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TRUMP’S THREATS EXPOSE CANADA’S UTTER DEPENDENCY ON THE US  
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Adam D.K. King interviews Sam Gindin
February 5, 2025
Socialist Project: The Bullet
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_ The immediate task is to address delinking from the United States
and the American Empire. This is not about aiming for a nationalist
form of sovereignty but one based on collectively and democratically
determining what kind of society we want. _

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United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs against Canada are
understandably causing
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consternation and debate. Some business leaders are forecasting
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warnings, union officials are calling
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retaliation and relief while also sidling up
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their corporate counterparts to present a united front. But these
developments are about much more than tariffs. Trump’s tariff plan
exposes the perils of Canada’s dependency on the US and the price of
integration within the American Empire.

To discuss these issues, last week I sat down with Sam Gindin. For
more than 25 years, Sam was research director of the Canadian Auto
Workers union. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of
Global Capitalism
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and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist
Challenge Today
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This interview was recorded and transcribed before Trump’s February
1 “tariff deadline.”

ADAM KING (AK): Let’s start first with your overall assessment of
Trump’s threat to impose tariffs not just on Canada but on other
imports into the United States as well. How credible are the threats,
and how do they fit within his administration’s overall political
project, such as we understand it so far?

SAM GINDIN (SG): Right now, Trump is living his dream of being an
American King. He has complete control over the Republican Party, has
defeated and demoralized the Democrats, and neither the labour
movement nor the left have the capacities to significantly challenge
him. We are obviously vulnerable – in both Canada and the US – to
Trump’s dangerous whims. For the time being, he can pretty well do
what he wants.

But contradictions will emerge. At one end of the spectrum are the
mundane: scandals to come from appointments based on loyalty not
competence and the inevitable clashes among the arrogant egos with
whom Trump had surrounded himself. At the other end, Trump seems to be
challenging the very essence of the post-war American Empire. The
American Empire has been distinct in not just looking to be the
biggest empire among other empires but in leading and overseeing an
empire that integrated others under its wing, universalized the
economic and social relations of capitalism globally, and supported
the formal sovereignty of states. America’s interests always came
first of course, but those interests were understood as accommodating
the interests of capitalism everywhere. Trump has, in contrast,
mobilized popular American frustrations by pointing to the imbalance
between America’s leading role and the unfair share of global
burdens and benefits allotted to America. The King will fix this by
putting American interests unambiguously and unashamedly first.

The contradiction lies in the impact of this nationalist turn on
American business at home and abroad. Business has been relatively
quiet on this so far, concentrating on getting the goodies they want
from Trump while assuming he will retreat from his rhetorical threats
against the free trade order. But if Trump goes ahead with his
dramatic tariff increases, this will bring not only higher inflation
but also retaliation from other countries that will disrupt supply
chains and threaten export markets. Furthermore, American legitimacy
– already questioned – will be further eroded. Pushback will come,
not so much from his disoriented political foes but from his own
allies. The question is, how will Trump respond down the road as he
faces that pushback? Will he double down or retreat?

In assessing all this it is crucial to grasp that the noise may be
about tariffs, but tariffs are for Trump primarily a bargaining chip,
especially but not only in Canada’s case, to gain certain
‘voluntary’ concessions. Canada, already a pliant ally, is being
warned to get even further in line with American preferences on, among
other things, immigration policy
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expenditures
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and access to resources (oil, of course, but perhaps also water).

Many of us argued that the free trade agreements with the US were
always a sham. The tariff threat confirms that the US has the power
and arrogance to ignore treaties when it pleases. In spite of brave
talk, a dependent and defensive Canada seems ready to surrender still
more of its substantive sovereignty to get rid of the latest tariffs
and keep its big brother happy. If the trade-offs Trump is asking for
occur, Canadian politicians will claim a ‘victory’ – a victory
that cannot guarantee that tariffs won’t be reimposed when
circumstances shift again and which, in exchange for a return to the
previous tariff status quo, Canada will accept all kinds of policies
the American administration has no business dictating to us.

