United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs against Canada are understandably causing much consternation and debate. Some business leaders are forecasting dire warnings, union officials are calling for retaliation and relief while also sidling up with their corporate counterparts to present a united front. But these developments are about much more than tariffs. Trump’s tariff plan exposes the perils of Canada’s dependency on the U.S. and the price of integration within the American Empire.
To discuss these issues, last week I sat down with Sam Gindin. For more than 25 years, Sam was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers union. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of Global Capitalism, and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist Challenge Today. This interview was recorded and transcribed before Trump’s February 1 “tariff deadline.”
Adam King: Let’s start first with your overall assessment of Trump’s threat to impose tariffs not just on Canada but on other imports into the United States as well. How credible are the threats, and how do they fit within his administration’s overall political project, such as we understand it so far?
Sam Gindin: Right now Trump is living his dream of being an American King. He has complete control over the Republican Party, has defeated and demoralized the Democrats, and neither the labour movement nor the left have the capacities to significantly challenge him. We are obviously vulnerable–in both Canada and the U.S.–to Trump’s dangerous whims. For the time being he can pretty well do what he wants.
But contradictions will emerge. At one end of the spectrum are the mundane: scandals to come from appointments based on loyalty not competence and the inevitable clashes among the arrogant egos with whom Trump had surrounded himself. At the other end, Trump seems to be challenging the very essence of the post-war American Empire. The American Empire has been distinct in not just looking to be the biggest empire among other empires but in leading and overseeing an empire that integrated others under its wing, universalized the economic and social relations of capitalism globally, and supported the formal sovereignty of states. America’s interests always came first of course but those interests were understood as accommodating the interests of capitalism everywhere. Trump has, in contrast, mobilized popular American frustrations by pointing to the imbalance between America’s leading role and the unfair share of global burdens and benefits allotted to America. The King will fix this by putting American interests unambiguously and unashamedly first.
The contradiction lies in the impact of this nationalist turn on American business at home and abroad. Business has been relatively quiet on this so far, concentrating on getting the goodies they want from Trump while assuming he will retreat from his rhetorical threats against the free trade order. But if Trump goes ahead with his dramatic tariff increases this will bring not only higher inflation but also retaliation from other countries that will disrupt supply chains and threaten export markets. Furthermore, American legitimacy–already questioned–will be further eroded. Pushback will come, not so much from his disoriented political foes but from his own allies. The question is, how will Trump respond down the road as he faces that pushback? Will he double down, or retreat?
In assessing all this it is crucial to grasp that the noise may be about tariffs, but tariffs are for Trump primarily a bargaining chip, especially but not only in Canada’s case, to gain certain ‘voluntary’ concessions. Canada, already a pliant ally, is being warned to get even further in line with American preferences on, among other things, immigration policy, military expenditures and access to resources (oil of course but perhaps also water).
Many of us argued that the free trade agreements with the U.S. were always a sham. The tariff threat confirms that the U.S. has the power and arrogance to ignore treaties when it pleases. In spite of brave talk, a dependent and defensive Canada seems ready to surrender still more of its substantive sovereignty to get rid of the latest tariffs and keep its big brother happy. If the trade-offs Trump is asking for occur, Canadian politicians will claim a ‘victory’–a victory that cannot guarantee that tariffs won’t be reimposed when circumstances shift again and which, in exchange for a return to the previous tariff status quo, Canada will accept all kinds of policies the American administration has no business dictating to us.
AK: I’d like to frame these issues with some historical background. Continental economic integration was once a hotly debated issue. Left nationalists in Canada feared the influence of the U.S. and the threat of American pressure to lower our social standards and public spending levels. Those opposition forces largely lost out and an era of neoliberal free trade followed and dominated for roughly 30 years.
Are we living through a reckoning with or even an overhaul of this model of globalization? How should we understand recent developments–not only Trump’s tariff threats but also Biden’s domestic investment agenda–in relation to this history of struggle over free trade?
SG: You’re quite right. The Canadian mobilization against free trade some four decades ago was fighting against still deeper integration into the American Empire and its values. But today, while we are even more dependent on the U.S. and the U.S. has become an even uglier place, Canadian officialdom–and some unions–are begging for what we opposed back then. An expression, as you say, of our four-decades-long defeat.
Your second point on whether we are in the midst of an epochal shift in globalization is critical. America flexing its muscles is not new. But in the past it involved specific sectors and was temporary, aimed at giving American business some breathing room and playing to popular uncertainties in order to maintain America’s larger overall global thrust. Trump is, however, clearly threatening, as you say, a more radical turn. I expect that Trump will modify but not reverse globalization–not because of opposition from the Democrats, unions or the left, but from pushback, if it comes to this, from his business allies.
AK: Let’s shift to the questions of China. Clearly, both Trump and Biden’s ‘turn inwards’ stems in large part from concerns over the rise of China. What role is competition with China playing here?
