Canadian autoworkers have faced many crises over the years, but the present threat is distinct. Lana Payne, president of Unifor, has warned that “If we don’t push back hard against [US president Donald Trump] and against these companies, we’re going to lose it all.” So far, the debate over what to do has started and stopped with Trump’s tariffs. But the threats go deeper, both for auto companies and for our ability as workers and citizens to determine democratically what kind of society we want — that is, for Canada’s substantive and not just formal sovereignty. Taking on these larger challenges demands coming to grips with some tough realities.
The starting point for a response must be that the tariffs are only a symptom of Canada’s larger dilemma: the over-dependence on the world’s dominant global power. We may be America’s long-standing “closest economic partner and most loyal ally,” but that hasn’t prevented Trump from treating us as a vassal state.
No one would know, hearing the Trump Administration’s justification for tariffs against Canada, that the United States actually has a trade surplus with Canada in manufactured goods, including auto. The tariffs were imposed in spite of this and driven, as US Secretary Treasurer Scott Bessent brazenly asserted, by US determination to apply “the most America-first policies that are possible.”
Bessent added that the only qualifier was not “incurring market wrath.” This declaration that the only constraint America accepts is the US stock market, overwhelmingly the property of the rich (10 percent of the US population owns more stock than the other 90 percent), offers a remarkably bleak — if accurate — view of not just America’s international vision, but of US internal democracy.
Whatever the long-standing frustrations of many Canadians with our subordinate relationship to the United States and a pervasive unease with what America represents, dissent was historically muted by…
Auteur: Sam Gindin
