Mafioso Tactics, Integrated Markets, and Pondering why Donald Trump is Doing to Canada What a Toddler With a Stick Does to a Frog
A Conversation with Canadian Senator Paula Simons
In the months since Donald Trump was elected president, I have limited my intake of news, but I haven’t stopped paying attention altogether. As painful as it is to learn about the latest horror being inflicted by the Felon-in-Chief and his Band of Mindless Miscreants and Enablers, I need to remain informed. We all do.
I get my news from newspapers and cable TV in the US and Canada. I also turn to friends who are journalists or who work or have worked in the political arena in both countries. One of those friends is Canadian Senator Paula Simons, whom I met when we were both Edmonton Journal columnists in the early aughts.
Parliament hasn’t been in session since before Christmas, and won’t be until after the next federal election, which was called yesterday, March 24, and will take place on April 28. Because Parliament isn’t in session, and because Paula is an independent senator and not affiliated with the governing Liberal party, she doesn’t have an official trade role.
However, she is keeping up with what’s happening in Ottawa and south of the border. While she said she has “almost no special knowledge that any other person reading the news doesn’t have,” she was happy to share her insight on the ever-changing and fast-deteriorating relationship between the country where I was born and the one that has been my home for nearly 33 years.
(Note: There’s more about the Canadian Senate and Paula’s role in it at the end of the Q&A.)
The threat to annex Canada is an existential question. We are not seeing this as a joke, because it has been made evident to us that the intention is to cripple our economy.
Debby: I’m so curious, what’s your take on the direction the US is taking under Trump?
Paula: I think like everybody else in the world I watched that scene in the Oval Office with Volodymyr Zelensky [on Feb. 28] and I kept thinking about Tony Soprano and protection rackets. That’s really what it sounded like: “Nice country you’ve got there, shame if anything happened to it.” To see those kind of mafioso tactics coming from the leader of the United States is very distressing.
Debby: So what do you think about Trump’s obsession with annexing Canada?
Paula: It’s surreal, and I really, really don’t think Americans understand. I was so angry the other day — I saw Christiane Amanpour interviewing [Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs] Melanie Joly, and Melanie Joly was very calmly explaining our sources of grievance and Amanpour was treating Trump’s 51st state shtick like a joke. And when she realized that Melanie Joly wasn’t going along with the joke, she seemed absolutely dumbfounded. She said, “My jaw has dropped open! Is this the end of an era?” And I started to scream at the television, “YES. THE ERA HAS ENDED!” And I think this is one of my really great frustrations, when I see progressive Americans who fail to understand that for Canada, this is an existential question. We are not seeing this as a joke, because it has been made evident to us that the intention is to cripple our economy.
Why is there a trade deficit? It’s because the US has 400 million people and Canada has 40 million people. There are more people in the US, with more money, buying more things.
Debby: Okay, Sen. Simons: explain Canada to my readers who don’t live here. You can start with trade.
Paula: Canada is the single largest market, by a large margin, for American goods, with nearly $350 billion in goods and services. Nobody imports more American goods than Canada does. And we are a little country, relatively speaking, of 40 million people. To pretend that the trade deficit is a crisis when the biggest part of that trade deficit is that America buys so much Canadian oil and so much Canadian electricity — that is why America has a trade deficit with us. Up until now, we have been buying almost as much as we could with almost no tariffs. That is the thing that is so frustrating.
Debby: What’s so frustrating, exactly?
Paula: The things that the American government are saying are completely wrong. They are completely false. And it’s not just the lies about fentanyl. I think President Trump fundamentally misunderstands the trade deficit. The United States has a trade deficit. That is not like a budget deficit. The trade deficit means that you buy more from Canada than Canada buys from you. Why is that? It’s because you have 400 million people and we have 40 million people. There are more of you, with more money, buying more things. The reason for the trade deficit is not because Canadians are engaged in some plot to bring down the American economy.
Debby: To me that’s one more example of Trump’s pathological projection tendencies: everything he accuses an individual or a country of doing is something he does. The question is, why is he doing it?
What does Trump want? More access to our dairy markets? Surely you don’t break this much furniture just to placate a few farmers in Wisconsin.
Paula: I had a very interesting interview for my podcast Alberta Unbound last week with Josh Wingrove, who is Bloomberg’s White House correspondent — he was an intern at the Edmonton Journal years ago. I can borrow his insights, which are that for Trump everything is transactional, everything is about who has power and that this is very much a power play. I would like to hope that this is just bargaining to get leverage, although it is hard for me to see, what does he want? More access to our dairy markets? Surely you don’t break this much furniture just to placate a few farmers in Wisconsin. Is it about our critical minerals? Is it about our water supply? Is it about our oil? And at the same time, the President is saying he doesn’t want any of those things.
Debby: I think he just wants to stay in the news. And torment as many people as he can.
Paula: This is a game for him. Like a little boy poking a frog with a stick, he’s enjoying seeing us jump. And we have to be careful that we don’t sound hysterical. I’m really happy to see that the people who are in charge of things — like Melanie Joly and Dominic LeBlanc [the trade minister] and [new Prime Minister] Mark Carney — have been calm and measured, because there is probably not a good reason for our leaders to set their hair on fire. Although I think it is important that some of us do a little hair-scorching.
