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Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/CP

All Canadians are steeped to the eyeballs in the lore of the world’s greatest binational trading relationship, but 37 per cent of Canadian GDP is tied up in trade with the U.S., and only three per cent of U.S. GDP, and most of that is in northern border states like Washington, Minnesota and New York, which are in the hands of the president’s Democratic opponents. (In a magnificent tactical gesture that could have been taken from the playbook of Maurice Duplessis, Trump’s tax reform bill almost eliminated the deductibility from federal income tax of state income taxes, which are imposed only by chronically spendthrift Democratic states — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois and California. If they want to elect fiscally profligate Democratic governors, they can pay for it and not lay it off on other more sensible states.)

Trump is not anti-Canada nor anti-Trudeau; but he isn’t much interested, either. It doesn’t matter to him, politically or otherwise, if the U.S. and Canada go back to World Trade Organization rules. Unlike every president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt, he has no interest in coming to Canada and he doesn’t care what anyone in Canada thinks of him. It would be an inconvenience to Canada, though not the end of the world, if NAFTA broke down, so this does raise the issue of the motivations of this government.

Canadians have been led into contempt for Trump by their hopeless, Kool-Aid-sodden media

I was a strenuous supporter of Brian Mulroney’s Free Trade Agreement with the first Bush administration in 1988-9, not only because it would secure easier access to the world’s greatest market, but because it would also raise Canadian self-confidence, in seeing that we could compete successfully and at the closest quarters with the world’s greatest economic power. It was a prodigy of diplomacy and statecraft for Mulroney to have gained that position; Canada did compete, and the United Kingdom will join a trade agreement with the United States in the next couple of years as it pulls back from Europe. Mexico has muddied the waters, but this remains the greatest trade association in the world, and the least compromising of the members’ sovereignty.