The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Canada seeks to diversify its trade partnerships beyond the U.S

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

What should we make of Trump's latest 35% tariff threat on Canada? Rudyard and Andrew agree that while this is not surprising given who we are dealing with, it's also not unique to Canada, with Europe and Mexico likewise getting hit with a tariff threat as well. We are not dealing with a normal interlocutor, and anybody who talks about Trump being a natural negotiator is not familiar with the trajectory of his career and many bankruptcies. Unfortunately for Mark Carney, the US holds most of the cards in cross border negotiations, and if recent history is any indication, there is no way of guaranteeing that Trump will live up to any treaty he signs. In the meantime, Europe and the Indo-Pacific have begun strengthening their relationships with other trade partners which will cost the US bargaining power in the future. But should Canada - in a similar bid to diversify trade - seek to strengthen business ties with China? And can Trump's tariffs - which have already paid off a portion of the US treasury's deficit - actually work as intended and chip away at America's ballooning debt? Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We have no idea. We literally have no idea whether Trump would actually live up to any treaty he signed. We have a pretty good idea who won't since he negotiated and signed the successor to NAFTA, the so-called Kuzma. I insist on calling it NAFTA. But so what is the point of a concession if you've got no assurance whatever that he won't just eat the concession and demand more right away? Welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Reddier-Griffis here, your chair and moderator. We continue our ongoing conversation. with Andrew Coyne. He's columnist with the Globe and Mail, best-selling book author, and he's all ours for the next half hour here at the Monk Debate Studios. Andrew, great to be in conversation. Good to be with you as usual. So much to talk about, but since we last met and had our most recent conversation, we've seen a raft of new tariffs announced by the president. It's threatened on August 1st. He seems to have drawn another deadline. It's almost as if, Andrew, that we're going back to Independence Day of early April. What do you make of this? Is it a negotiation tactic? Is it a real

threat? How do we make some methodology out of the madness? Is it a distraction from Jeffrey Epstein? I mean, you just don't know. I mean, what it certainly shows is, this is true of a lot of issues these days, is it is not unique to Canada, trying to deal with Trump's ever-changing moods and ever-changing demands. So we've been jumping up and down. What did we do wrong? maybe we weren't tough enough, maybe we were too tough. Why did he hit us with a 35% tariff out of the blue? But he just did the same thing to Europe and Mexico with 30% tariffs. And they are like us tearing their hair out, trying to figure out what's the appropriate response.

So Europe, for example, has decided not to respond in kind at this point in hopes that something can be arranged between now and August 1st. But you're just not dealing with a normal interlocutor. I don't know if I've made this comparison before on this program, but sometimes when a really good hockey team plays against a really lousy hockey team, the really good team is flummox because the lousy team does not respond in any way that they're used to. And they kind of get dragged down on their level or can even lose, you know, in a certain times. Sometimes it's sort of similar here is you're dealing with a negotiating partner who's not obeying any of the normal rules in negotiating. Anybody who talks about Trump being a master negotiator, I don't think is actually conversant with his career.

Six bankruptcies, you know, threw away his father's inheritance, is consistently made a chump by Vladimir Putin or, you know, Kim Jong-un. In this case, he does have a strong hand to play in the sense that everybody wants access to the U.S. market, doesn't want to be denied access to the U.S. market. But you can just see people just trying to figure out what works with this guy, you know, and the answer is it's not clear anything does. Yeah. In Europe, what we've heard or seen are some divisions. We've seen Macron come forward and basically argue for a much harder line versus Trump, that he thinks that there should be more preparation done now for bigger retaliatory package

and that Europe should draw some lines in the sand. We're hearing different things out of Germany. and out of Italy, where leaders seem to, I don't know, maybe for domestic reasons, Germany, the auto sector, much more keen possibly for a deal. Do you think in Canada we would benefit from more internal debate about this? I feel that when you compare Europe to Canada right now, we have a kind of quietism almost internally domestically when it comes to these negotiations. We basically said, Mark Carney, this is your task, job number one, go figure it out. And everyone else shut up? I don't know. It's interesting. I just see this contrast.

