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Now, we all know what happens when a bully is provoked, and it usually doesn’t end well.

So, what did the Liberals hope to achieve?

We’ve heard the Trudeau Liberals complain consistently about being accused by the U.S. of “dumping”— as in Canada exporting goods into the U.S. with artificially low prices because of home-front subsidization.

Photo by Darren Calabrese / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Think of softwood lumber, for example, which is primarily harvested from Crown land with arguably lower costs and taxation associated with ownership, and jetliners from Bombardier, a Quebec-based company that would have been bankrupt long ago if not for government largesse.

And, most recently, newsprint — a product which, like softwood lumber, is sourced primarily from Canada’s abundance of Crown land.

The end result, much to Canada’s dislike, has the Americans applying a tit-for-tat of high tariffs on those products.

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If the United States knows how to play anything, particularly with Trump’s Protect America agenda, it’s how to muck it up in the corners and make the game even harder to win.

The U.S. doesn’t think much of the WTO, for example, which is no surprise to anyone in the know, and it has used its economic might to keep vacancies open in the WTO’s appeal court, thereby limiting the agency’s ability to hear the squabbles and deliver decisions.

It’s the next best thing to having a veto.

Photo by Carolyn Kaster / AP

Why the Trudeau Liberals think running to the WTO with a pile of trade complaints against the United States involving piles of other countries is therefore a head-scratcher.