U.S. border czar Tom Homan says America should shift its border security focus north to Canada, calling the country a “huge national security vulnerability” now that the Trump administration says the southern border has been secured.
On today’s episode of Straight Up with Marc Patrone, Carleton University professor Ian Lee discusses his new book, Trapped in the Shadow of Trump’s America and How We Escape, and argues Canada’s vulnerability to the United States is largely the result of decades of self-inflicted economic weaknesses that Trump is now exploiting.
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Lee points to declining productivity, interprovincial trade barriers, excessive regulation and restrictions on resource development, arguing Canada made itself overly dependent on the U.S. instead of building the infrastructure needed to sell its resources around the world.
He places some of the blame on what he calls Canada’s “Laurentian elites” in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal.
“They’re largely progressive liberals, small-l liberals,” Lee said, arguing those who favoured restricting resource development helped leave Canada overly dependent on the U.S. market.
Lee says free trade with the U.S. was not the mistake. Rather, Canada failed to diversify at the same time, leaving roughly 70 per cent of its exports dependent on a single market.
Lee gives Prime Minister Mark Carney credit for beginning to reverse some previous policies and opening the door to more resource development, but argues Ottawa still isn’t moving fast enough to tackle regulatory delays, infrastructure bottlenecks and Canada’s poor productivity.
Finally, Lee supports diversifying Canadian trade but warns Europe cannot simply replace the U.S. market because it faces major competitiveness and productivity problems of its own.
“We’ve got to save ourselves,” Lee said.
Watch the latest episode of Straight Up with Marc Patrone.
