Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
The philosopher Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, once said that you don’t step into the same river twice, meaning the river flows. Other people look at that quote and said he meant panta rhei, everything flows or changes, although he didn’t necessarily say that himself.
Everything changes. That applies to our current U.S.-Canadian spat. We were given an initial description in the media, and then we had some clarification, and now we’re in what I would call Stage Three.
Stage One was outrage at Donald Trump and the United States, and this is the narrative that we got from one side, from Mark Carney. He said the Americans are at it again, and Trump in particular. They’re bullying us. They’re demanding that they’re gonna take away our sovereignty, and they’re saying to whom, and with whom we can trade and with whom we can’t.
And then, they wanna squash Canadian nationalism, and they want to suppress indigenous reading, literature, influence in the French language, and we’re not gonna do that. So we had to back out.
So, everybody got very angry. The Wall Street Journal said: This is a silly Trump spectacle right on the eve of the midterms. This is crazy.
And then we went into Stage Two: clarification. People in Canada, 90%, supported Carney. They were booing the American “Star-Spangled Banner” when it was played at sporting events in Canada. And they started to informally boycott U.S. products.
And then they stuck out their chest and said we might not give four million barrels of oil to the United States from Canada. We may stop our pipeline. We can do all of these things to the United States. They need us. And the world is against Trump. And our prime minister can deal with China if he wants. He prefers China.
So, we heard all that, and then we found out that the deal was almost cemented, and Carney brought up his objections at the last moment.
Then we found out the United States did not wanna suppress the French language or Indigenous culture in Canada. It just said our digital media companies operate worldwide. Why, in this particular country of Canada, should they pay a 5% surtax on top of charge, in addition to income tax, just to subsidize for the particular agendas of the Canadian government?
We don’t do that to Canada. We don’t say, “If you come into the United States and you have a product or a media conglomerate, we’re gonna slap a 5% so we wanna promote DEI, we want to promote poor white people in East Palestine.” We don’t do that.
Then we find out that we don’t want to take away Canada’s sovereignty. We are in an existential struggle to save the West from Chinese mercantilism. They have been dumping product. They have been manipulating currency. They’ve been stealing patents. They don’t respect copyrights. They run up trillion-dollar surpluses with us, half a trillion with Europe, and we’re saying no more. We want symmetry.
And [China], to get around that, is dumping cheap steel and aluminum and saying to Canada, “You can buy our product very cheap, much cheaper than you can produce it. Then you can use it in your assembly of cars and trucks and other manufactured goods and send it into the United States and undercut American producers. You win, and then we get around the American tariffs.”
And Trump and his team said, “No, we know what you’re doing.”
So, that was a clarification that didn’t look too good.
Then people said, “Well, wait a minute. Canada can’t even send its oil, highly sulfurous and thick tar sands, to Ontario or to British Columbia because the provinces are so at each other’s throats under this weird system that they don’t. They have almost autonomy with one another, and they won’t let pipelines be built. But the Americans will let it be built.”
So, they need the 4 million-a-day export. After all, if Canada’s doing so well, why don’t … Alberta said, “We can’t give you our oil. We need it. We’re booming. That’s what we’ve been told.
“Why would we give it to a booming United States that already is the greatest producer of gas and oil in history and self-sufficient, unless it’s in our interest? It’s right across the border. The United States treats us better than our other provinces treat us. They allow a pipeline into a foreign country, i.e., the United States. Our other provinces don’t allow Alberta to do that.
“And, by the way, they allow a pipeline then to go into Quebec and Ontario. If we cut off their pipeline, they’ll cut off two of our provinces.”
