This is an uncomfortable truth for those who blame Canada for not ‘getting a deal.’
A thief has a zero-sum mindset. You have something they want. To get it, they will simply take it from you. They will have it, you won’t.
A trader has a ‘value-for-value’ mindset. You have something they want. They recognize your ownership of it. To get it, they need your consent, and they need to offer something of value in return.
These two mindsets/worldviews are incompatible. If you think like a thief, you are not a trader. If you are a trader, you can’t be a thief.
Donald Trump has the mindset of a thief
Now, let’s consider U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump recently announced that he would impose a 25% tariff on European-made vehicles, claiming the EU is ‘not complying’ with the EU-US trade deal:
“President Donald Trump said he would increase tariffs charged to the European Union for cars and trucks to 25%, without saying what authority he would use to raise the levies.
“Based on the fact the European Union is not complying with our fully agreed to Trade Deal, next week I will be increasing Tariffs charged to the European Union for Cars and Trucks coming into the United States,” he wrote on Truth Social on Friday. “The Tariff will be increased to 25%. It is fully understood and agreed that, if they produce Cars and Trucks in U.S.A. Plants, there will be NO TARIFF.””
Trump has not specified how the EU is supposedly not complying, though he faces pressure as the deal was signed when the U.S. President possessed his now struck-down IEEPA tariff authority. Despite having agreed to one set of terms with the EU, Trump now feels he can extract more from the EU by making new threats, and wants to use those threats to coerce European companies into producing vehicles in the United States instead of Europe. Given his zero-sum view of trade, Trump is – in his mind – using threats to take jobs from Europe and move them to the U.S., and feels completely unbound by the trade deal he agreed to previously.
This is also how Trump has dealt with CUSMA. Despite once calling CUSMA “the largest, most significant, modern, and balanced trade agreement in history,” Trump now claims Canada is taking advantage of the U.S. on trade due to Canada’s trade surplus with the U.S. (a surplus that exists due to Canada selling energy to the U.S. at a discount and which will deepen given U.S. approval for a new ‘Keystone Pipeline’). What Trump says, the promises he makes, the deals he signs, mean nothing to him when his mind changes.
This is an uncomfortable truth for those who irrationally blame Canada for ‘not getting a deal’. The EU had a deal, and Trump is ignoring it to threaten more tariffs. Trump is not a good-faith actor, because he doesn’t believe in offering value for value, but instead believes in taking what another country has and making it his own, while believing that issuing a threat and then ‘offering’ to withhold that threat is a ‘concession’. That would be like a thief breaking into your home with a baseball bat, threatening to beat you with it if you don’t give them your stuff without a fight, taking your stuff without delivering a beating, and claiming that a ‘trade’ took place.
In the face of such a mindset, Canada must protect its interests by deepening trade ties with other nations led by people who think like traders, strengthening the trader mindset here at home by unleashing the private sector, and refusing to give moral sanction to Trump’s thief-style approach by blaming Canadian leaders for the consequences of Trump’s thief-like mindset.
Spencer Fernando
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