SG: The United States was the main force pushing to bring China into the World Trade Organization (WTO). China offered a massive market and massive pools of low-cost labour that would contribute to keeping inflation low in the U.S., profits high for American companies, while strengthening American competitiveness. Geo-politically, integrating China into global capitalism would make it far less of a potential threat.
The panic over China today is rooted in the U.S. determination to have not just relative economic and military power but absolute power. Militarily, China hasn’t given any indications of being an expansionary power. The U.S. has some 750 military bases around the world, about 200 of which are in Asia. China has none anywhere near the U.S. (or America’s NATO allies). Their primary goal, and key to the legitimization of the [Communist Party of China], is to continue to develop economically and raise living standards. China has placed its bet on doing so under the umbrella of the American Empire. The dilemma for the U.S. is that it now wants to contain China militarily and technologically but is at the same time anxious to avoid ‘decoupling’ from China.
This gets us back to the contradictions between the Trump administration and American business. American business has been rather quiet, supporting Trump for the tax cuts, the deregulation and the restructuring of federal departments but expecting he’ll get over his nationalist preoccupation. The reality is that Trump has no program to address popular concerns with jobs, insecurities, inequalities and the general malaise in small town America because these problems can’t be solved by his facile solutions; they demand challenging capital and that’s exactly where he’s not going. So there will be all kinds of openings for the left if it can organize itself and win working people over.
AK: In the face of Trump’s threats to Canada, there seems to be an all-party consensus supposedly committed to protecting the Canadian national interest. At the same time, some unions have called for a plan to counter the threat of tariffs, which includes targeted trade retaliation, renewed industrial and procurement policies, and emergency relief and income benefits for workers impacted. How do you assess the responses of Canadian politicians so far? Perhaps more importantly, what should we make of the labour movement’s position?
SG: Politicians like Doug Ford in Ontario either want the tariff issue to go away or they want to opportunistically flash their Canadian nationalist identities. They can’t be trusted. They will sell us out to get on the good side of the Americans, breathe a sigh of relief and claim a victory. ‘Look how great I was in saving Canada and keeping us open for business.’ As for Canadian business, their primary concern is not to alienate the U.S. If we ever made advances to a degree of delinking from the U.S., it would be Canadian business that would be first in line and most aggressive in attacking us.
That unions look lost after the decades of hammering they have received is not surprising. Many are bravely talking about retaliatory tariffs, but this won’t work. Our relative sizes and Canada’s particular dependence mean we can’t win this game of ‘tit for tat’ against America; Trump is more likely to up his threat in response. The inadequacy of the union response is inseparable from the weakness of the left, and the weakness of the left is a result of the union and social democratic defeats across the world.
We need to play a different game. There’s no nice middle ground here. The options have been polarized and unless we understand that and start discussing and debating what this means, we will keep confronting ever limited, demoralizing choices.
AK: Others seem to also be suggesting that this may be the time to rethink Canada’s economic relations with the U.S. and reorient domestic policies “to build a more self-reliant, resilient and fairer national economy fit for the new international disorder.” The challenge, it seems, is both figuring out what that might look like and charting a path there.
SG: It is of prime importance that we appreciate how radical it would be to move towards addressing the challenge posed in your question. The point is that the radical is today the only practical; it is the only hope.
The immediate task is to address delinking from the United States and the American Empire. This is not about aiming for a nationalist form of sovereignty but one that is based on collectively and democratically determining what kind of society we want. This cannot be achieved within the context of formal sovereignty but substantive dependence.
The fact of our current dependence cannot be ignored and the extent of this dependence makes delinking especially difficult–that’s why dependency is such a liability. Can we diversify our trade? How do we phase out our support, through our oil resources, of the American military colossus and how is this related to other priorities like the environment? Should we get out of NATO with its explicit subservience to the U.S.? And perhaps most important, if we look to reduce dependence on the American market, what kind of inward restructuring would this demand?
Taking control of economic restructuring begins with rethinking what we want to produce and which services we need. Some of this would involve replacing a share of imports with Canadian production. All kinds of social and cultural services demand expansion or improvement. The demands of the environment in particular mean rethinking how we live, work, travel and enjoy our lives. Addressing this involves expanding public transit, rebuilding infrastructure, transforming housing and offices, and modifying machinery and equipment so they are environment sensitive. Instead of plant closures–or in response to shutdowns due to American tariffs–we’d convert these existing facilities to different uses.
All of this implies a high degree of planning, and since you can’t plan what you don’t control, it implies fundamental challenges to private corporate power. And this question of power gets to the nub of being serious. What would it mean to build a movement with the power and confidence to do this? How do we intervene in the union movement? Could union locals also set up conversion committees to secure their long-term future? What kind of community organizing might this lead to?
The greatest hurdle we face is a sense of fatalism. After decades of defeat, people feel like there really is no alternative. This can only be reversed by developing an inspiring vision, building structures that give people confidence that working through them matters and orienting all our struggles to not just winning specific demands but measuring our success by whether those struggles are contributing to building the social forces we so desperately need.