AK: I’d like to frame these issues with some historical background.
Continental economic integration was once a hotly debated issue. Left
nationalists in Canada feared
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influence of the US and the threat of American pressure to lower our
social standards and public spending levels. Those opposition forces
largely lost out, and an era of neoliberal free trade followed and
dominated for roughly 30 years.

Are we living through a reckoning with or even an overhaul of this
model of globalization? How should we understand recent developments
– not only Trump’s tariff threats but also Biden’s domestic
investment agenda – in relation to this history of struggle over
free trade?

SG: You’re quite right. The Canadian mobilization against free
trade some four decades ago was fighting against still deeper
integration into the American Empire and its values. But today, while
we are even more dependent on the US and the US has become an even
uglier place, Canadian officialdom – and some unions – are begging
for what we opposed back then. An expression, as you say, of our
four-decades-long defeat.

Your second point on whether we are in the midst of an epochal shift
in globalization is critical. America flexing its muscles is not new.
But in the past, it involved specific sectors and was temporary, aimed
at giving American business some breathing room and playing to popular
uncertainties in order to _maintain_ America’s larger overall
global thrust. Trump is, however, clearly threatening, as you say, a
more radical turn. I expect that Trump will modify but not reverse
globalization – not because of opposition from the Democrats,
unions, or the left, but from pushback, if it comes to this, from his
business allies.

AK: Let’s shift to the questions of China. Clearly, both Trump and
Biden’s ‘turn inwards’ stems in large part from concerns over
the rise of China. What role is competition with China playing here?

SG: The United States was the main force pushing to bring China into
the World Trade Organization (WTO). China offered a massive market and
massive pools of low-cost labour that would contribute to keeping
inflation low in the US, profits high for American companies, while
strengthening American competitiveness. Geo-politically, integrating
China into global capitalism would make it far less of a potential
threat.

The panic over China today is rooted in the US determination to have
not just relative economic and military power but _absolute_ power.
Militarily, China hasn’t given any indications of being an
expansionary power. The US has some 750 military bases
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the world, about 200 of which are in Asia. China has none anywhere
near the US (or America’s NATO allies). Their primary goal, and key
to the legitimization of the [Communist Party of China], is to
continue to develop economically and raise living standards. China has
placed its bet on doing so under the umbrella of the American Empire.
The dilemma for the US is that it now wants to contain China
militarily and technologically but is at the same time anxious to
avoid ‘decoupling’ from China.

This gets us back to the contradictions between the Trump
administration and American business. American business has been
rather quiet, supporting Trump for the tax cuts, the deregulation, and
the restructuring of federal departments but expecting he’ll get
over his nationalist preoccupation. The reality is that Trump has no
program to address popular concerns with jobs, insecurities,
inequalities, and the general malaise in small town America because
these problems can’t be solved by his facile solutions; they demand
challenging capital, and that’s exactly where he’s not going. So,
there will be all kinds of openings for the left if it can organize
itself and win working people over.

AK: In the face of Trump’s threats to Canada, there seems to be an
all-party consensus supposedly committed to protecting the Canadian
national interest. At the same time, some unions have called
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a plan to counter the threat of tariffs, which includes targeted trade
retaliation, renewed industrial and procurement policies, and
emergency relief and income benefits for workers impacted. How do you
assess the responses of Canadian politicians so far? Perhaps more
importantly, what should we make of the labour movement’s position?

SG: Politicians like Doug Ford in Ontario either want the tariff
issue to go away, or they want to opportunistically flash their
Canadian nationalist identities. They can’t be trusted. They will
sell us out to get on the good side of the Americans, breathe a sigh
of relief and claim a victory. ‘Look how great I was in saving
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and keeping us open for business.’ As for Canadian business, their
primary concern is not to alienate the US If we ever made advances to
a degree of delinking from the US, it would be Canadian business that
would be first in line and most aggressive in attacking us.

