Trump wants to go back to 1913. Canadians and Americans will suffer the consequences

Canadians have taken Donald Trump's threats of trade action — now realized — very personally. Understandably and justifiably so.

But the American president's treatment of Ukraine — not to mention his administration's larger withholding of foreign aid — demonstrates that Canada is far from alone. This United States administration is not concerned much with the welfare of other nations or the people who live there.

"So today the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time they're talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator," Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday, sounding newly unencumbered in his final days as prime minister.

"Make that make sense."

Speaking directly to "Donald," the prime minister said he agreed with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal when it wrote recently that the president's decision to launch a trade war with Canada and Mexico was "dumb." 

In fact, the Journal called it the "dumbest trade war in history." But however dumb, it is still now real. 

Going back to November, the official American explanation for tariffs has involved fentanyl, the deadly drug that has killed thousands of people on both sides of the border.

All leaders of all nations should want to do something to combat that scourge. But the notion that the flow of illegal fentanyl across the U.S. border with Canada could somehow justify punitive tariffs on Canadian imports was always flimsy, at best.

Seizures of fentanyl attributed to the northern border by U.S. customs represented 0.08 per cent of all fentanyl seized by American officials in the last fiscal year. Subsequent reporting by the Globe and Mail has shown that even those figures might overstate the problem — at least a third of the 43 pounds of fentanyl attributed to the "northern border" last year did not actually originate in Canada.

Even still, federal and provincial governments made what can only be described as a good-faith effort to respond to Trump's publicly stated reason for threatening tariffs. Resources were marshalled and dispatched. At the behest of the Americans, drug cartels were formally listed as terrorist groups. A "fentanyl czar" was appointed. 

It transparently didn't matter — even as some U.S. officials continued to insist this week that the tariffs on Canada and Mexico were about fentanyl.

"I think in what President Trump said yesterday, that there is nothing Canada or Mexico can do to avoid these tariffs, underlines very clearly what I think a lot of us have suspected for a long time — that these tariffs are not specifically about fentanyl, even though that is the legal justification he must use to actually move forward with these tariffs," Trudeau said on Tuesday.

So what does Trump want?

"We have to fold back on the one thing he has said repeatedly, that what he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that'll make it easier to annex us," Trudeau said.