Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Home – Trade Policy News – Victor Davis Hanson: Carney Picked a Trade War With Trump—But Why?

Victor Davis Hanson: Carney Picked a Trade War With Trump—But Why?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Victor Davis Hanson: Canada, everybody likes Canada. Come on. We all have—I have a brother-in-law who’s Canadian and a very nice person. But there’s three things to remember about Canada, this dispute.  

Number one are the issues, and they’re real.  

Number two is the timing. Why now?  

And number three, why does Mark Carney seem so angry? 

He’s not a Stephen Harper, that wonderful prime minister that I think all of us on the conservative side, but all Americans in general, really admired. And he’s not Brian Mulroney, whom I admired, who just passed away not too long ago.  

FBI Followed Catholic Priests, Continued Richmond Memo Work After Removal Order: DOJ Report Finds

Victor Davis Hanson: The Radical Left Wants to Destroy America and Rebuild It

‘There’s No Portland Exception to the Constitution’: Mom Sues School Over Trans Policies

So there’s three issues. There’s Carney, there’s the timing, and there’s the problem. 

The problem is that Canada pretty much got into a habit the last few years of running up a $50 billion to $70 billion surplus with the United States. Not as bad as Mexico, but under Donald Trump’s vision of symmetry, he wanted to address it.  

And what made it egregious is we had a North American Free Trade Association, which was supposed to eliminate the need for tariffs and taxes on imported and exported goods because there would be fair dealing and there would not be differences very much. What Ross Perot… 

Remember he said that, that huge sucking sound of jobs—the sucking sound … and money. Yeah. That wasn’t gonna happen, we were told by [Bill] Clinton and [Al] Gore. And it did, and Mexico had a $200 billion. And the weird thing is, we told Mexico, “You’re not going to get Chinese cheap dump parts and assemble them and be the gateway for China to evade tariffs, to get, undercut our jobs.” 

And they said, “Okay, we won’t do it.” Then we said, “We’re going to tax, we’re gonna start your remittances at 1%, $65 billion …” And we said that because we had 30 million illegal immigrants, mostly from Latin America and Mexico, who were largely recipients in some fashion of American largesse: housing, education, food, health care subsidies. 

We’re not gonna pay that and free them free cash to become the largest source of foreign exchange in Mexico, which we are.  

Jack Fowler: Money, that probably had not been taxed in the U.S. either. 

Victor Davis Hanson: No. No. And never had. It was probably cash. Then we tried to tell them about the cartels, and the point is, we were making........

© The Daily Signal