That unions look lost after the decades of hammering they have
received is not surprising. Many are bravely talking about retaliatory
tariffs, but this won’t work. Our relative sizes and Canada’s
particular dependence mean we can’t win this game of ‘tit for
tat’ against America; Trump is more likely to up his threat in
response. The inadequacy of the union response is inseparable from the
weakness of the left, and the weakness of the left is a result of the
union and social democratic defeats across the world.

We need to play a different game. There’s no nice middle ground
here. The options have been polarized and unless we understand that
and start discussing and debating what this means, we will keep
confronting ever limited, demoralizing choices.

AK: Others seem to also be suggesting
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this may be the time to rethink Canada’s economic relations with the
US and reorient domestic policies “to build a more self-reliant,
resilient, and fairer national economy fit for the new international
disorder.” The challenge, it seems, is both figuring out what that
might look like and charting a path there.

SG: It is of prime importance that we appreciate how radical it would
be to move towards addressing the challenge posed in your question.
The point is that the radical is today the only practical; it is the
only hope.

The immediate task is to address delinking from the United States and
the American Empire. This is not about aiming for a nationalist form
of sovereignty but one that is based on collectively and
democratically determining what kind of society we want. This cannot
be achieved within the context of formal sovereignty but substantive
dependence.

The fact of our current dependence cannot be ignored, and the extent
of this dependence makes delinking especially difficult – that’s
why dependency is such a liability. Can we diversify our trade? How do
we phase out our support, through our oil resources, of the American
military colossus, and how is this related to other priorities like
the environment? Should we get out of NATO with its explicit
subservience to the US? And perhaps most important, if we look to
reduce dependence on the American market, what kind of inward
restructuring would this demand?

Taking control of economic restructuring begins with rethinking what
we want to produce and which services we need. Some of this would
involve replacing a share of imports with Canadian production. All
kinds of social and cultural services demand expansion or improvement.
The demands of the environment in particular mean rethinking how we
live, work, travel, and enjoy our lives. Addressing this involves
expanding public transit, rebuilding infrastructure, transforming
housing and offices, and modifying machinery and equipment so they are
environment sensitive. Instead of plant closures – or in response to
shutdowns due to American tariffs – we’d convert these existing
facilities to different uses.

All of this implies a high degree of planning, and since you can’t
plan what you don’t control, it implies fundamental challenges to
private corporate power. And this question of power gets to the nub of
being serious. What would it mean to build a movement with the power
and confidence to do this? How do we intervene in the union movement?
Could union locals also set up conversion committees to secure their
long-term future? What kind of community organizing might this lead
to?

The greatest hurdle we face is a sense of fatalism. After decades of
defeat, people feel like there really is no alternative. This can only
be reversed by developing an inspiring vision, building structures
that give people confidence that working through them matters, and
orienting all our struggles to not just winning specific demands but
measuring our success by whether those struggles are contributing to
building the social forces we so desperately need. •

This article first published on The Maple
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_Adam D.K. King is an assistant professor in Labour Studies at the
University of Manitoba._

_Sam Gindin was research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from
1974–2000. He is co-author (with Leo Panitch) of The Making of
Global Capitalism
[[link removed]] (Verso),
and co-author with Leo Panitch and Steve Maher of The Socialist
Challenge Today
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the expanded and updated American edition (Haymarket)._

_The Bullet is an online publishing venue for the socialist Left in
Canada and around the world. It solicits, publishes and republishes
articles that advance socialist ideas and analysis of important
events, topics and issues. It publishes articles by socialist thinkers
and activists, movement builders and organizers, workers and trade
unionists, and all those seeking to go beyond capitalism. _

* Canada
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* Donald Trump
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* U.S. Empire
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* Tariffs
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* socialist strategy
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