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Canada at risk: Janice Stein warns of erosion of sovereignty under Trump
Janice Stein, founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, is one of Canada’s most important public intellectuals, with decades of experience working at the highest level with policymakers in Canada, the United States, and around the world.
GZERO’s Stephen Maher spoke to her on March 5, the morning after Donald Trump’s address to Congress, to discuss the president’s annexation threats and Canada’s economic, political, and military vulnerability. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Maher: It appears that Canada is in a position of great vulnerability because of the new relationship between Washington and Moscow. What do you think?
Stein: Canada faces a challenge of unprecedented proportions. The vulnerability comes because we share a continent with the United States and Mexico, and there are enormous disparities of power between the United States and its two neighbors. We live next door to the most powerful dynamic economy in the world and the strongest military in the world. Geography is not destiny, but it comes very, very close.
You look at the near neighbors of other great powers, and you get a sense of what it’s like to live next to one of these giants in a period where they are looking outward, acquisitively at their neighbors. That’s what we’re seeing now in the Trump administration, and that, more than anything else, is what makes it risky for us. If there were no softening of US attitudes toward Russia, but Trump still talked about Canada and about Mexico the way he does now, we would still be at enormous risk.
I have been talking to experts about Trump and the Canada relationship for a long time, and they have all been wrong, and for good reasons, but they have all been suffering from normalcy bias. Why?
All of us had some normalcy bias, including me. There were boundaries to how far I thought Donald Trump would go, and I was wrong. He’s gone much farther than I thought he would go. So it’s important to think about the worst case.
What would the worst case be for Canada? A version of these 25% tariffs would stay. There would be tariffs on top of the 25% on aluminum, steel, and lumber, and then layer on top of that, whatever this administration means by reciprocal tariffs, and the president was explicit in his address to Congress that that would include and account for non-tariff barriers, such as, for example, the Goods and Services Tax.
Well, if you do the math, you can get up to 50% or 60% without trying very hard. That would deliver a crushing blow to the Canadian economy. And that’s what the prime minister was warning about when he was talking about the use of economic force to make us weak and vulnerable.
I don’t think we can take that kind of catastrophic scenario off the table. We need to think about it, and we need to do our best to make ourselves as resilient as possible against it, although it’s a tough hill to climb.
Do you think we will be forced to accept new limits on our sovereignty in the next four years?
Sovereignty is an evolving concept. There’s mythical sovereignty, where the state has full control over its territory and the population that lives within its territory. But it’s never been absolute, and it waxes and wanes. We signed the auto pact long before we signed the free trade agreement. So sovereignty is always a question of degree. When we had the free trade debate in this country, we debated whether we would be able to retain cultural sovereignty and sovereignty over health care if we agreed to a much deeper trading regime. We’ve managed to do that. Are we as sovereign today as we were in 1980? No, but nor is anybody else. So yes, I can see where we are going to have to partner in different ways — and that word is well chosen on my part — we’re going to have to co-invest in different ways. We’re going to have to co-produce in different ways, because we live next to the most dynamic economy in the world that is led by a president who thinks in regional terms, who thinks big powers make the rules and their near neighbors take the rules.
I keep thinking about Thucydides, who wrote, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.” Is that Canada’s position now? Will we have to suffer what we must?
Yes, because we live next door to the United States, which has a president who talks like President McKinley at the end of the 19th century, who is openly aggressive toward near neighbors. I think the prime minister was right when he used the words trade war, and the president said it himself: I will not use military force, but I will use economic force to coerce you.
It is economic warfare. We have to understand that, and that’s what all of us got wrong, including me. We expected a version of this, but what we did not anticipate was that it would be framed within a broader context of economic war, and that became apparent during that first trip to Mar-a-Lago when Trump talked about Canada becoming the 51st state. And he understands it’s not coming through the use of military force and formal annexation. But, again, pay attention to what he said Tuesday night about the Panama Canal and Greenland: We’re going to do it one way or the other.
He is not quite saying that about Canada.
It is not in the same category. And that should be some small comfort to all of us. I listened very carefully to the speech. We are not in the category of Panama and Greenland.
I was impressed by Claudia Sheinbaum, who I thought, in contrast to Trudeau during the first tariff showdown, was able to keep her cool, and she didn’t have regional leaders undercutting her.
Let me talk about the challenges leaders face when they deal with Donald Trump because a courageous leader like Volodymyr Zelensky found himself in an absolutely unprecedented situation in the White House [last Friday]. So let’s talk about the difference between Zelensky and Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum has exercised iron self-discipline. She does not rise to the bait. She’s very deliberate. She makes it absolutely clear that Mexico is going to retaliate, but she always puts some time between when she says — in very deliberate, very controlled language — we are going to retaliate, and the date at which that retaliation is going to take place.
Zelensky was deliberately baited in that meeting, and he, tragically for him, took the bait and argued with the president and with the vice president. And very interestingly, there were two reactions in Canada to that. One was, “I’m really glad that somebody had the courage to stand up to that bully.” That is a very human reaction, and it actually channels the anger that Canadians are feeling toward Trump. The other was, “What a disaster. What a disaster.” He needed to sit there stone-faced and not rise to the bait because there’s a larger picture here.
That’s an object lesson for all Canadian leaders going forward, and it’s going to be very hard on the Canadian public. The outgoing prime minister did that for four years, with one exception, in Donald Trump’s first term. All of us are going to have to watch our leader, whoever it is, sit there stone-faced, not rise to the bait, and think about the longer term and what has to be done for this country, and not provide the emotional satisfaction of arguing back, even though it’s entirely justified.
So, in the election ahead, Canadians are going to have a choice between someone (Pierre Poilievre) who gets MAGA and might be better able to work with the Americans, and someone (Mark Carney) who will likely have more of a focus on maintaining sovereignty. Do you think that that’s the central question?
I think a ballot question is: How worried are you about Donald Trump? If you’re reasonably sanguine, and you have faith in American institutions, and you see this nightmare as a two-year thing, you’re in one world. And I would suspect then you’re going to consider Poilievre on the basis of the campaign on which he ran before Donald Trump. And you’re going to say, “Is this important to the Canadian future?”
But if you’re really worried about what Trump is going to do, if you’re scared, if you’re deeply worried about the future of the economy, you’re going to say, “Well, there’s a candidate who spent his life managing crises in the economy.” I think it’s going to come down to that. I think it’s all about the level of fear and anxiety.