Debby: Okay, that has to be a metaphor. What do you mean, we have to do some hair-scorching?
Paula: I don’t want to say that we’ve allowed ourselves to be dependent on the United States — but we trusted in the idea that we can have integrated markets. We have an integrated electricity grid. We have integrated car manufacturers. I was recently deputy chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Cows go back and forth across the border all the time. They might be pastured in Montana and then in a feed lot in Alberta and then back to Montana for slaughter, or go the other way around: they may be grazed in North Dakota and then in a feed lot or an abattoir in Alberta or Saskatchewan.
Everything presupposes that we are friends. It’s like having a joint checking account when you’re married. It presupposes that there’s a level of trust in one another. And now, all of our assumptions about what we can put our trust in have just been tossed to the wind. I think very few people imagined a scenario in which we were attacked like this. The trade war, sure — there were unfair tariffs levelled against Canada in the first Trump administration — but this is exponentially different because of the implicit threat of annexation.
Debby: And yet, can you imagine Trump sending the military in to take Canada?
Paula: I don’t think it will be like a conventional invasion — it will be something like Trump will say, “We’re really worried about the North and the Northwest Passage, and maybe we’ll send troops to protect that.” Trump has made it plain he wants to bring our country to its knees. If Americans don’t think we’re taking that as a serious threat, I don’t know how much plainer he can make it.
Debby: And yet, at the risk of being complimentary to the Orange Menace, he’s done amazing things for Canadian unity in a very short time.
Paula: I have never seen Canadians this united and I’ve been a Canadian for all my 60 years. Nationalists in Quebec are suddenly singing O Canada. Indigenous leaders too: the Grand Chief of the Treaty Six Confederacy, Greg Desjarlais, issued a really interesting statement a couple of days ago about this, stating that Canada is on Treaty Land, and that sovereign First Nations stand united against American aggression. Even in Alberta, which is the most right-wing of Canadian provinces, 90 per cent Albertans are proud to say that they never want to be American. There has never such a united sense of purpose. I wonder if that will sustain.
Debby: Why wouldn’t it?
Paula: We are about to go into an election campaign and I think we’re extremely vulnerable to international monkeyshines in our election. I am heartened to see Canadians coming together but I’m reminded of COVID, where at the beginning everyone was banging their pots and loving health workers and by the end health workers needed bodyguards to get into the hospitals.
Things can turn and get pretty ugly under duress and right now Canadians, they go to the grocery store, they no longer buy American food. They go to the department store, they no longer buy American goods. But the real impact of the tariffs has yet to set in. We haven’t yet had big waves of unemployment. We haven’t yet had huge spikes in prices.
Right now we’re declining to buy American goods out of patriotic pride. It’s going to feel different when we can’t afford to buy the American goods. So the world of solidarity and a sense of national unity that Canadians feel today, will it be there in six weeks or six months? I don’t know. That’s the real challenge ahead for us, and for whoever becomes our next prime minister.
A Primer about the Canadian Senate and Paula’s Role in It
Canada’s Senate is modeled in part on the one in the United States. The senators represent provinces, just as US senators represent entire states. Unlike US senators, those in Canada are appointed. Actually, this was the case in the US until 1913 . Canadian senators also have a mandatory retirement age of 75. As Paula pointed out, “You can’t be Strom Thurmond.”
The Canadian Senate is considered the chamber of “sober second thought”: the senators review and amend bills brought forth by the House of Commons. If senators find fault with a bill, they’ll amend it, but the members of Parliament, known as MPs, are not obligated to accept those amendments. If they don’t accept the amendments, the senators don’t necessarily force the issue.
“At the end of the day, they are the ones accountable to the voters,” Paula explained. “The convention is that we ping, but we don’t pong. We say, ‘You’re elected. You’re accountable to the voters.’”
There is one exception. If a bill is clearly unconstitutional, or if it violates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Senate has a right – and Paula would say, a responsibility – to defeat that legislation. The last time that happened was in 1991, when the Senate defeated a bill that would have limited access to abortion, upholding the constitutional right of Canadian women to freedom of choice.
Until 2015, the Canadian Senate was a very partisan chamber, with almost all Senators representing either the Liberal or Conservative parties. But for the last nine years, the Senate has embarked on a major reform initiative. Today, 88 percent of Senators are independent, with no party affiliation. Paula is one of those non-partisan senators, and guards her independence fiercely.
Passionate, informed, and committed to a strong, equitable, and fair Canada, Paula has been an active committee member, serving on both the Senate committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and the Senate committee on Transport and Communications. She also been Deputy Chair of the Agriculture Committee, where she got to know and respect her colleagues on similar committees in the US Congress.
For what it’s worth, this American is making a deliberate effort to buy Canadian and EU products. We’re on your side.
Interesting interview with Canadian Senator Paula Simons about the current Canada -US situation. "Everything presupposes that we are friends. It’s like having a joint checking account when you’re married. It presupposes that there’s a level of trust in one another. And now, all of our assumptions about what we can put our trust in have just been tossed to the wind. ". Looks like we are being forced into a divorce.