Well, obviously, we should always be able to debate things in a democracy. On the other hand, at this particular moment in history, maybe it pays to have those debates in private rather than in public. And I would say the same thing about Europe. I mean, what Trump thrives on is division. What Trump thrives on is playing one partner off against another. And that's true of the countries in Europe. And that's true, I think, of the provinces of Canada. So, I don't think there's anything wrong with the prime minister consulting the provinces. I believe there's a first minister's meeting coming up shortly. But ultimately, you have to have one negotiating party, and that party is the federal government.

So the provinces should absolutely have input, and we obviously need them to all be on the same page. I'm not sure we need to be out there debating it in public. It's sort of like there's that old saw in the United States that politics. at the waterland. Perhaps honored more in the breach than the observance, but that basic idea of you want to, you want to present a united front, I think particularly in Canada's case when we're up against something fairly existential. I don't think, I think that's fair.

So let's, for now, keep some of these debates behind closed doors. Okay. Well, just to be the burr under Mark Carney's saddle for a moment, you know, he did this very abrupt reversal on the digital. sales tax, which, look, there may have been all kinds of reasons to consider it a bad tax. Maybe he wanted to get rid of it. Maybe it was something left over from the Trudeau era that he, as others have said, was not how Canada should have proceeded on this.

But nonetheless, we seem to cave on that, and we seem to cave in a panic over the course of the weekend. Trump announcing on Friday are rescinding the act by Sunday evening. It's always just before markets open. We have to clean up these kind of do-dos that happen because of the president. Then the president comes out and says, well, you know what? I'm not going to honor our July 21st deadline. It's now October 1st and we're going to slap 30% plus tariffs on you unless you come to the table on issues that I'm not going to tell you, obviously, what they are in public.

But they're probably supply management and a bunch of other things that are much more significant for the Carney government than the digital services tax. So should Carney be open to a little bit of criticism here in terms of how this is, why didn't we come forward on the 21st and table our proposal anyway? I mean, why are we always jumping to his tune, playing to his clock? Yeah. Like, where's the criticism? It just seems that the media and others are silent about how Mark Carney's handled this. I'm not sure it's been pitch perfect to this point. Just to, so we don't confuse our listeners, I think you meant to say August the first.

Yes, August the first. For a second, I think he made was something else. not aware of. Yeah, well, we're in a difficult situation, first of all. And this is not to defend the prime minister at all, but, but, you know, the United States does have most of the cards in this negotiation. Point one. Point two is, as you mentioned, it was probably a bad tax to begin with. Probably the mistake was to have said that they were proceeding with it because it gave Trump a kind of a casas bell, which he's always going to take anyway. Point three is you're getting people saying, well, they should have got something in return for it. And there's a sliver.

of a possibility that maybe they did get something we don't know about, but I think that's unlikely. But what is exactly what were you going to get if you don't even get into the negotiations? But point four, and this, and I come back to this over and over again, is what are the negotiations for? In a normal negotiation, a normal trade negotiation, and trade negotiations are always pretty strange to begin with. I'll just put this in parentheses, because most of the bargaining chips, it's like both sides have got a gun to their own head, right? Do this, or I'll, you know, slaughter my own consumers. So they're strange to begin with. But nevertheless, in this one is particularly strange because normally when one side makes a concession, the other side makes a return

concession, and the other side agrees to be bound by the concession that they've made. We have no idea. We literally have no idea whether Trump would actually live up to any treaty signed. We have a pretty good idea who won't since he negotiated and signed the successor to NAFTA, the so-called Kuzma. I insist on calling it NAFTA. but, so what is the point of a concession if you've got no assurance whatever that he won't just eat the concession and demand more right away? So the whole thing is problematic to me. I think a lot of it is, and I don't mean this in a, in a negative or critical way, I think a lot of it's performative. I think a lot of it is showing that we're standing out for the country.

