Conrad Black: Trump is defaming Canada

President Trump’s threat to impose 25 per cent tariffs on American imports from Canada is not appropriately answered with Justin Trudeau’s booster-ish nonsense about Team Canada. To judge from what the president published, his complaint is with drugs being illegally transmitted from this country to the United States, and 19,000 illegal entries of people from Canada in the last year. It is generally the task of the country that does not wish these imports and people to stop them at their own border. We’re not East Germany building walls to keep our people in, or Mexico, facilitating an outright invasion of the United States by millions of destitute migrants. Trump could not possibly be suggesting that the government of Canada approves or condones for an instant any trafficking of illicit drugs or violation of the rules of entry to any country. It is outrageous that we should be assimilated to Mexico in these matters.

 

The Mexican government and implicitly to some extent the outgoing U.S. administration also are complicit associates with possibly the most violent and barbarous crime gangs in the world, slave trafficking huge numbers of pitiful and desperate people and infiltrating across the U.S. southern border extremely dangerous quantities of fentanyl and other lethal drugs, often originating in China. The millions of Mexicans living in the U.S., including those who are illegally squatting in the country and being exploited by greedy employers, send between $60 and $120 billion of their earnings back to Mexico annually, relieving some of the pressure from the ravages of poverty in that country.

At the same time, Mexico has also been enticing American manufacturers to shut down their factories in the United States, relocate just inside the Mexican border, take advantage of low Mexican labour costs and special tax holidays and ship the products formerly made in the U.S. back into the U.S. along with the unemployment created in the U.S. by their relocation. The governments of Canada and its provinces do not engage in any comparable activities, and instead of being a Hooray Henry about Team Canada, Justin Trudeau should demand that the president-elect not defame Canada by likening its conduct in trade, investment, and immigration matters to that of Mexico. If we are in fact being negligent in processing undesirables making their way to the United States, of course we should stop immediately. If we owe the Americans a higher standard of care in these matters than we are showing, we should adjust our policy accordingly.

 

If, as I suspect, we’re being unjustly pilloried, the prime minister should make that point very forcefully and publicly and demand that President Trump withdraw his slur against Canada. We should also make it clear that we will impose similar tariffs on the U.S. and moderate the value of our currency so that the net effect is greater economic damage to the Americans than to us, while we use the trade agreement dispute resolution mechanisms against the U.S. We should have retaliated against Biden when he cancelled the XL Pipeline, and if this stands, we should retaliate forcefully. Canada is not a weak and defenseless country and should not act like one. Trump should be put on notice that it is no fault of Canada’s that the outgoing American administration threw open the border with Mexico to admit millions of illegal migrants, and Canada does not accept the right of the United States, as it finally deports many of these people, to put us under threat of suddenly having masses of unwanted and often lawless peasants that the U.S. government permitted to enter that country being effectively encouraged by Washington to swarm our border. Donald Trump is not hostile to Canada and it is not easily discernible what his motive is in associating us with the intolerable conduct of Mexico.

 

Another foreign policy shambles, and one that is entirely of the prime minister’s own making but does not particularly intrude upon Canadian-American relations, is this country’s agreement to comply with the International Criminal Court’s preposterous indictment of the Israeli prime minister and former defense minister as war criminals, along with dead Hamas officials, as if the indictment of corpses was a plausible judicial activity. For diversity and inclusion why doesn’t the ICC indict Hitler, Joan the Mad, Vlad the Impaler, Genghis Khan, Xerxes, and Nebuchadnezzar as well? The International Criminal Court has no standing whatsoever and was patched together by an agreement in Rome outside the ambit of any other international organization and is essentially a playpen for frolicsome Third World countries hurling polemical thunderbolts at more advanced countries and strutting about in the raiment of the righteous and the downtrodden. Israel, as the indictment of the dead Hamas leaders implies, responded to an act of war that was intended to provoke a war by Israel against Hamas. It is a well-recognized right in international law that the countries that are the subject of aggressive war have an absolute right to resist. This right is not constrained to be proportionate: nobody told Churchill and Roosevelt and Mackenzie King in 1943 that we had killed quite enough Germans and Japanese and should stop the war.

These inane calls by Justin Trudeau, President Macron of France, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom and other snivelling nincompoops on this issue for an immediate ceasefire and Israeli evacuation of Gaza, if heeded, would only facilitate the rearming of Hamas, coercive recruitment to rebuild their terrorist personnel that has been reduced by over 80 per cent by Israel, and encourage a revival of this endless genocidal campaign against Israel, by those armed by the totalitarian Iranian pseudo-theocracy. In these circumstances, a ceasefire would be a promotion of barbarous terrorism against the state of Israel, which is defending civilization and is being harassed and sniggered at by its natural allies who should be supporting it unambiguously.

Canada’s role on this subject has been an utter disgrace. One of the greatest addresses ever delivered by a Canadian Prime Minister was by Stephen Harper to the Israeli Knesset in 2014 when he concluded: “Through fire and water we will be with you.” He spoke from the conscience of Canada and in the Canadian national interest; his successor has dishonoured this country.

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