Canadians on the lookout for aid from the commerce struggle launched by United States President Donald Trump are sure to be disillusioned. The Trump administration has simply introduced it’s more than doubling Canadian softwood lumber duties, including to an already punishing flurry of tariff actions.
These tariffs are designed to squeeze Canada, pressuring us into giving up our sovereignty. And whereas Trump might have cooled his annexation discuss recently — seemingly due to the way it was resurrecting the Liberal Get together’s fortunes within the ongoing federal election marketing campaign — we can not merely fake this risk has gone away.
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In response, Canada should use each device at its disposal. It ought to leverage retaliatory tariffs and goal commerce motion at susceptible Republican districts if Trump targets Canada with extra tariffs.
Canadian shoppers have to proceed boycotting American goods and Canada ought to ban American corporations from bidding on public contracts. It additionally must revitalize commerce and diplomatic relationships with dependable allies.
However alone, even these measures will probably be inadequate.
Public diplomacy like no different
To succeed, Canada wants probably the most formidable and energetic marketing campaign of public diplomacy in its historical past. The goal of this marketing campaign shouldn’t be the Trump administration, however the final voice of authority in U.S. politics — the American public. Canadian diplomacy ought to intention to persuade
Americans that the concept of annexing Canada, already unpopular, is a poisonous betrayal of U.S. values.
Doing so, nonetheless, requires utilizing the fitting language. Public diplomacy fails when it ignores the values of its viewers, and particularly when the viewers has a robust emotional attachment to these values.
Which means simply because one thing sounds righteous to Canadian ears doesn’t mean it resonates with Americans. Defending Canadian sovereignty actually sounds good to Canadians, however this idea is just too summary and distant from People’ on a regular basis lives.
Likewise, Canadians are fiercely happy with our identification as “good neighbours,” however most People reside removed from us and have no idea us. Nor can we invoke a shared historical past that almost all of People don’t keep in mind or have by no means discovered.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
The worth of freedom
As a substitute, if Canadians are going to talk to People, then they need to converse to their tradition — and in U.S. tradition, no worth speaks extra loudly than the worth of freedom. As American historian Eric Foner writes: “No concept is extra basic to People’ sense of themselves as people and as a nation than freedom.”
For American cognitive psychologist George Lakoff, most of up to date U.S. politics will be learn as a wrestle over totally different conceptions of freedom. From the Declaration of Independence launching a new child United States right into a struggle for its freedom to the bravery of the Freedom Riders through the Civil Rights Motion, there isn’t a different American worth that has the broad resonance and emotion attraction of freedom.
If America has a civil faith, in actual fact, it’s nearly actually a religion in freedom.
Canadians have to embrace this language and converse it relentlessly at each alternative. People have to know that Canadians need the liberty to decide on their leaders and their legal guidelines. They need the liberty to commerce with out the interference of tariffs. They need the liberty to decide on who enters our nation.
They need the liberty to talk totally different languages. The need the liberty to decide on what’s taught in Canadian colleges, for girls to decide on, to criticize our authorities, to decide on who we’re and who we love. And if Canadians don’t have the liberty to say “no thanks” to turning into the 51st state, then they don’t actually have any freedom in any respect.
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(AP Photograph/Lindsey Wasson)
Placing People on the defensive
Embracing this language does greater than merely sign shared values, it places advocates of annexation on the defensive. By claiming the mantle of freedom, Canadians can put pro-annexation voices on the again foot by forcing them into defending an unpopular position.
Why ought to Canadians lose their freedom to elect their very own leaders or make their very own legal guidelines, lose their independence or bend the knee to an American president? People would by no means settle for an identical alternative.
Advocates of annexation, together with members of the Trump administration, have to be relentlessly challenged over why they assume Canadians ought to be disadvantaged of their freedoms and compelled to turn into American topics.
The Trump administration has spent weeks suggesting Canadians have a stark alternative: endure financial ache or undergo annexation. Luckily, the American public is aware of that the selection between ache and submission isn’t a free alternative, and that the denial of freedom is profoundly un-American.
Canada wants to inform Americans that’s precisely what their authorities is doing.