And there's something to be said for that with somebody as irrational and emotive as Trump. you know if you can if you can pray upon some of his psychological failings if you can he is a bit of a coward frankly if you can make it clear that somebody or somewhere that that he whose opinion he vow is going to get hurt by this we've seen for example we i think we talked about us last time that you know when he when he started getting in trouble with farm groups over his assault on on migrants he backed off. So if you can find those constituencies in the states that would be hurt by whatever you're putting on, you do have actually a chance of getting them to back off. So far, it doesn't sound like we've had a great success at that. So part of our difficulties in negotiating is how much

can we actually hurt, other than hurting our own consumers, how much can we actually hurt theirs? But maybe there's something to be said just for symbolic shows of defiance that you're not going to be rolled over. Because, you know, it does seem like for what it's worth, and it may not be worth anything at all, he does seem to like Carney better than he likes Trudeau. Yes. Now, has that translated into actual concession so far? It doesn't sound like it. But, you know, arguably it might even be worse if Trudeau was still there. So these weird things like, you know, Vladimir Putin likes me. He'll literally say these things as being something of a guide to his calculus when he's, when he's negotiating these things.

If that's what this guy is about, then our negotiators have to take those kinds of strange, irrational considerations into account. Just to end this section on a maybe more positive note, we're seeing reports or signs that Asian countries now are really actively pursuing more bilateral trade with each other. Look, Asia has certain advantages of culture and geography and proximity. Possibly they can lessen their dependence on the United States

a lot faster than us. But does it speak, Andrew, just to horrible costs that America is paying behind the scenes here? A butcher's bill that literally is coming due every day as Donald Trump kind of eviscerates the bonds of trust that were built up over decades between the United States and Europe and Canada, the United States and its Asian trading partners. You just have to wonder if there's a silent noise out there, to use an oxymoron, that is the same. sound of not simply de-globalization, but de-Americanization of international trade? Well, or to borrow a term from another discussion, friend-shoring. So, you know, we, we, you know, consensus opinion came to the conclusion in recent times that our efforts to liberalize trade with Russia and China in the interest of trying to draw them into the international

consensus had failed. And that in fact they were our adversaries in a very overt way now and Why would we want to trade with our adversaries and enrich them? And so there's been a strong movement towards not simply putting up the barriers and calling it a day, but actually opening trade more with our friends and people who can at least be persuaded to behave like our friends. So you can salvage something from the rubble, in other words, that we don't just have to give up on globalization or give up on free trade. We can say, okay, that particular party doesn't seem interested in it right now or we're not interested in doing it with them. let's deepen and expand trade with other like-minded countries. Okay, so that's the discussion we had about Russia and China.

I think we need to have that discussion about the United States now because, as I think we've discussed, even once Trump was gone, we can't be sure the United States is going to revert to being the kind of bulwark of the international order and international trading system, or particularly that it was in the past. If protectionism is now much more going to be the norm in the United States, maybe not as overt or as.

or as shifting in mercurial as in Trump's case, but if that's what it's going to happen, then maybe the rest of the free trading world, free market world needs to get this act together. It needs to be, you know, really drive forward some of the piecemeal trade negotiations they've had in the past and make further progress on that. There was a piece in the New York Times over the weekend,

about exactly that, that this is what you're seeing signs. You mentioned Asia, but also, you know, Canada and Europe, getting their act together. And that way, you know, you still have a large free trading sphere, and you can still have all of the benefits of free trade within that world, if you like. And you leave a light on the window for the United States. You know, call us when you're ready to come to your senses and maybe we can reconstruct something. And frankly, maybe we get a better, more balanced world order out of it. Maybe when the United States is having to deal with an already constructed free trade order,

that they lose some of their bargaining leverage, and you get something a bit more balanced than we've had in the past. And maybe somewhat provocatively, you know, Europe is clearly leaving a door open to China in terms of their economy. They're, you know, restructuring some of their deals on Chinese electric vehicles and other things, which even a year ago they were much more potentially restrictive

and negative about it. I wonder if Canada shouldn't be thinking about that, too, that in that new kind of free trading world order, What if we could find ways to pull the Chinese into it? It certainly would create leverage with the United States. And who knows? I think the challenge still of trying to bring China out of its autocracy into something other than what it is now to make it more liberal, if not politically, at least economically.

