“Canada – USA Tariff Wars”

Stephen Harper’s ten years as prime minister began on Feb. 6, 2006. Twenty years later is a good time to assess his achievements in office and the legacy he left behind. I worked closely with Harper when he was leader of the Opposition, but not when he was in government, so this is a view from the outside.

The first thing to remember is the constraints under which he laboured. He led a minority government until he finally won a majority in 2011. Even then, he was still hemmed in by a Liberal Senate, a left-leaning judiciary, and a federal civil service that tends to tilt Liberal or NDP. Thus, it is not surprising that his greatest accomplishments were in areas where he could exercise his executive authority without impediment.

Not long after Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Unifor union leader Lana Payne voiced their concerns over Canada’s recent trade agreement with China, GM CEO Mary Barra weighed in as well. Given what’s at stake, especially the potential arrival of low-cost Chinese EVs in North America, her stance was as expected.

Barra made it clear she sees the deal as working against efforts to bolster a strong North American manufacturing base. The underlying concern is one of both economic and strategic security.

As an illustration of Canada’s relative irrelevance on the world stage, I always liked the story about external affairs minister Lester Pearson’s visit to president Dwight Eisenhower, an avid golfer.

Pearson emerged from a meeting in disbelief that Ike hadn’t even heard of a pressing Canadian issue. “You’d think,” he muttered to an aide, “his caddie would have mentioned it to him.”

There have been moments when Canada popped up for a day or two on American news, but by and large we’ve been a marginal force. That changed with Mark Carney’s speech in Davos.

U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to slap a 50 per cent tariff on Canadian aircraft and says his administration will “decertify” planes made by Canadian aerospace company Bombardier.

In a post on his social media site, Truth Social, Trump justified his latest trade war escalation by accusing Ottawa of blocking the certification of a series of jets made by U.S.-based Gulfstream.

The day Oshawa, Ont., autoworkers have dreaded for months has arrived, as GM Canada is poised to cut a shift at the city’s plant, costing over a thousand workers their jobs.

Up to 1,200 workers throughout the auto supply chain are expected to complete their final shift on Friday as the company scales back its Canadian operations, according to the union president who represents them.

GM Canada confirmed Thursday approximately 500 of those people are its employees.

The number of Canadian applications for the Nexus trusted-traveller program has fallen off a cliff since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.

Applications had been steadily increasing following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).