If Trump wants a trade war, make the rich pay for it

Prime Minister Mark Carney belatedly came around to the position of NDP’s Avi Lewis, Wab Kinew, and organized labour: that no trade deal was better than a bad deal. On Friday, Carney walked away from Donald Trump’s trade deal, leading to 50 per cent tariffs on almost $30 billion of Canadian goods coming into effect.  What killed the negotiations was the stupidity, greed, and arrogance of Trump and his top advisors, who took Carney’s sweetheart deal and said “what if we pushed Canada just a little bit more?” They demanded truly insulting things, from controlling our trade with other nations to attacks on the French language. Even Carney couldn’t endorse something this unacceptable and save his political career. Carney has made a gamble: That capitalism and trickle-down economics will save Canada. That gamble is wrong, and as we enter a new phase in the trade war against Trump’s USA, it becomes even more clear that the only path forward is to oppose the United States on all fronts, not simply to try and out-capitalism Trump and his cronies. In his final speech as leader, Tommy Douglas pointed to the last time Canada faced a truly existential threat to our freedom, arguing for public ownership and economic planning as a way to resist tyrannical foreign forces. Carney’s pitch from the very beginning was that, by embracing free-market economics and the virtues of inequality (cutting taxes on capital gains on the rich while firing public servants) we would gain the tools needed to defeat Trump, as well as convince Americans to make a deal based on shared right-wing interests. Carney himself was willing to sign a deal largely in the Americans’ favour only days ago, in part because he believed in the capitalist project as a sacrosanct ideal to be preserved. In his first press conference after walking away from the deal, Carney invoked the rhetoric and imagery of war, how the U.S. was attacking Canada, and he wasn’t wrong. But that raises the question? How do you win a war that poses an existential threat to your country? Do you win by cutting taxes on yachts and making the rich richer? Or do you do it with a collective effort built on solidarity and shared sacrifice? As new polling indicates, the vast majority of Canadians feel rejecting the Trump deal was the right move, but millions still worry about losing their jobs. There is a sense across Canada that all hands-on-deck are needed to defend this country, but that some may well end up sacrificing more…