I warned you I’d be back occasionally, haunting the back page... while there’s still a back page to haunt. Forewarned is forearmed.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank that abominable man just over half the U.S. voting population put back in the White House. No, seriously. I want to thank him for all the good things he’s done for Canada. This won’t take long.
His asinine palaver about making Canada the 51st state has sparked a nationalistic fervour usually reserved for a gold medal win in Olympic hockey. And unlike those events, it seems to have some traction and is growing by the day. Canadians in number are boycotting American goods, choosing not to travel to the land of intolerance and even burning their Costco cards, chanting, “Hell no, we won’t shop.” As an aside, Costco cards are really difficult to burn.
Because Canadians have that Oh, So Canada feeling again, flying the Maple Leaf has come back into vogue. This is good from a pride-of-country mindset but more importantly, it has elevated our national flag from the depths to which it sunk when hijacked by the Freedumb Convoy losers. You no longer have to feel like a redneck yabo flying the flag.
It has reminded the entire population of the United States, even those who didn’t vote for him, there remains life in the epithet Ugly American, that being a pretty accurate description of how the rest of the world—not led by dictators—feels about you. Apologies to those of you who didn’t vote for the mutt but that’s the nature of generalizations. You’re tarred with the same brush and you can stop sewing Canadian flags on your knapsacks, we see right through you.
Finally, the example of what can happen when you let a deranged populist take the reins of power has made the upcoming Canadian federal election a horserace once again, with a very good chance it won’t be a cakewalk for Pierre Whatshisname.
Unfortunately, these four gifts to Canada have come at a steep price—global chaos, market turmoil, a sycophantic relationship between the U.S. and every right-wing dictator around the world, the de facto demise of NATO, the end of the world order put in place after the Second World War, and the universal gastric distress suffered every time Mr. Combover opens his mouth.
Oh, and Elon Musk. I don’t know about you but I can hardly pass a Tesla these days without wanting to key it or snap off a mirror.
But enough praise. What does this carpet-bombing of tariffs mean for Canada? Your guess is as good as mine, but at a minimum it means everything will be more expensive everywhere in the world, workers will be laid off, new cars will be out of the question again and the only growth notable in the market will come from an increased sale of anti-depressants.
More importantly though, what can Canada do? Our Lame Duck government immediately announced retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods to the tune of $30 billion dollars, rising to $155 billion in 21 days. Which goods? Both God and the Devil are in the details and so far, those details aren’t known, or reported. But if you have a fresh orange addiction, you’re in for a bumpy ride.
Personally, I don’t think countervailing tariffs are enough. If the main tool of the White House is chaos, I believe we need to fight chaos with more chaos. If we learned anything from the last time this loose cannon was president, we learned reason, facts, self-interest and ridicule seem to have little or no effect on him. So why not chaos. Fire with fire.
Where better to start than that most Canadian of commodities, potash. Canada produces more potash than any other country in the world. Canada is the 800-pound gorilla of potash, producing nearly double the next largest producer, Russia. And unlike Russia, which uses almost all of its potash internally to grow the next crop of fodder, Canada exports most of what it produces.
In case you’re completely unfamiliar with gardening or farming, potash is primarily potassium, chemical symbol K. It’s the third number on any fertilizer bag and, well, things just don’t grow without it.
After Russia, Belarus, China and Israel are the only major producers. Their numbers fall off dramatically.
Canada exports more than twice as much potash as Russia and Belarus, almost seven times more than Israel, and China doesn’t even make the list of exporters. China is the largest importer of potash, followed by Brazil and the U.S.
The U.S. produces a fraction of what they use, importing most of what they need from, yup, Canada.
Under the tariff war, that potash will be more expensive. Corn, soybean and other farmers in the Midwest U.S., are setting their hair on fire over what this price increase is likely to mean for them. They want potash to be un-tariffed. Canadian potash accounts for 80 per cent of all the potash used by U.S. farmers. But let’s not forget... those same Midwest farmers are the short-sighted populists who elected Trump.
So here’s the plan. Don’t send ‘em even a spoonful of Canadian potash. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Let the Magacites piss on their crops and see if that helps ‘em grow. High in nitrogen but no measurable potassium. They’re not going to get it anywhere else. They’ll be like junkies going cold turkey, breaking into peoples’ houses to steal potash. So will the whole of the U.S. market. Without corn there’s no methanol, no high-fructose corn syrup, no cattle feed, no popcorn.
The two punch of the one-two is canola. Guess who produces more canola oil than anyone else in the world? Stop blushing, of course it’s Canada. By a factor of three over the next largest producer.
Canada supplies the lion’s share of cooking oil used by the U.S. Without Canadian canola, the staple food of Americans—French fries, or is it Freedom Fries again?—would have to be cooked in palm oil or perhaps McDonald’s would go back to using beef tallow like it did in the early days. Of course, if they did that their largest consumer, Trump, would probably die of congestive heart failure in six months.
Canada, you’ve got the cards. You can out-chaos the chaos maker. You can school him in the real art of the deal. Take off the gloves and come out swinging.
