Kyle Sammin: Trump blames Canada

We all know, here in 2025, that the political consensus in favor of free trade that held sway for decades has collapsed. Tariffs are back on the menu, and many political observers — myself included — see them as a healthy and reasonable reaction to the longstanding imbalance with Communist China. That’s even more true now that China and the free world are now fully engaged in the Second Cold War.

So when Trump took office two months ago (yes, it’s only been two months) we should not have been surprised that he used tariffs both to achieve trade protection and to get other nations to the bargaining table on other issues. 

What did come as a surprise was the target of these tariffs. China? Sure. Mexico? Reasonable in some ways. But Canada? Really?

It’s hard to see the logic in it.

Canada is one of America’s oldest friends and allies. We share the largest unguarded border in the world, and that’s not just evidence of our friendship: it’s evidence that even though we’re different counties, we’re the same kind of country. Two first-world, industrialized democracies with similar standards of living and similar laws. A shared language, a shared cultural heritage, a shared history. We should be drawing closer together, not feuding over our minor differences.

And it’s not just a matter of history and culture — the tariffs on Canada strike at the very logic of trade protection itself. 

Trump often emphasizes the unfairness of our trade relations with foreign countries. When we look at all the outsourcing to China, for example, it’s easy to see what he’s talking about. China is a low-wage country, so it is already cheaper to make things there. But the larger problem is that the Chinese government puts its thumb on the scale to ensure that it stays that way. 

Consider all the reasons it is more expensive to build things in America. For one, our workers get paid more. China, though it calls itself a socialist workers’ paradise, suppresses wages by outlawing independent unions — all Chinese workers belong to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, but it answers to the same people who control the state and the factories, the Chinese Communist Party. China’s environmental laws are also weaker than ours, and more sporadically enforced, which means Chinese businesses can avoid all of the costs of anti-pollution. It’s bad for the environment, but good for the bottom line. Chinese businesses also borrow money from state-controlled banks on terms that would never be allowed in a free market country; effectively, the state props up failing businesses, helping them compete on the world stage where they normally would fail.

All of this adds up to unfair trade, even before you get into dumping, industrial espionage, and intellectual property theft. China doesn’t play by the rules, and it is completely just for us to refuse them access to the rules-based system that is the American economy — or at least to charge them a hefty tariff to level the playing field.

But none of that is true of Canada.

Their cost of living is similar to ours. They have independent unions that workers are free to join — or not join. They have environmental laws that raise the cost of doing business — a trade-off most advanced nations have made to some extent in exchange for clean air and water. Their economy is capitalist, like ours, and their banks are independent, like ours. Their businesses have to survive on their own, like ours. 

There is no unfairness in Canada’s trade with the United States, and no reason that businesses from the two countries can’t compete on a level playing field. In fact, we have done so for a very long time. 

There are always disputes between neighbors, and some — like the long-running fight over Canada’s subsidies to softwood lumber — will cause tensions to flare from time to time. But these are like the squabbles of two brothers living in the same house, not true enemies. And the solution to them is not to escalate tariffs and other trade barriers: it is to reduce them.

What Canadian-American trade needs is more integration, not less.

Trump’s fixation on Canada becoming “the 51st state” is bizarre, but I honestly agree that an ever-closer union with our neighbor to the north would be good for both countries. Where I disagree is with Trump’s approach.

Many conservatives talk of “running government like a business” and Trump’s behavior to Canada does very much resemble a Wall Street hostile takeover. But this is one area where business and government differ. A board of directors of a public company may be forced to accept a takeover bid because of their duty to act in the shareholders’ best interests. This is essentially how Elon Musk ended up with Twitter: if you offer a high enough share price, they’re basically compelled to agree to it.

But politics is not about maximizing economic value. Nationalism is not rational. And Canadian nationalism, especially, is based on an obsession with the small differences between us and them. Even their former Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, summed up Canadian identity in these terms. “One of the ways we define ourselves most easily,” he said, “is, well, we’re not American.” 

Being aggressive with Canada will not force them to throw up their hands and meekly apply for admission to the American union; it will make them dig in their feet and confirm all of the things they hate about us. If some country ten times our size started bigfooting America, we’d get our backs up in precisely the same way.

In the Spectator this week, Jenna Stocker wrote that “you could think of the US-Canadian border as ‘the longest one-way mirror in the world,’” an old analogy that is even more appropriate today. Their whole political world has been upended by Trump’s bombast, while most of us in the States don’t notice them at all. Trump is doing what he does and it might be popular with some of us in America, but if he actually wants Canada to join this country he is going about it in precisely the wrong way.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.