Last night I was part of an in-person panel co-hosted by the St. Catharines Public Library on, as the title says, what Canada and the world can expect from a Trumpified US. There was, unsurprisingly, a lot of interest in the event — it was fully registered, with a waiting list. Judging from the turnout and the questions we fielded, people are understandably very worried about what’s going to happen after next Monday’s inauguration.

Local TV was also there to do a segment, coincidentally the same camera guy who videoed a 2016 panel on Trump (post-election, per-inauguration) that I’d also organized at the Library. He told me that that first panel had stuck with him, including how his initial belief that we were being somewhat alarmist faded quickly as the madness of Trump I took hold.

Regarding the event itself, as a former colleague who attended put it, “People found the session enlightening, if a bit disturbing.”

Which sounds about right. You’d be hard-pressed to find a legitimate political scientist who can see any silver lining in what’s about to happen. Yet, if anything, there continues to be a relative lightness to most of the public pronouncements about the coming Trump 2.0 administration, and deeds are not matching words. Pundits are gaming out Trump’s 51st state nonsense, as if the same (democratic) political rules will apply after next week. The Liberals are taking their sweet time choosing a new leader. Just today the federal government accused Elon Musk of political interference in Canada, but with no plan to, you know, actually do anything about it. The federal Conservative leader is passing the time talking to a disgraced, far-right psychologist and has yet to emerge from his three-word-sloganeering pupa stage.

What I’m saying is, there’s an appetite for honest, sober analysis that lays out exactly what we’re dealing with. A good start for people would be Kim Richard Nossal’s 2023 book, Canada Alone: Navigating the Post-American World. Though it’s exactly about our moment, written by one of Canada’s leading scholars of Canada-US relations, it’s been conspicuously absent from the Canada-Trump discussion.

Below are my opening comments, lightly edited. They’re adapted mainly from two articles I’ve written for The Conversation (which, it should be noted, has been publishing excellent and accessible academic analysis on what Canada can expect from Trump). It even gave me the opportunity to revisit my 2005 MA Major Research Paper on the negotiation of the Canada-US Smart Border Accord.

Thank you all so much for coming out and thank you to the St. Catharines Public Library for hosting this panel. Just the sheer number of people here shows that there’s a lot of interest and real concern about what’s going to happen to Canada when Trump assumes power in just under a week.

From 2005 to 2011, my PhD and before that my Masters’ work, focused on Canada-US and North American politics, and on the question of the conditions under which Canada can exert significant policy autonomy in the shadow of its neighbour, which is also the world’s most powerful country. And all of a sudden, this is the big question of the day, and probably for the next four years at least.

There’s a lot to say about what Trump and the authoritarian turn in US politics means for Canada and the world, but I’m going to keep my comments brief, because I’m interested to hear your questions and concerns. In my time I want to highlight two things. First, what makes this moment so dangerous for Canada, and second, how the country should respond.

It’s worth keeping in mind that we are in uncharted waters. The Canada-US relationship has been so stable for so long that it feels almost natural, like a fact of life. And over that time Canada has enjoyed peace, prosperity and a healthy degree of independence, built in large part on the Canada-US relationship.

But it was a product of its times and context. And in a way, as I’ll show in a moment, it was already fading. But Trump’s re-election means that this old-style relationship is likely gone for good. As a result, Canada is now more exposed to raw US power than any time in its history.

I’ll give a few of examples of what I mean, but basically it comes down to trade agreements that aren’t really trade agreements, and, more fundamentally a lack of shared norms related to the rule of law and sovereignty.

A lot has been made about Trump’s continued and wholly offensive and utterly inappropriate threats to Canadian, Mexican and Greenland’s sovereignty. And last week he said that he’s going to use economic coercion to bring Canada in line.

I wrote most of the following remarks [ed. note: everything on why Canada’s vulnerable to the US] back in mid-November, just to give you an idea of how predictable all this has been.

Anyway, the bad news is, we are currently very susceptible to this kind of open and direct coercion. And for all the patriotic talk online about how the US can get bent, I think politicians and pundits are underselling the degree of the challenge an authoritarian US poses to Canada.

Most importantly, we have a trade agreement with the United States that doesn’t provide us with any actual protection. The United States for decades has used the carrot of access to its market, or the stick of removing this access, to get other countries to amend their laws so that they favour US interests and goals.

But trade agreements, like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, take that card off the table. And for Canada and Mexico that reduces the United States to the status of an important party, but not one that can tell Canada what to do. Which preserves policy autonomy even as our two economies became ever-more deeply integrated.

But! Back during Trump 1, the United States forced the renegotiation of NAFTA, to include, among other things, a renegotiation clause, that would automatically reopen it every six years. Which means in 2026. This renegotiation clause guts the autonomy protection that normal trade agreements provide. It means that every six years, the United States, whether it’s run by Democrats or Republicans, will be able effectively to go through our regulations, decide what it doesn’t like, and put that on the table. At stake: our access to their market.

