Trump Is Making Canada Great Again

 

As a Canadian, I support Donald Trump in the current trade negotiations with Canada. His chief complaints are, first, border security, second, the flood of drugs across the border, third, the Canadian egg, poultry, and dairy quotas, and fourth, the digital services tax. 

In each case, what Trump wants is in Canadians’ best interests. What the Canadian government wants harms Canada.

Border security: We should be just as worried about terrorist attacks as the US; why is this controversial? It is apparently fact that more terrorists are entering the US from the north than from the south. The Canadian government has been alarmingly lax about Chinese influence, Kalistani terrorism, and floods of supposed refugees from the Middle East. Canada has no land border with any nation but the US, and is separated from the rest of the world by oceans. We don’t need to build any wall, or turn back small craft at sea. It would be far easier to stop the flow of undocumented or undesirable aliens here than it is for the US, Britain, or any of the countries of Europe. Yet the Canadian government is making no effort, even opening the doors ever wider—as if they want chaos.

Drugs: Fentanyl is a major crisis in Canada as well as the US; we should want to stop the traffic just as they do. Granted that the “war on drugs” was a failure, and prohibition did not work. But the current Canadian governmental approach of legalization, turning a blind eye, and handing out free drugs to addicts, is clearly making matters worse. We ought to work with the Americans to try something else. The obvious thing is to try to cut off supply.

Cheese: the Canadian government seems far more concerned with the smuggling of cheese than the smuggling of fentanyl. The Canadian “supply management” system is an obvious violation of the free market. It is a perfect example of a cartel in restraint of trade, which should be illegal. It is the government’s job to prevent cartels from forming, not to impose them. The result of this cartel is that the very poorest among us are made poorer for the benefit of a handful of large producers. The cheapest sources of protein are made artificially expensive. It is pure evil, quite apart from its unfairness to American farmers, our neighbours. It is even bad for the Canadian dairy industry, which used to be able to compete internationally. 

Happily, the digital services tax is already suspended.  It would have made the cheapest forms of entertainment more expensive; and would have made Canadian high-tech start-ups less competitive.

I hope Trump will also go after Canadian content regulations, which cut us off from dialogue with the world.