Canadians are gullible
Invasion porn, fairy tales, and ignorance keep them confused
Canadian are gullible.
If not gullible, then easily led.
How else to explain the oozing pile of invasion porn from journalist and scholars alike in the face of a supposed dire threat to Canada’s very existence as a country. Yet no one notices the obvious lack of any action from either Canada or the United States to go along with the looming shadow of the American eagle that central Canadians will tell you looms across our borders like a Fenian or Benedict Arnold headed for Quebec.
There’s not much sign of a real threat given the bungling, bumbling White House that looks just like the zoo of Trump 45. Donald Trump’s senior trade advisor is Peter Navarro, a 75 year old retired economist from the University of California at Irvine, five times failed candidate for elected office, and an economist other economists think is from beyond the nutty outer fringe of the nutty outer fringe of crackpot economists.
Yet the Toronto Star that bastion of superbly researched, ideologically untainted journalism touts Navarro as the real threat to Canada. Among other ludicrous things, the clearly demented Navarro thinks that American companies moved their factories to Canada because we do not have unions here or that the country has been taken over by Mexican drug cartels. Toronto Star thinks this guy is evil incarnate. Are they part of the gullible crowd or are they deluding the gullible? Hard to tell.
Navarro is ultimately as frightening as Howard Lutnick, whose job as commerce secretary is, besides dressing like every Wall Street greaseball since Gordon Gecko, to tell us that King Donald has decided to change course - yet again - on tariffs, trade wars, or whatever else has popped into Don’s skull at any given moment. Donald Trump’s tariffs are on and off more times a day than Stormy Daniels’ undies back in the day. All of this goes with the imaginary fentanyl labs and all the other hallmarks of the sort of “alternative facts” the sensible people in the world lampooned from the old Trump White House.
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As for lack of action by the Premiers, that screams that the “existential threat” is a political fraud made up by Canadian politicians and enabled by Canadian media and others. On the last day of February, Canadian Premiers agreed to nothing more than a “review” f the decades old list of stuff protected from competition across provincial borders under a “free trade agreement” that took the better part of 30 years to agree on in the first place. The goal is to review the list, not change it but to simply check the list again.
The Premiers will start talking about “mutually recognizing all consumer goods” made in other provinces. But not food. No explanation of why not food. After all, it’s cleared for sale by the federal government. “This would guarantee that a good certified in one province can be bought and sold in any other, without additional red tape.”
Sounds good but it is a mystery why there still has to be talking so that a scarf made in one province could be legally sold in another. After all, you can go to another province and buy them now. You can order them online from another province. Why would any other goods be held up? Perhaps we are talking about drugs here, but even then it makes no sense to restrict something approved by Ottawa. Provinces only do it now for bureaucratic self-importance and people who need the drugs are the ones who suffer.
The Premiers “will prioritize efforts to further improve transparency and reduce the administrative burden for labour mobility.” Not eliminate barriers, including indefensible ones that are - in the case of medical licensing, for example - 112 years beyond their best before date. No clear end goal of reducing to zero all needless barriers, all the same. Just look busy in an old-fashioned bureaucratic way.
The Canadian premiers will work “together to promote growth and resiliency in the domestic market,” whatever that means. As with everything else there are no firm targets, deadlines, goals, end states, or anything that might be mistaken for an actual commitment. Just words.
Lastly, in what superficially appears to be one concrete move, all provinces except Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island have agreed to let consumers in one province buy alcohol and beer from another province. Two things about this. First, without ending the provincial government monopoly on beer and liquor retail, this just means more consumers can get ripped off by a system that keeps prices artificially high in every province and and choice artificially low. It also limits the market for craft beer, domestic wine, and locally distilled alcohol.
Second, and most importantly for consumers in that province, Newfoundland and Labrador won’t end it’s monopoly on liquor sales. The official claim is that the Furey crowd want to defend two American multi-national breweries whose unions have the politically feeble Liberals desperately frightened. The real reason for the continued trade barrier is that the financially crippled province, in even harder shape after four years of Andrew Furey than before, cannot afford to let local consumers find out how much the government and the unions who control liquor sales have been gouging them for decades. On top of shagging the local brewing, wine-making, and distilling industries, the policy also hammers local bars and restaurants who must buy liquor, wine and beer at retail prices dictated by the provincial government. The whole scheme is a massive brake on the local economy but a desperate government with no ideas and even less guts cannot do anything else.
The Canadian media parrots all of this political rhetoric as if it were real and exposes nothing of the chasm between American bumbling or lack of Canadian action on the one hand and the Canadian political rhetoric of a Putin-like attack by Trump on the other. Academics and reporters and columnists chime in with their own versions of the panic mongering and ordinary Canadians are frightened and worried.
The media even made a big deal out of Andrew Furey’s comments about history and Trump’s imperialism, which tells you at once how desperate the Canadian media is for filler and how desperately unaware they are about what actually happened in the past. “It was the economic forces, not the military forces, that caused us to lose our independence and choose to join Canada," Furey told reporters and the Canadian Press recited. The rest of Furey’s comments were nothing but the federal Liberal talking points he’s been parroting since last November and all of it is junk.