Hopefully that could remain a goal. I'm skeptical, to be honest with you. Okay. I'm not sure the arguments have gone away as to why we wanted to. French Shore versus China. They are still interfering in our elections. They are still an expansionist dictatorship that is each day making more noises about attacking Taiwan. So I think some of the geostrategic considerations that made us leery of further exposing ourselves to the Chinese. Remember, this was what we thought was we were drawing them into the liberal world order. What we found

to our alarm was, no, we'd made ourselves more dependent on, more exposed to them, if it were any other If it was a normal country, I wouldn't say dependent or exposed. I would just say we were benefiting from exchange. But with a country like China, I think there's more to be said. Now, look, are you going to undo or reverse all of the comparative advantage benefits of trading with China? Are you just going to close the borders? No, you're not. But I'd be very weary, I should say, of pursuing some trade agreement with them.

Again, I don't want to make concessions to China. I don't want China to be able to make demands on us. And I'm not sure I want, frankly, I'm not sure I want us to be doing more trade with China if that just gives them more leverage on us, ultimately, if they impose trade sanctions. So it's a nice idea to say, okay, now we'll pivot to China and that'll show the United States. But, you know, China is our adversary. What would you think if part of these trade negotiations going on with Canada right now is a demand by the Americans that we accept, let's say, their tariffs on China and that our access to the United States. States is predicated on our accepting a North American tariff wall that the White House and Donald Trump determines.

This is a great fear of mine. It is I don't in any, I don't attach any great probability to America trying to annex us. You know, I wouldn't entirely rule that, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't attach any great probability to it. The worry for me has always been Finlandization. Explain that analogy. Finland, Finland for many decades living next to the Soviet Union, the price of their independence was, their sovereignty was, they lost some of it. They had to pursue a foreign policy

that was congenial and a defense policy that was congenial to the Soviet Union. And my worry is, maybe not to that degree, but are we going to face increasing demands for increasing constraints on our freedom of maneuver, our ability to have our own trade policy with other countries? I mean, I don't think we should have a free trade treaty with China, but I think it should be our choice, our ability to have our own defense alliances. If we don't think the Americans are trustworthy anymore, should we be able to strike more independent agreements with Europe? Is the United States going to object to that? And I think there's going to be some really tough issues going forward. We've all been talking a good game of, okay, now we'll pivot to Europe,

now we'll have more trade with Europe, we'll do more defense policy, et cetera. We haven't, I think, factored in, not that this should change our mind, but the Americans may have something to say about this. And so, yeah, we may, I mean, even before all this, we were getting demands. In fact, I think some of it was built into the Kuzma, the language that could be interpreted, shall we say, as constraining our ability to strike independent trade agreements with unknown, unnamed powers. I think this is going to be an increasing issue, is how do we assert our sovereignty versus the United States in this particular respect of our ability to deal with the rest of the world in the way that we see fit?

And if we don't want to end up being like a fast boiling frog in a pot of kind of, you know, American hegemony on the continent, how hard do you think, Andrew, we fight against that? What did, I guess what I'm trying to understand, is there something for you or would you advise that there are red lines? Because right now, it's not clear to me that we've really articulated many red lines. Yes, we pass through Parliament, a unanimous vote on some defendants. supply management, a kind of odd red line, if there ever was one, to trip and die on, potentially. But for you, would there be other red lines, like, for instance, let's say having to harmonize our trade policy with American trade policy?

What's going too far? Yeah. Let me start at maybe a further thing. A common currency would be going too far. When people, you saw people like Kevin O'Leary talking about an economic union, which basically means a common currency, which basically means you adopt the U.S. dollar. Right. And monetary policy. Well, exactly. So you give up basically a good chunk of your sovereign right there.

So not that anyone's proposing that these days, but that would certainly, you know, specific examples, I'd have to give it more thought as to where is your red line. Let's say I know you're a supporter or hypothetical supporter of the Golden Dome, missile defense, stationing American military personnel in Canada to operate a missile system that's shooting down potential. potentially threats that are coming either over the North Pole or. For me, off the top of my head, it would depend on what the terms of engagement were. How much would they be able to make decisions without consulting Canada, et cetera? I think those would all be critical to that. The idea of having specific military, U.S. military personnel and Canadian soil would not be a deal breaker for me. It might be for others.

