Maybe we should take a page from Trump

By Craig Westcott

Despite his craziness and unpredictability, U.S. President Donald Trump is winning his trade wars against Canada, and indeed, much of the world.
Big companies the world over are postponing or cancelling plans to build manufacturing plants in other places and sizing up where to build in the U.S. instead. World leaders are contorting themselves to placate and flatter the show master. Even Canada quickly bowed down when Trump barked that he doesn’t want the Canucks taxing the big American social media companies that are making bumper profits while killing off Canadian newspapers by stealing their advertising.
So, tariffs are working for him. America looks poised to regain some of the manufacturing it has lost over the past few decades to other parts of the world.
We should learn from that. Tariffs are as old as trade itself. The last two or three decades of free trade in North America have been the exception in centuries of world commerce. Unfortunately, while our short era of free trade did much to grow Canada’s economy, it also made us extremely vulnerable to the United States, and other countries. A land that is among the richest in the world in natural resources, from oil to minerals to agriculture to fish, has become a nation of government workers and fast-food servers as our manufacturing base eroded and those important private sector jobs were exported to other places. You can’t even complain to a person in Canada now about something you bought because the call centre is in India or the Caribbean.
When Newfoundlanders were debating whether to join Canada in the 1940s, one of the big fears raised by advocates of Responsible Government was that union with Canada would open the market to cheaper Canadian goods, killing our own manufacturing base.
To a large extent, that is exactly what happened. A drive around St. John’s, Harbour Grace, Grand Bank, or Bay Roberts with anyone knowledgeable of local history will help you realize how many factories closed after Confederation, as cheaper goods from competitors on the mainland flooded in. Instead of being manufacturers, employing Newfoundlanders to build and make things, such as wood stoves, nails, cigarettes, you name it, many scions of the business elite became licensed agents for the cheaper goods supplied by their former Canadian competitors.
Freer trade within Canada hurt local manufacturing. There’s no greater example than the newspaper industry. The Telegram was founded and run for decades by the Herder family of St. John’s. The Robinson Blackmore chain of newspapers was owned by families in Grand Falls, and eventually the Crosbie family of St. John’s, which also owned the Daily News. Eventually the local owners sold their papers to Thompson Newspapers of Toronto, and other chains, who sold them in turn to Southam News, then CanWest, then OptiPress, then Transcontinental, and finally to Halifax-based Saltwire, which practically drove the Newfoundland newspaper industry into the ground. Each time as those mainland companies sold our newspapers, there was a little bit less to pass on as they took turns striving to cut costs and milk as much profit from Newfoundland as possible. The result was we went from an island with five newspaper presses to a place with none. This paper is now printed in Montreal, while what’s left of The Telegram is printed in Ontario.
The federal government says eliminating trade barriers between provinces is part of the answer to the peril being inflicted upon us by Trump’s tariffs. That may benefit the bigger provinces, but it will hurt the smaller ones like ours. It is internal trade barriers that ensure that fish landed in Newfoundland is processed in Newfoundland, that beer is brewed in a St. John’s brewery. If only there had been the same protection for newspapers and other things made right here.
No, we should take a page from Trump’s playbook. If he slaps a tariff on our cars going into the ‘States, we should slap an equal one on those coming here from America. Use tariffs to make the car, cell phone, and other manufacturers make their wares here if they want to sell in Canada. We are not as big a market as the United States, but a market of 40 million is nothing to sneeze at.

Time to step in

When Donald Trump hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House last week, the president again raised his inane notion that Palestinians should be relocated from Gaza to make way for a new luxury resort on the Mediterranean.
Netanyahu was in the dicey position of trying to humour Trump, while not unduly alarming the rest of the Arab world, and the rest of the West for that matter, by endorsing such a cockamamie notion.
But this bit of Trumpery raises a critical matter: who will speak for the Palestinians?
Since Hamas and other terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, butchering, raping and kidnapping its citizens, Israel has been doing its level best to grind Hamas into dust. The problem is that Hamas and the other terrorists hide below and among the rest of the civilian population, so the casualty count has been huge and horrifying.
And yet Hamas carries on. During the last hostage exchange, masked Hamas terrorists made a spectacle of parading around in expensive cars, flashing their weapons and using the hostages as stage props for social media and propaganda purposes.
It’s likely that however much bombing and attacking Israel carries out, Hamas will not be eradicated. But after nearly two years of warfare, with much of Gaza levelled, it’s time for Israel to stop and for the West to figure out Gaza’s future.
The ideal situation would be for a peaceful coalition of Palestinian leaders to take on the responsibility of governing and working with the West to rebuild Gaza. That will be very hard to achieve. In the past, Palestinians have come close several times, but always rejected, the chance to have their own state on the grounds that they want all of Palestine, with Israel removed.
The result of the Palestinians’ latest war against Israel surely must convince most by now that Israel is a reality, it’s not going away, and it’s long past time to accept it, and move on, hopefully in peace. Rather than waste time and effort negotiating with Hamas, or some other anti-Jewish proxy, the West should grant Palestinians their own state anyway, appoint local administrators for now, and then oversee elections, participate in the rebuilding, and take measures to make sure the new independent country of Palestine doesn’t arm itself for more war.
This will take a lot of manpower, diplomacy, cooperation and money. But what is the alternative?
Palestinians may find over time that living peacefully in their own state, in some form of trade and diplomatic cooperation with their neighbour Israel, is far better than a perpetual holy war to remove Jews from a land to which they both have historical ties.