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If there’s one lesson learned from scrapping with the United States over trade, it’s that Canada needs to find new partners and new places to do business. It’s time to move on, because America might never be cured of its malignant Trumpism.

The talks for a new NAFTA exposed what President Donald Trump is doing to his formerly respected country. He is making it repellent.

That’s the only conclusion after hearing Trump’s threats about “the ruination” of Canada if it failed to kowtow to him and about how he could “punish the people of Canada.” He also remarked on how our prime minister is “very dishonest and weak.”

So we have a tentative new trade agreement, but life with the Americans is never going to be the same again. Nor should it be. They can’t be trusted and it isn’t just Trump.

The president is the least trustworthy major political figure in memory among the advanced democracies. But his tame Republicans support him to the hilt. None will criticize Trump or his poisonous behaviour, presumably because they believe that arrogance and lies are what Americans want.

Trump also has his fan cult, with its rallies and paraphernalia; its chants and its aura of barely contained violence. Members demand the kind of lies and arrogance you can only get from Trump.

Watching from next door, most Canadians are growing to despise the Americans and all their works, especially Trump’s notion that every other country must bend to his well-armed will.

“America is being respected again all over the world, right now, and we're going to keep it that way forever,” Trump told a cheering crowd of gullible followers at a rally last week.

All over the world, right now, people disagree. Respect for the U.S. is plummeting. It might still be feared, but even that’s a stretch. The Chinese aren’t afraid of the Americans; neither are the Europeans anymore. The Russians don’t fear Trump; they manipulate him and make him look foolish.

And the rest of the world isn’t sitting around waiting for the Americans to regain their common sense and ethical values. It’s moving on.

As part of that, Canada has organized a meeting of allies to talk about maintaining a world trading system based on rules and fairness. The Americans weren’t even invited.

Representatives from Australia, Brazil, Chile, the European Union, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland will attend the two-day meeting in Ottawa starting Oct. 24.

Almost every country on that list also is a U.S. ally or trading partner. Trump has criticized almost all of them, often insulting their leaders and threatening to withdraw from mutual security arrangements.

The Canadian Press reported the other day on a Canadian discussion paper that describes the challenges facing international trade and the World Trade Organization. While it doesn’t specifically name the U.S. or single it out for direct criticism, it’s clear that Washington was excluded because it no longer wants to play by the rules.

Under Trump, the U.S. has undermined the global trading order that it helped set up over the past 50-plus years and which benefits the U.S. as much as anyone. But ethical trade doesn’t fit Trump’s protectionist narrative.

So the U.S. is declining to appoint members to the WTO’s dispute-settlement panels. Cases are piling up because the panel can’t establish a quorum and as a result, can’t hear cases or make decisions. Then Washington says that paralysis proves the WTO doesn’t work.

This is at the heart of the Canadian appeal to “like-minded people,” as Trade Diversification Minister Jim Carr described the countries coming to the Ottawa meetings.

The Canadian document cited “the combination of disruption and paralysis (that) has begun to erode respect for rules-based trade . . . paving the way for trade-distorting policies.”

Those policies include tariffs, duties and other measures designed to manipulate trade. Trump loves them and claimed that tariffs against Canada and Mexico had brought the two supposedly junior partners to heel in the North American talks.

Trump now claims the new Canada-Mexico-U.S. agreement is the greatest trade deal ever reached, apparently because he was president when it happened.

The new deal does provide 16 years of relative predictability in continental trade, ample time for Canada to get working on new opportunities. It’s not going to happen overnight, but there’s no rush. Canada will be around long after Trump is gone.

Canadians are tuning him out, as are people around the world. Public confidence in the U.S. is at historic lows, according to polling across 25 countries by the respected Pew Research Center in Washington.

The study suggests only 18 per cent of Canadians believe the U.S. considers this country’s interests when it makes decisions. Only one in four Canadians has any trust in “the American presidency.”

Fewer than four in 10 Canadians say they have a favourable view of the United States, down from 70 per cent before Trump was elected. And it’s not just us. With very rare exceptions, like Israel, America is losing respect around the world.

Canada must try to maintain cordial relations with the U.S. wherever possible, but it also needs determination to move ahead to more reliable partnerships around the world.