To me, it would be the terms of engagement. But what I wanted to say was simply, you know, and I hope this isn't ducking your question, is whatever the red lines, there have to be red lines. Yes. In other words, when you're being blackmailed, you have to be at some point willing to say to the blackmailer, go ahead, fill your boots, do whatever it is you want to do, fulfill whatever threats you're making. Because otherwise, you're just dying a thousand deaths, and the cost are theoretically infinite. At least you know, if they fulfill their threats, there's a specific cost of that that you can decide whether you can live with or not. So we absolutely have to be willing to say, at some point, the Americans, do what you've got to do.

You know, make our day. But short of that, this is where the art of politics, the art of diplomacy comes in, is finding the mixture of defiance and conciliation, depending on the president's mood, depending on the situation he's in the polls, these kinds of things. Again, a point I've made often is he's a declining force in many ways. He is losing ground in the polls. He is getting older.

You're seeing more and more elements of the MAGA coalition, breaking off. Look at the damage that's happening to him now. Jeffrey Epstein. So whenever we're negotiating, we should be doing so in a dynamic, forward-looking way, in both senses. So in some ways, he's a declining force, but he's also getting worse as a person. His behavior, as we discussed, is becoming more and more erratic if that were possible. So we've got to be factoring both those things of not where are we now, but where are we going to be three months, six months a year from now, in terms of his relationship with the Congress,

in terms of his popularity in the polls, in terms of the elements of his coalition. But right now, you would say, from our perspective, it's looking good in the sense that he is in a lot of trouble on a lot of different fronts. And he's vastly overstated, I think, his leverage. He's as even sensible presidents usually overreed their mandate. They usually try too many things, take on too many things,

and Congress devours them or foreign policy devours them, and they don't wind up getting nearly as much done as they thought they would. I think with Trump, that's happening in spades. So I come back to the old thing, play for time. If you're enjoying the Monk Debates podcast, come over to our website at triple-w monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com and check out our free monk membership.

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To bring this conversation full circle, we began by asking about, I began to ask you about the the new tariffs that he's threatening on Mexico and Europe 30%. And whether we, this was Deja Vu, Groundhog Day, we were going back to early April because you're, you would start, if those tariffs were enacted, you would start to put together really almost a Depression era, at least U.S. policy response to the rest of the world. There's been reporting in the last a while that at the U.S. Treasury,

where they collect the tariffs, year to date, they've collected almost $100 billion. This has wiped out the deficit inside the Treasury. The Treasury is now building a surplus based on tariff revenue, and this just really hasn't been seen in a number of decades. I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think it by the end of the year, though, like they've got enormous deficit.

So I think that's on a month-to-month basis. It's the deficit of the Treasury itself, not the entire U.S. government. So the Treasury has a balance sheet internally that it has expenses. It has to pay for its own operations. Pay for other things. On the other hand, it collects revenues. The tariffs are coming into them. It goes back, though, to what I think many of us have worried about, which is at the end

of the day, the United States is in a precarious fiscal position of its own. It has deficits to GDP of six or odd percent. They're spending more on interest payments than they are in their military, and that's trillion dollar a year bill and to itself to what extent are you concerned and or that possibly the president in his own way and in his own party and in this political moment with the big beautiful bill act having passed congress may not have as much optionality when it comes to tariffs as we might impart to him in his administration in other words they may see tariffs as a genuine tool to collect revenue and if you want to be really cynical about it as a way to actually levy a tax

on Americans and have a broad portion of Americans cheer on an administration for levying a new tax on them. What do you think of this, Andrew? Is there something happening here, a toxic combination of American indebtedness, an addiction to deficit spending, a massive spending bill that's just been pushed through in the last few months, and soaring revenues coming through tariff, that many in his political and economic universe are saying, this, sir, is how we get ourselves out of the problem that we are in economically, fiscally, financially. Well, we've talked before about how they have, you know, many different conflicting rationales for the tariffs, one of which is raised revenues, one of which is use bargaining chips, for example,

which are mutually contradictory. If you bargain in the way, so goes your revenues. You also lose your revenues if the tariffs do what tariffs will do, the long range, which is stop trade. So what's happening, I think, right now, and people have been talking about this, that the markets basically don't think that Trump will go through with it. So people haven't really made a lot of changes in their arrangements. They're simply paying the tariffs. Of course, the tariffs are being passed on to consumers. So ultimately, the consumer is paid. Or even by companies, because we haven't seen that spike of inflation yet.

