Quote:
Originally Posted by Monahammer
It's not hot air bargaining. How many people have to tell you this before you believe it?
He's serious. Whether enough people will go along with him or not is what is in question.
Personally, my kids and wife have swiss citizenship and we launched the process to secure their swiss passports in december.
|
Everything he says is an angle on something and he says the most inflammatory thing to get an emotional reaction to throw his counterparty off balance. His ramblings on Canada were among a lot of ramblings on a lot of other things too.
IE He also talked about 'redeveloping gaza' in that same presser on AF1. Is the US actually going to 'redevelop' Gaza? Or is he really trying to invoke the image of the US parachuting into Gaza to try an leverage neighboring countries into taking refugees?
On Canada, it's clearly two asks:
1. That Canada pay the cost of it's national defense, when Trump uses the $200Billion+ figure on the Trade deficit and many folks point out it's 'actually only $60Billion', the difference is he's including a made up number for the cost of continental defense or some approximation of what it 'should' contribute to NATO (he throw around 5% of GDP at some point in the past few weeks when speaking of NATO allies generally, Canada has long committed to 2% and is actually at 1.4%)
2. Clearly he has ambitions to aggressively renegotiate NAFTA/USMCA on a number of areas and these would likely be % of North American sourced components in Cars to be designated "North American", access to Canadian & Mexican markets that are asymmetrically 'tariffed' or 'restricted' on the agreement - such as Supply Management, banking, foreign ownership restrictions on telecom, airlines, etc.
As for what Canada should do:
Contributing to 2% of GDP per NATO commitment ASAP (IE not 2030 et al) should be a no brainer for Canada. Building ships for the arctic, etc. will be a way to keep steel plants and other industries caught up in the trade war running while also bolstering the Canadian forces at a time when the US is musing that it wouldn't necessarily defend Canada is a sound idea as well. Going up to an inflated number pulled out of Trump's behind would be where they would want to negotiate against.
The rest is difficult, as a country dealing with a hostile trading partner it wouldn't want to sign an agreement that would essentially allow it's critical industries to be hollowed out by larger American rivals. Yes Supply Management is inefficient, yes Canadians pay more for less, but essentially allowing Wisconsin to take out the Canadian dairy industry would not be very strategic in a world where the US views Canada as a transactional counterparty rather than friendly neighbor with shared values. The best play here is probably to do some strategic things like axe interprovincial barriers, set up P3's to fund an oil pipeline west to east to remove Eastern Canada's dependance on Line 5 and give greater export capacity to the sector and potentially build LNG plants to generate more from exports to offset the resulting higher tariffs that are sure to come when Canada doesn't sacrifice it's protected industries.