Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Suscríbete a nuestro canal de YouTube para ver más de sus videos.
Hola, soy Victor Davis Hanson para The Daily Signal.
El filósofo Heráclito, un filósofo de la antigua Grecia, dijo una vez que uno no se baña dos veces en el mismo río, queriendo decir que el río fluye. Otras personas miran esa cita y dicen que quiso decir panta rhei, todo fluye o cambia, aunque él mismo no lo dijera necesariamente.
Todo cambia. Eso se aplica a nuestra disputa actual entre EE. UU. y Canadá. Nos dieron una descripción inicial en los medios, y luego tuvimos alguna aclaración, y ahora estamos en lo que yo llamaría la Etapa Tres.
La Etapa Uno fue la indignación contra Donald Trump y los Estados Unidos, y esta es la narrativa que obtuvimos de un lado, de Mark Carney. Dijo que los estadounidenses están en ello de nuevo, y Trump en particular. Nos están acosando. Están exigiendo que nos quiten la soberanía, y están diciendo con quién podemos comerciar y con quién no.
Y luego, quieren aplastar el nacionalismo canadiense, y quieren suprimir la lectura, la literatura y la influencia indígena en el idioma francés, y no vamos a hacer eso. Así que tuvimos que retirarnos.
Entonces, todo el mundo se enfadó mucho. The Wall Street Journal dijo: Este es un espectáculo tonto de Trump justo en la víspera de las elecciones de mitad de período. Esto es una locura.
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.”