It may come, but it hasn't shown up yet. But this is all, as I say, this is all in a in a taco world, right? Trump always chickens out. So there's a, there's a lot of assumptions built in, I think, in market behavior right now and in diplomatic behavior that ultimately this is all going to be a bluff and he's not going to retain these things. Because certainly, as I say, if he does keep the tariff and make them permanent, and if that becomes, that registers with people that this is permanent, you're going to see huge disruption in trade flows. And so you won't get that revenue because people will stop, you know, importing as much. Fair enough. So in other words, this is a kind of Goldilocks period where the full consequences of the palsy haven't been, what's the word,

internalized. That's right. And you're kind of having your cake and eating it too. For now. Now, I might dispute one of the things that was embedded in your question, which is that Americans are cheering for this. One of the great things come out, one of these weird silver linings of Trump flying the protectionist flag is, you've seen a huge surge in support for free trade in the United States.

Have you? Okay. Oh, yeah. People have seen, polling that on this, people have seen what the alternative is and they don't like it. And similar, there was just a story out the other day that there's now been a surge in support for immigration in the United States because they're looking at the alternative of shutting down immigration. So that, you know, I often say if they had the, if they had the World Trade Organization meet in Seattle this time, the way they did in whatever year it was, I don't think there'd be any protests. I think, you know, Trump's done more to rehabilitate the World Trade Organization. than anybody on earth.

So if they are counting on these revenues, you're worried is that they'll be beholden, they'll be so... Well, addicted to these revenues. In a sense, they're funding their tax cuts and their profligacy now through this tariff revenue, and it's become a feature, not a bug, of the bigger fiscal model for government under Trump.

If they are planning on that, they're fools, and they're just going to make the fiscal situation worse, which is, I shouldn't even say if, you know, they are fools, So, yes, so, you know, this is another weakness of the United States and therefore a weakness of Trump is, you know, sooner or later, this level of indebtedness is going to bite even the country with the reserve currency. And, you know, a year or two, four years ago, I would have laughed at anybody who said the United States, the dollar was about to lose as to the reserve currency. When you've got a president who seems to be doing everything he possibly can, and in some cases, you have some of the people around him think, being the reserve currency is some terrible burden the United States is bearing. So there's a lot of really demented thinking around him. And so they, yeah, they, to all appearance, it seemed to be

doing their best to basically annihilate the U.S. dollar. And all kinds of consequences that they clearly haven't thought about will flow from that. You can carry that much debt if everyone needs to hold U.S. dollars. If people don't need to hold U.S. dollars, then you're just another creditor, only even larger and in worse trouble. And so this going forward, is an absolute, I mean, they're running these massive deficits. I think I saw a figure saying that the deficit this year would be 9% of GDP. Wow. If that's conceivable, I hope I'm right in saying that.

The only point, even if it's much less than that, this is at the top of the business cycle. Yeah. Right? What happens when they get into a recession, which again, he seems to be doing it? What happens if he fires the Fed chairman? Well, he seems to almost want to do that on a de facto basis. And puts some inflationist with crazy theories in his head about, you know, The way to lower inflation is to lower interest rates are some of the madness that's around.

Turkey. Exactly. So there's real potential for just a massive collapse, frankly, of the U.S. economy. Not predicting it, but it's, you know, more so than any time in my life, I would say there's a potential for it. Well, there's a, what's the famous phrase to express all this? An exorbitant privilege is what you have, and it's been an exorbitant privilege to spend this half hour with you.

I had so many other things I wanted to talk to you about. But again, Andrew, you're a fountain of wisdom and insight. And I didn't get your excellent column on the fate of the NDP and the future of our voting system. So we're going to have to say we're going to roll that over into our conversation next week. Thank you so much for making it down to the studio on a very hot, muggy kind of wildfire-induced day in Toronto. So you've braved our weather here. And you've made it to the studio and we really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the show.

That was Andrew Coyne. I've celebrated Golden Mail columnist, bestselling author of a new book on Democracy. Go check it out on Indigo or Amazon. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, Chair of the Monk Debates. Thanks for tuning into these. Our Monk Dialogues. We'll keep them going as long as you want them. And show us that you do want them by liking our channel on YouTube.

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