Trump is starting a trade war. If he wants to absorb Canada, what comes next will be worse
Experts say annexing by 'economic force' involves more than just tariffs
The first shots of the trade war between the United States and Canada have been fired.
Whether it escalates beyond the planned 25 per cent tariff into a wider economic war depends upon how genuinely serious President Donald Trump is about annexation, experts say.
Tariffs are one thing. While painful and destructive, experts agree duties alone would not crush the Canadian economy, nor the political establishment, into submission.
Prior to his inauguration, Trump threatened to use "economic force" to compel Canada to become the 51st state in the union.
That would require a whole different level of coercion than what was unleashed Saturday — the kind usually reserved for America's enemies, as opposed to allies.
What does a full-blown economic war look like? Think sanctions, import and export restrictions, trade embargoes, theft of intellectual property.
While dismissing the impact of tariffs on American consumers, Trump made clear recently that he believes the U.S. can do without Canadian goods, including cars and milk.
He said if "you get rid of that artificially drawn line," referring to the border, it would "also be much better for [U.S.] national security."
It is the kind of shocking rhetoric that chills national security experts and historians to the bone, especially the ones steeped in the long-held American belief of that nation's exceptionalism — a concept known as Manifest Destiny.
On Jan. 27, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) at the University of Waterloo launched the Canada at Economic War project, which aims to identify and assess the kinds of threats the country faces short of a shooting war.
Raquel Garbers, a visiting fellow at CIGI from the Department of National Defence, said in general, economic attacks are the essential first phase of full-scale war between nations and Canada is a high-value target because of its mineral wealth, technological know-how and advanced economy.
Most of the project's research has thus far focused on the often under-the-radar economic coercion China has directed toward Canada.
But its findings could also serve as a warning bell for the kind of screws the Trump administration could tighten if it was going to try to absorb Canada.
Garbers said we need to pay attention and watch for signs of escalation.
"There is no question that we're being bullied" by the United States, she said. "Is it economic warfare? My answer to that is: not yet. But that's not to say it can't get there."
In contrast, Garbers said China's ability to carry out economic warfare is made possible in part by laws that force the entire society to effectively act as an arm of the Chinese military and intelligence services.
"I can't imagine that we would see that happening in the United States," she said.
The Trump administration, by its own admission, sees tariffs and a trade war as enriching the U.S. treasury and a possible way to fully restructure the tax system in that country. But Garbers said Canada finds itself in the crosshairs because of its current, relative economic, political and social weaknesses.
High taxation, lacklustre productivity, decline in affordability, the current transition in federal leadership and challenges integrating the flood of new immigrants have not gone unnoticed in Washington.
"Trump, like all bullies, can smell weakness. And the sad story is that we are weak, right?" Garbers said.
But is there something deeper at work than the straightforward corporate-raider-on-steroids mentality that Trump embodies?
On Friday, he told reporters that America's golden economic age encompassed the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, up to the First World War — a time when corporate monopolies held sway and the income inequality gap was wide.
Trump invokes 'Manifest Destiny' during inauguration
In his recent inauguration speech, Trump invoked Manifest Destiny to outline his vision for America's expansionist aims — a future that included integrating Canada, acquiring Greenland and reclaiming the Panama Canal.
The concept — that the United States is exceptional and God wanted the boundary of its dominion expanded — has been around in one form or another since the Revolutionary War, said Kevin Brushett, a professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada.
The common language (for the most part), the cross-border family ties, the shared history and in some cases similar values create a blindspot for Americans, something Brushett believes Canadians don't fully appreciate.
"I'd say Americans kind of see the annexation of Canada as almost a natural kind of thing and something that doesn't necessarily need a war to occur," he said.
Similarly Brushett said Canadians don't appreciate the extent to which the threat of American annexation drove the politics and policy decisions in the mid and latter half of the 19th century. The fear came in waves after the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845 and then the 1848 Mexican-American War.
The end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 reignited those fears. The following year, Irish rebels known as the Fenians actually invaded the self-governing Canadian colonies at two points.
At the same time, a bill to annex Canada was introduced in the U.S. Congress.
Still reeling from the carnage of the Civil War with the American South in ruins, Brushett said there was no appetite to expand northward and the bill died without ever coming to a vote.
The die was cast, though, and Canadian political leaders opted for Confederation in 1867.
In the aftermath of the political union, border fortifications — built by the British — were improved and a large militia was created.
By 1870, the Canadian government had purchased Rupert's Land and the Northwest Territories from the Hudson's Bay Company, expanding the new country's borders west and pre-empting a U.S. claim to the region.
Manitoba was created in 1870 and British Columbia was added as a province in 1871.
A decade later, the Canadian-Pacific Railway was built.
All of it, in one way or another, was a response to the Manifest Destiny movement in the U.S., said Brushett.
The reflex response of most Canadians to Trump's 51st state musings has been to dismiss them — or even laugh at them.
"It's hard to get a sense of how serious Americans are about this, but I do think that there is an element here, that they think that Canadians are weak, that we won't necessarily fight back," he said.
Federal cabinet ministers have been hammering on doors in Washington trying to convince lawmakers of the cost of tariffs to the economies of both countries.
Brushett said that narrative should be expanded to counter the annexation rhetoric and the point should be made to lawmakers and the U.S. public that absorbing Canada is more trouble than it's worth. Integration would be a costly exercise for American taxpayers.
"I think reminding them of those costs would be a good political strategy on our part," Brushett said.
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