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Trump’s blunt talk and uncompromising stances are also highlighting other failures of Canadian policy. Trump expects Trudeau to put on his big-boy pants with respect to NATO, too, where Canada has never honoured its commitment to contribute our share of military spending — two per cent of our GDP — to the defence of the free world. Instead, while Canada pays lip service to the need to stand strong in Ukraine and the Middle East, we contribute just half as much as pledged, leaving our own military in disrepair and expecting the United States to pick up the difference and to be our protector.

Under pressure from Trump, Canada may finally do the right thing for the Canadian consumer and the Canadian economy

Canada has a sense of entitlement that Trump, in his undiplomatic way, is exposing. His plan to renegotiate NAFTA — and to walk away from it if the renegotiation didn’t serve America’s interests — was widely met in Canada with indignation and outrage, as if we had an entitlement to the U.S. market. True to form, we also responded with praise for the glories of free trade and contempt for America’s backward turn to protectionism. Yet Canada remains one of the West’s great bastions of protectionism, barring foreign ownership of banking and other major sectors and unable to achieve even internal free trade among our provinces, despite 150 years of trying. The provinces themselves don’t accept the provisions of NAFTA, cannot be bound by them and haven’t honoured them.

Until Trump began a rescue of our energy sector by approving the Keystone XL pipeline, the federal and provincial governments were so inward looking, and so beholden to provincial politics, that they couldn’t even muster the courage to proceed with much-needed pipelines to either the Atlantic or Pacific that would allow Alberta oil to flow to European and Asian markets.

Canada wasn’t always a snowflake country. In the previous century, we were far more self-reliant — economically successful, despite the American protectionism that we then faced, and confidently entering both world wars long before the Americans. We wore big-boy pants then. So did our farmers. Trump may force us to wear them again.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com