And this is what’s allowed under our treaty, let alone Trump’s almost certainly illegal tariff threats.

Here’s the catch. Because trade agreements now cover so much more than tariffs, there’s nothing that this power won’t be able to touch. Do you think that Teslas should have to face regulations that make them not trap passengers inside a burning car, as happened in Toronto a few months ago? Me too, but those regs could easily find their way onto the chopping block, all in the name of market access.

Second, trade politics. Whenever the United States get protectionist, the federal government likes to trot out the fact that we’re the number one trading partner of 19 US states and I’m sure number two in a whole bunch others. The reason they lobby US officials using this number is because they want to show them that if you hurt Canada economically, you’re just hurting yourself. And it’s true.

The problem, though, is that that only works if politicians care what happens to voters. And in an authoritarian system, the links between voters and power are muted at best. The Republicans will care if Elon Musk’s interest are hurt. They won’t care if Democratic Detroit slides into the sea. So that’s gone. This is where we’re headed. (And you’ll notice that I’m referring to the Republicans, and not just Trump. This is because the Republicans are now an authoritarian, far-right party, with or without Trump. That’s our reality.)

Third, our regulatory state, the rules that keep our water clean, our medicines safe and our cars from being deathtraps, could very well come under attack. Trump, backed by an enthusiastic Republican Party and the Republican Supreme Court, has signalled his intention to dismantle the regulations that have kept Americans safe and the economy functioning for a century. Think things like pesticides on strawberries and lead in toys. Given the tight relationship between our two countries, are we going to recognize their (non-rules)? And given our integration, how long will it be before US companies, to say nothing of own companies, start lobbying Canada to lower our own regulatory thresholds in the name of competitive disadvantage?

You want to go really dark? We can do that: We already have Elon Musk interfering in our politics in a way that is completely inappropriate for a member of a foreign government. Now, consider what a lawless Trump, one with his personal generals on his side, with the might of Silicon Valley at his disposal, might do to Canadian political opponents who displease him. For all the talk of the United States as a beacon of democracy, they have a long, and recent history, of abetting coups and assassinations in countries that step out of line. We’d be foolish to think that something similar couldn’t happen in Canada.

Democracies are comfortable with dissent; we know how to process it. For authoritarians, dissent is treason. Why would an authoritarian United States feel comfortable with a healthy democracy on its border?

That’s some of why the current moment is so dangerous for Canada. So, how should our leaders respond?

The whole 51^st state thing points us to the big challenge facing Canada over at least the next four years. Which is: Because they’re next door, we have to respond to US demands, no matter how crazy or destructive they may be. So, how do we respond in a way that promotes and protects Canadian sovereignty and Canadian interests, without giving away the store?

If we just try to appease them and give them whatever they want, then we’ll be end up being a de facto 51^st state. And that’s kind of what the federal, Ontario and Alberta governments have been doing to date, with their haphazard border deals and natural resource proposals. Not great.

The good news, such as it is, is that although Trump’s authoritarianism has us in uncharted waters, this isn’t the first time that the United States has directly posed an existential threat to Canada. So, we actually can look to both recent and ancient history to tell the difference between mere appeasement and working in the national interest.

The first lesson is from the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It’s hard to believe now, but in the 1990s, the United States didn’t really pay a lot of attention to its northern border with Canada. At the time, they were all about making North America a borderless economic space. Then 9/11 happens, and all of a sudden, security went from being a minor issue for the US to the only thing they cared about. Then, as now, this securitization of the border threatened Canadian exports to the US.

But also, then, as now, while the United States wanted action on the border, they didn’t really know what they wanted beyond, security. You know who did? Canada. Because the federal government had been bugging the US for years to modernize the border to make things run more smoothly. And so, when the United States said, we have to do something, Canada had what became the Smart Border Accord ready to go. And it had some security parts to it, but because of Ottawa’s forethought, it was designed mainly to protect the economic relationship, which is what we cared most about.

The lesson here is: Always have a plan ready for what we as a country want out of the relationship. That way you’re not left just reacting.

That’s lesson one. Our second lesson comes from the birth of Canada itself. One of the reasons Confederation happened at all was because the United States abrogated the free trade agreement that had been in place between it and the Canadian provinces. In response, instead of just looking south for salvation, the founding provinces looked east and west. And we got Canada as a result. Not a bad result.

The lesson here is: To respond to US uncertainty, look east, west and north. We need to build up the country. This should include internal free trade, reorienting our energy infrastructure to flow east-west rather than the now-unstable North South, revitalizing our internal communication infrastructure, including platform regulation and support for the CBC.

Now, none of these is a panacea. And they will also require substantial effort and investment on a scale we haven’t seen in Canada since the 1960s. But the reality is, Trump is going to cost Canada one way or another. And while we can’t avoid this challenge, we can choose how we react to it. And we can choose to react in a way that builds up and improves the country and doesn’t just give in to whatever Trump wants today.