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Any predictions on the trade war outcomes? I'm always kind of unpleasantly surprised when I see random stuff around that's made in Canada, but by the numbers the amount of canadian stuff on us store shelves is small. Meanwhile American exports to Canada seem like a small fraction of the overall economy.
I guess as long as Canada keeps selling oil, the overall effect of the trade war may just be a nothingburger. Might push up the price of goods marginally but not in any huge way.
Only thing I can see is increased polarization in Canada between the people who voted for this and the people who have to pay for it. (The manufacturing sector went hard CPC last election; so did every sector that will be impacted by these tariffs. Fancy that.)
They weren't the same people, and far as I can tell still aren't. Obviously Carney and his Maple MAGA Boomer cohort don't care- they're too busy manufacturing a crisis through incompetent statesmanship to try and quell movements about kicking them out of power for ever- so it's realistically going to be up to the workers in lower Ontario to solve this.
At least they'll have a lot of time on their hands once their plants close down, especially if what the sister comment mentions comes to pass and the supply chain is destroyed. Which is kind of the risk here- if Canadian manufacturing is destroyed, then they have no reason not to just import vehicles from China [and was a huge problem when Canada hinted at doing this last time], which means a Canada pulled closer to the Chinese orbit, which is something the US can't accept.
So it does make sense for Canada to adopt the Palestine strategy of holding themselves hostage, and a bonus for the LPC since it won't cost them electorally (the areas affected have no alternative and the areas not have been so turbocharged by jingoism they'll be voting the same way at the end of the decade at least).
Which itself might make further policy interventions against Canada more likely from the D side. If the objective is to lay a massive annexation-shaped landmine under the foot of the next administration, perhaps Trump is doing a better job of that than expected.
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TACO is the way to bet.
Apart from raw materials, most of the Canadian goods surplus with the US comes through the highly integrated auto industry-based economy of Greater Greater Detroit, most of which ends up in vehicles badged Ford or GM (even if final assembly was in a Canadian plant). If this trade war lasts for more than a few weeks then two iconic American companies are going to be screaming in pain, and UAW workers who voted for Trump are going to be laid off. Even if the tariffs are working to shift demand to cars made with a US/Mexican supply chain and not a US/Canadian one, the politics of "one union job noisily lost at a US-owned plant in purple Michigan, two nonunion jobs quietly added at a Japanese-owned plant in red South Carolina" is a disaster for the administration.
It isn't clear that Canada think they can give in even if they wanted to. What Carney has said is pretty close to "Trump's America is not agreement-capable, so we will make no concessions." Trump's public antics and the online activity of his core supporters have been entirely consistent with the MAGA view on Canada being that it should be a vassal-state and that the punishment beatings will continue as long as Canada perversely insists on pretending to be sovereign (see also @Shakes and @Ex_Nihilo above).
I also think the intra-MAGA politics of this mean that we can expect to see the "Blame Canada"/TACO pattern continue for the rest of Trump's term. Increasingly I am leaning towards a model of MAGA psychology where the beatings are the point. One of the things the right-wing base thought they would get when they renominated Trump in the 2024 primaries was a President who would use the powers of the Presidency to inflict visible pain on the hated Blues. Right-wing Americans who pay some attention to foreign news but don't actually understand foreign countries (this isn't intended as an insult - very few people anywhere actually understand foreign countries) see Soviet Canuckistan and the EUSSR as Blues-over-the-water, so punishment beatings of Canada (which cause fewer legal and constitutional issues than punishment beatings of domestic political opponents) scratch the same itch. But I'm pretty certain that MAGA would support a 50% tariff on Massachusetts if there was a legal way of doing it.
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Short term: Nothingburger.
Long term: War, or to quote Victoria Nuland, "Fuck the EU." Let us not forget that it was turning down a trade agreement with the EU that set off Yanukovych's downfall in Ukraine.
It's not a perfectly clean comparison (Canada is a lot more united, and the US less so, compared to Ukraine and Russia respectively circa 2013.) but I don't see any future US administration being overly tolerant if Canada seriously orients itself to the EU (because military alliances follow economic ones) or China, and "fighting for sovereignty" can be used to excuse any number of bad outcomes of antagonism with the US for Canadian politicians.
To be clear, I do not advocate this. I doubt anyone in Russia or Ukraine expected to be in a shooting war back in '04 either, though.
Canada cannot substantially reorient its trade relations away from the U.S., for obvious geographic reasons. Whatever changes occur will be minor or even cosmetic. But it is striking that a U.S. regime that seems determined to insulte, belittle and antagonize its allies is surprised that those allies seek to recalibrate.
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