Last spring, while Donald Trump was levying tariffs on Canada and musing about making the country the “cherished” fifty-first state, the Liberal Party was deploying a strategy of political judo, redistributing the force of the American attack to secure an election victory. The conceit of the Liberal effort was premised on keeping national “Elbows Up,” resisting the Yankee menace through a series of measures designed to assert Canadian sovereignty and look abroad in an offer to hedge national bets on trade and defense.
It wasn’t that Canada wanted to decouple from the United States. How could the country walk away from a trade relationship worth the better part of a trillion dollars annually or a deep security partnership that has underwritten Canadian defense policy for decades? Rather, the Canadian government wanted a sustainable deal with the Americans — as close to the pre-Trump status quo as possible.
The Canadian population bought into “Elbows Up” as a call to arms, cultural and economic. Sort of. In the months following Trump’s tariffs, Canadian travel to the United States declined, along with exports and the purchase of imported American goods. But the great northern resistance only went so far. Capital investments kept flowing south from Canada. Indeed, in recent months, Canadian citizens, corporations, and even the national pension fund have poured money into American equity markets at a record-setting pace. During this time, few talked about how many core Canadian industries and their corporate leaders were American-owned, in whole or in part. Curious, that.
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Auteur: David Moscrop
