Danielle Smith still wants us to surrender

So much for that reprieve. The pro-appeasement Postmedia pundits and Conservative politicians in Canada hadn’t even completed their victory lap over the apparent postponement of Donald Trump’s promised tariffs when Trump himself announced that he’d changed his mind. “We’re thinking in terms of 25 per cent on Mexico and Canada,” he told reporters on Monday. “I think we’ll do it February 1.”

This comes as a particularly big blow to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who has been an enthusiastic and vocal proponent of surrendering to the incoming administration and its wildly incoherent whims. She has repeatedly broken with her provincial peers and the federal government, trying over and over to flatter Trump and his proxies into exempting Alberta’s oil and gas industry — a decision that would, it’s worth reiterating, inflict even more pain on its agriculture, forestry, and manufacturing sectors, not to mention the rest of the country’s economy.

She seems to believe there’s a win-win outcome available here, all evidence to the contrary. Never mind that Trump’s energy policies, which include his day-one decision to declare a “national energy emergency” aimed at boosting U.S. oil and gas production and reducing oil prices, are directly contrary to Alberta’s economic interests. “Americans want to have energy dominance globally, and I believe the best way for them to achieve that is for Canada to be a partner in that,” she said recently. “If their asks are reasonable, then let’s meet them halfway.”

But their asks aren’t even remotely reasonable, and meeting halfway is not their style. Trump has repeatedly framed his country’s trade deficit with Canada — one that’s entirely the result of our oil and gas exports — as a form of subsidy or even theft, and suggested that tariffs offer a risk-free way to remedy that. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” he said in his inaugural address. 

In fairness to Smith, she’s not the only Conservative politician in Canada desperately trying to find new and innovative ways to surrender. BC Conservative leader John Rustad released a video blaming David Eby for the threats to his province’s prosperity and suggesting he ought to accept Trump’s false premises around border security that the federal government has already addressed. “David Eby is putting at risk the people in this province by threatening a trade war instead of actually figuring out how you work with the Americans. Ontario, Saskatchewan, and even Alberta are looking at how they work with the Americans, not ramping up the trade rhetoric,” Rustad said.

Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, declined to take a position on whether he’d support retaliatory tariffs against the Americans. Instead, he hopped in his imaginary time machine in order to duck the question and talk instead about how he would have approved pipelines like Northern Gateway and Energy East. Liberal leadership candidates Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland weren’t nearly as shy, with both calling for “dollar-for-dollar” retaliatory measures. "If you force our hand,” Freeland said at her Sunday campaign launch, “we'll inflict the biggest trade blow that the United States has ever endured."

And yet, for all of her failed attempts to placate and appease Trump, Smith still seems to think that more appeasement is the way to go — and that the real threat is somehow coming from Ottawa, not Washington. "It hurt me that they felt they could make that argument that Alberta should sacrifice our interests in order to try and advance some kind of trade war,” she told reporters on Monday. "I take a different approach. Let's stop fighting with each other and let's maybe try to remove some of the internal trade barriers and maybe my fellow premiers can stop blocking pipelines when we propose them."

The whole point here is to stop a trade war, not advance it. All the new pipelines in the world won’t help Canada or Alberta in the here and now, given how long it would take to build them. And there’s no universe where we can simultaneously increase our energy exports to the United States, as Smith has suggested repeatedly, and eliminate America’s trade deficit with Canada, as Trump has demanded. As UBC economist Kevin Milligan argued on Bluesky, there are no easy ways out here. “We're not weighing our pain vs their pain. We're trying to inflict pain on them to get the tariff removed, and taking some own-pain now is better than submitting.”

This is the point that surrender-curious Conservatives keep missing. Pitching Trump on some kind of win-win outcome, as Smith keeps trying to, is an affront to the way he sees the world. As Canadian writer Dan Gardner argued in a recent (and excellent) Substack, Trump’s position is that “mutually beneficial relationships are a tale believed by suckers. This is why Trump is so contemptuous of international trade and why his thinking about trade and trade deficits resembles the mercantilism that dominated the 18th century before economists in the 19th century showed that trade can make both parties better off.” 

Canadian negotiators must heed the lessons of history — specifically the historical example of the Siege of Melos during the Peloponnesian War, Gardner writes. Appeals to justice and fairness on the part of the Athenians failed the Melosians, while their allies in Sparta disappeared when they were needed most. They learned too late, the only way to survive is to fight. “We need to make the bastard bleed,” Gardner writes. “We either threaten savage reprisals that hurt Trump and devastate us or we slowly get beaten into submission and penury.”

You’d think a political movement that worships at the altar of Winston Churchill — Smith’s government installed a new statue of him on the grounds of their government offices in downtown Calgary last summer — would understand this. As Churchill knew only too well, bullies don’t believe in things like diplomacy or decency, and demonstrations of weakness only invite more shows of strength on their part. Perhaps someone can commission a statue of Neville Chamberlain after this is over to help people remember that acquiescence isn’t the path to victory.