sovereignty that most Canadian voters demand.
College classmate Sandford Borins is Canadian. He is a professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career. He maintains his own website where he shares his thoughts on politics in Canada: https://sandfordborins.com. This is an advance version of what he will be publishing there shortly.
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Guest Post by Sandford Borins
A Temper Tantrum or a Deadlock?
In response to the Government of Ontario’s ad quoting a Ronald Reagan speech criticizing tariffs, Donald Trump announced that “ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.” Would a government really terminate trade negotiations with its second-largest trading partner because its head of state doesn’t like an ad campaign run by a subnational jurisdiction? If Donald Trump is president, it might well. But Canadians are treating Trump’s pronouncement as a late-night temper tantrum.
Events don’t happen out of thin air, and it is useful to understand how the Ontario government came to launch this ad campaign, and why it drew such a furious reaction. The Progressive Conservative Party, headed by Doug Ford, has been in power since 2018. One of its standard practices has been using the government budget to pay for advocacy (one might also say partisan) advertising, mainly on mainstream media. Much of it has been directed at Ontarians, for example telling us how well our economy, and thus the Ford Government, is doing. Earlier this year, when Trump started referring to Canada as the 51st state, the Ford Government ran an upbeat advertising campaign in the U.S reminding Americans of their long-standing economic partnership with Ontario.
Click: America's "ally to the north"
The latest ad, which was Premier Ford’s brainchild, cites Republican icon Ronald Reagan’s strong and articulate support for free trade and opposition to tariffs.
Click: CBC shows the "Ronald Reagan" ad
Furthermore, Doug Ford has defined his political brand as “captain Canada,” a tough-talking patriot who can stand up to the Americans. He won re-election last February by wearing a “Canada is not for sale” cap and defining the key issue as who can best protect Ontario. The Ford Government was also the first to pull American products from the shelves in the provincial liquor stores.
Donald Trump’s temper tantrum is easy to understand. The Ontario ads use the voice and words of an American icon against him and attempt to mobilize the traditional Republican Party against the MAGA Party. While foreign governments lobby the U.S. through diplomatic channels, only one foreign government – a subnational one, no less – has gone public through mainstream media advertising. The ads, often run during the baseball playoffs, are being noticed. This is a shocking contrast to the dominance Trump craves and obsequiousness he demands in Oval Office visits by foreign leaders.
Trump had his tantrum. The Ford Government will pull the ads, but only after the first two World Series games. Trump will call it a win, but his temper tantrum can only increase the attention paid to the ads, a win for Ford. Negotiations will resume.
The most difficult aspect of the negotiations concerns the Canadian auto sector, which is located entirely in Ontario. The federal and Ontario governments are clinging to the vision embodied in trade agreements for the last 60 years of an integrated U.S.-Canada auto industry with parts and assembled vehicles moving freely across the border in a balanced flow. However, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have continually said that the auto assembly is a strategic sector, and Canada should not be exporting cars to the U.S., period. Their threats and the imposition of tariffs on the auto sector have already begun to have an impact. Last week Stellantis said it would move production of a new Jeep model from suburban Toronto to Illinois (3000 jobs) and GM said it would stop production of its electric van in southwest Ontario (1200 jobs). The government of Canada is treating these moves as a betrayal of promises Stellantis and GM made in return for government support. It is responding by threatening to sue the manufacturers and imposing quotas and tariffs on autos they export from the U.S. to Canada.
As populists, Donald Trump and Doug Ford have a common vision. They see manufacturing as essential to the economy and blue-collar, traditionally male, jobs in manufacturing as essential to their political success. This is win-lose, not win-win. Negotiations will resume now that Doug Ford has once again flipped the bird at Donald Trump and Donald Trump has had his temper tantrum. But with these irreconcilable differences it is unlikely that the negotiations will get to "yes" anytime soon.
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7 comments:
Secondary to his lawlessness, I hate Trump’s treatment of Canada, our best friend. It means NO ONE should trust us, not even our own citizens. It’s the lack of trust that hurts the most. Health care, the courts, the military that I used to believe in, but now I must doubt.
Please provide current or the most recent statistics for the "traditionally male" jobs in manufacturing statement, particularly in the auto industry. This is 2025 and sex discrimination has been illegal for years. What is going on? The president of GM is a female engineer, I believe.
Clarification: Mary Barra has been the CEO of GM since 2014.
She is a baby boomer born in December 1961. She has a BS in electrical engineering and an MBA from Stanford.
Canada played the ad, airing on Fox Sports, between the 7th and 8th innings of World Series game one. The opening was a respectful performance of both countries' national anthems.
You have to have tariffs when the Canadian government subsidizes their timber industry at the detriment of the American timber industry, and Canada imposes huge tariffs on American products.
Assembly lines are increasingly automated utilizing robots. Care and “feeding” of robots is not a burly manly job. Knowledge of program control and industrial control systems are increasingly unisex positions. The number and strength of the workforce is radically reduced from Henry Ford’s assembly line. Furthermore, the automobile companies are no longer vertically integrated, rather they rely on Just in Time (JIT) supply systems and global logistics for parts and supplies. Trump is a Luddite if he thinks cutting off trade with Canada will up jobs numbers in the US.
Moving production from Canada to America will increase American jobs.
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