“He’s fighting the world now.”
That’s from former BC Premier Glen Clark who was part of a Canada/US Relations Panel during day one of the COFI Convention from the PG Conference and Civic Centre today (Thursday).
Clark, who led the NDP from February of 1996 to August of 1999 was joined by 15-year Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam Conservative MP James Moore and Fellow/Lead on Canada/US Relations Strategy Mark Cameron.
Clark, who has dealt with American President Donald Trump in the past says his demeanour behind closed doors is a lot different than what you often see portrayed in the media.
“That is why I think some countries; some politicians are having better success with him privately because behind closed doors he is not as crazy as you might think.”
“He is very articulate and charming actually and wasn’t at all spewing the extreme rhetoric that you see him use publicly. He is very much a performer, and he plays for the audience and supporters. Privately, he may still believe that, but he is much easier to deal with.”
He added the relationship between Canada and the United States has fundamentally changed and not for the better.
“Fundamentally, it is very hard to trust the Americans. We’ve had agreements with them, but they have ripped them up. I think the rules have changed; we need to look at other trading partners and strengthen our country separately and we need to look at our governments to make more investments and make us more competitive.”
As for pair down the inter-provincial trade barriers, Clark says eliminating all the red tape at once isn’t as easy as it sounds as Canada as seen as decentralised country as each individual province has its fair share of economic control.
“The decentralises giving us different rules in different provinces so that is why we have never felt that need to give up power to form a national strategy and this time because we do have a threat from the United States, it is more important than ever that all the provinces give up some of that power in the interest of the nation.”
While the end goal of the global war for Trump is unknown to many, Moore on the other hand says his motives are outdated and unsustainable.
“I think we wants to set in motion a trend of reinvestment back into the United States by putting more auto plants back into his country. I think he wants America to be made stronger while also making other countries weaker and I think that is a broken formula.”
Moore like a lot of other political pundits think the strategy by Trump to mark-up products from other countries like Canada will backfire, citing the instability of the stock market as a good example.
“Donald Trump has given us a big hand here in the sense that he is going to impoverish Americans. He crashed the stock market, jack up inflation and is going to make everything more expensive and he has made a lot of the world hate the United States, which I don’t think Americans aren’t going to like a lot of those things and they will want this to stop.”
“The trend that he wants to create is to enrich America while impoverishing Canada and that is something we can’t allow to happen.”
On Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution that would cancel President Trump’s ability to impose tariffs on Canada.
The Senate voted 51-48 to approve the bill and send it to the House of Representatives, where it could be shelved. Four Senate Republicans teamed up with Democrats to advance the legislation.
In addition, the Democrat-sponsored bill would terminate a national emergency Trump declared in January, which he linked to illegal imports of fentanyl from Mexico, Canada and China
The COFI convention wraps up tomorrow (Friday).
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