Furey knows as much about history as he does about anything that isn’t orthopedic surgery, which is to say not much at all. As proof, his deal with Quebec repeats perfectly both the disastrous 1969 contract that it continues right down to the ridiculously low price for electricity as well as ehe 1998 bait and switch deal that the Newfs fell and on which Michael Sabia and Francois Legault modeled the new pitch. To show just how ignorant of the past Furey is, given the control Furey gave to Quebec over Labrador in the deal, he repeated as well a scheme from the late 1920s as Newfoundland sank under its own debt and political inaction to sell Labrador to Canada for a few bucks. Unlike 1927, Furey did the deal this time for more cash, but now as then, for far less than the thing is worth. AFter all he did not get enough money from Quebec to pay for the monstrously stupid Muskrat Falls mess.
In his ignorance of history beyond even the most superficial, Andrew Furey fits in with most North Americans of his generation and certainly most in the 21st century. In a wider sense Furey reminds us that history for most people is not so much what happened but what they remember and their memories are exceedingly bad. But Furey fits another pattern, too. The British use history for comfort, Susan Neiman notes in her 2019 book Learning from the Germans: race and the memory of evil. Germans use history to look to the future. Newfoundlanders, one would add, use an imaginary version of the past to justify the present and obscure the future, which is what Furey is doing so clearly with his nonsense about what happened in 1933 and 1949.
Were Furey or anyone else look to history for understanding, they would know that tariffs of the sort Donald Trump is imposing on his own people and Andrew Furey already does on his own province - hello, liquor monopoly - helped wreck Newfoundland and Labrador in 1933. There was a lot more to it than that, though. Wasteful overspending was another big part, including a crazy scheme to build branch lines on a railway that was already too expensive and inefficient thanks to the sort of low-level graft and corruption that defines politics in Newfoundland and Labrador still. Give-aways to carpet-baggers and con artists would be another and Furey has been all-in for all sorts of scams and boondoggles despite the experience of the past.
There was no hostile power before 1934 desperate to take over Newfoundland and Labrador. Local stupidity, insularity and the ruling classes, and closed-mindedness did the country in. All the same, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians did not surrender their independence in 1949. They made the decision for themselves, democratically, to join Canada and at no time did they surrender their sovereignty within Confederation, although Furey has routinely in one display of his historical ignorance after another.
The thing to remember about Newfoundland and Labrador as we face the Americans in 2025 is that our historic relationship with the Americans is very different from Ontarians, who are trotting out the ghosts of 1812 and the 1860s to frighten the children and childlike among us. In 1948, Newfoundland and Labrador decisively rejected becoming part of the United States. That was after a few years of a very close and very amicable relationship with Americans on an individual basis during the war and a century or more of migration to the United States. Officially, it wasn’t always so friendly, especially over trade and legal jurisdiction over American citizens, but there has been a very good and workable relationship.
If you wanted to take a potentially useful lesson from Newfoundland and Labrador history with Americans, look the experience of the fishery that came out of the Treaty of Washington (1871). The treaty started the long-standing and peaceful relationship between the United States and Britain which carried over with Canada and Newfoundland at the time. In a section written by historian James Hiller for Heritage NL, Hiller explains that “Newfoundland became party in 1873 to … the Treaty of Washington (1871). Under the treaty certain Newfoundland exports received free entry into the U.S. in return for American access to the inshore fisheries. The same terms applied to Canada” and both countries received compensation from the Americans.
The Americans broke the fishery terms of the treaty in 1885. Newfoundland tried to find an agreement for free trade with the Americans not just once in 1890 but a second time a decade later. With the death of the second free trade agreement in 1905 in the American Senate, the Newfoundland government led by Robert Bond imposed tough restrictions on American fishermen in the Bay of Islands and, as Heritage NL puts it, “adopted a highly restrictive interpretation of the 1818 Anglo-American Fisheries Convention, which governed American fishing activity in British North American waters. The situation became tense. The U.S. government was not prepared to allow American nationals to be harassed, and the British government would not allow Newfoundland to cause an international incident which might harm Anglo-American relations. Thus Bond was forced to retreat, accept the fact that his convention was lost, and agree to refer the legal points at issue to international arbitration at The Hague.”
Newfoundland won its points in the tribunal decision but free trade died all the same. Sometimes these things don’t work out but there is always value in understanding the depth of experience we have to draw on in Newfoundland and Labrador as a model, rather than the sort of superficial Canadian view that is just another version of invasion porn. Our history is rich and we have been in the past far bigger than we allow ourselves to be today. We can be bigger again today. We can find comfort for our current angst, and a guide to action if only we allow ourselves to use history as a guide to the future and not, as we usually do, and as Andrew Furey and his friends are doing today as a blindfold to what is wrong today.
