Republicans Unanimously Back Trade War With Canada, Nation's Second-Largest Customer, In Bold Move To Sell Fewer Things
Congressional Republicans closed ranks this week behind the President's tariff campaign against Canada, a country that buys roughly $350 billion in American goods a year and has never once asked for a receipt.
The strategy is elegant. Canada is the top export market for 30-odd states. Michigan sells it cars. Ohio sells it plastics. North Dakota sells it, and this is true, an enormous quantity of electricity that then gets sold back. The plan is to make all of that more expensive, and then wait.
"We're standing firm," said one senator from a state whose largest export partner is Ontario. Asked what Ontario was doing in response, he said he assumed it was thinking things over.
Ontario is not thinking things over. Ontario is buying Mexican bourbon. Every provincial liquor board in the country has quietly pulled Kentucky product off the shelf, which is less a boycott than a monopoly deciding what a nation may drink, an arrangement Canadians accept because the alternative is talking about it.
The deeper joke is that the tariffs are working, just not on the target. American manufacturers pay them. American grocers pass them on. The Canadian dollar sagged, which made Canadian exports cheaper, which partly cancelled the tariff, which nobody in either capital wants to explain out loud.
Meanwhile a father and son in Nova Scotia freed a bald eagle from a fence this week and could not resist a joke about giving America back its bird.
The eagle flew off toward Maine. Under current rules, it will be assessed at the border.