If you are confused by the ever-changing, on-again, off-again, on-again, maybe never, look out it starts tomorrow barrage of presidential statements on tariffs, take comfort from the fact that you are supposed to be confused. It’s Trump’s way of softening up the target before serious negotiations.“If you read his book (The Art of the Deal) you’ll see he’s already told us how he does things.” Thus Brian Lee Crowley, founder of Ottawa’s leading think tank, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, tonight’s guest on Hannaford..Crowley tells show host Nigel Hannaford that it’s a mistake to think Trump is acting irrationally, that he actually has two defined objectives.“First,Trump is genuinely trying to respond to the concerns of the people he’s in sympathy with, the so-called forgotten people in the rust belt whose jobs were offshored. And as Vice President Vance has eloquently described in his book and the film of the book, fentanyl addiction is part of their burden. So yes, fentanyl was entering the US from Canada. But we’ve done something about that. Trump keeps the threat alive because it’s a signal to that group of Trump supporters that he’s still working for them.”Second says Crowley, Trump is very well aware that America today is militarily vulnerable, because the country can no longer make everything it needs to fight a major war. The idea, he says, is to ‘onshore’ the productive capacity that America needs, to bring back the industries it lost, in the interests of national security.So, what now for Canada and those who have to negotiate with Trump’s team?Crowley: “We need to get past the hysteria. It’s understandable but the first part of our response is to get through that. Then the second part is that Canada needs to think about the grand bargain that we can offer that deals with our concerns but that also responds to America’s largest concerns. That’s economic, but it’s also to acknowledge that we have been free riders in continental defence, that we have been lax in immigration and that we have allowed some pretty sketchy characters into the country and we don’t even know where they are.”What that looks like is the subject of tonight’s show. It airs at seven o clock.
