Mark Carney has been claiming that we have the best trade deal in the world with the United States. Try telling that to the workers at the Stellantis plant in Brampton now facing permanent layoffs as production of the Jeep Compass moves from Ontario to Illinois.
It was just last week that Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told a Toronto business audience said that auto assembly jobs would move to the United States and Canada would need to be second.
“Car assembly is going to be in America and there is nothing Canada can do about it,” Lutnick told them last week.
According to those in the closed-door session, Lutnick encouraged Canadians to seek other markets.
“You have the ability to bring tech investment and mining and other investments into Canada,” he said.
For autoworkers who have spent decades on the job, Lutnick’s words ring hollow. They amount to the equivalent of telling people to “learn to code.” It’s an insult to those who have spent decades doing the work that puts cars on our streets.
“That guy, President Trump, he’s a real piece of work,” Ontario premier Doug Ford said on Wednesday.
“You know something, what my message to the prime minister when I meet him on Thursday, is if you can’t get a deal, let’s start hitting him back.”
Ford has been out in front, calling for Canada to try to hit back hard against Trump. While that seemed like a good move at one point, it hasn’t delivered results of late.
Despite the fact that hitting back against the Americans might feel good, economically it won’t deliver.
Ford’s denunciation of protectionism is more than correct, but his reaction to the American instinct is 100% wrong. He wants to respond to American protectionism while also endorsing his own view of protectionism.
We need to break down barriers, but that requires leaders who are willing to take the first steps on this front, be it Doug Ford or Mark Carney.
Since the election, when Carney said that Trump wanted to break us so that America could own us, tariffs have gone up. The tariffs that exist also apply to more goods than they did during the election — and yet, Carney now claims that we have the best deal of all counties in the world.
How we go from Trump trying to break us and own us to the best deal in the world — while tariff rates increase and the number of products they apply to — is beyond me.
What we need is a bold Canadian auto strategy, but so far, we aren’t able to articulate that. We need federal and provincial players to come to the table and find a way forward.
During the 2008-09 financial crisis, Stephen Harper joined hands with Dalton McGuinty to rescue the auto industry. Neither man liked the deal they had to sign, but it was the right thing to do at the time.
That is where we are now: A different era, but the same result.
