Daniel Westlake and Aaron Ettinger joined paNOW's Glynn Brothen for a discussion on tariffs, U.S. relations and the effects of a trade war on Saskatchewan. (ID 138503943 © Jeff Whyte | Dreamstime.com)

By Glynn Brothen

The Prairies and Team Canada

Navigating tariffs and trash talk, paNOW hosts political science panel

Mar 21, 2025 | 6:00 AM

In light of ever-changing tariff threats, an upcoming federal election and a change in Canada’s relationship with its American neighbour, the team at paNOW wanted to get two takes on these issues, both from a provincial standpoint and a national one.

Editor Glynn Brothen spoke to two political scientists. Daniel Westlake is an assistant professor of political studies at the University of Saskatchewan. His work is focused on Canadian political parties and elections. Aaron Ettinger specializes in international relations and US foreign policy and recently authored works on the Trump presidency. He is an associate political science professor at Carlton University in Ottawa.

The following panel interview has been edited for clarity. You can listen to it here or read a transcript below:

Daniel, the relationship between Canada and the US has changed. Where does Saskatchewan sit in this?

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Daniel: I think it’s a challenging spot for Saskatchewan. We are one of a number of resource dependent provinces and exports to the United States are going to be a big part of Saskatchewan’s economy. On one hand, our interests are aligned. I think the interest of Saskatchewan developing a good trade relationship with the United States line up with a number of other provinces. But on the other hand, this is a real challenge for the Saskatchewan economy and for Scott Moe and the government. It will be something they have to navigate moving forward.

Aaron, when combating tariffs, how effective is the Team Canada approach?

Aaron: We don’t know yet because we’ve only been doing this for a couple of weeks. Everything that we’re hearing about the Team Canada approach at least in regards to countervailing tariffs is based on an assumption that Americans are going to feel enough pain that either the Trump administration is going to yield or voters are going to kick Republicans out of office in 2026. This is entirely based on presumptions about economic theory and how tariffs are going to work.

Now, we do have some clues as to how they’re going to work based on the first Trump administration. But that was an entirely different beast. We had a situation where there were countervailing tariffs on tin, aluminum and various other products. But it was also within the context of renegotiating NAFTA… we now have the USMCA. Donald Trump in his second term in office here is far more hostile to free trade in North America than he was back then. Much of the rulebook, much of what we know has gone out the window and now we’re in uncharted territory.

Premiers Scott Moe and Doug Ford recently won their provincial elections and a federal election is looming. Do they hold a unique position in this trade war?

Aaron: The short answer is yes. Certainly Doug Ford as the leader of the largest province in Canada, the largest economy in Canada, with a resounding mandate that he just won has a particular role to play. In the short term, without any strong mandate at the federal level, the Liberal Party can’t accomplish a great deal. So what has effectively been happening is Doug Ford is the de facto leader of the Team Canada approach. That’s been good in some instances and less good in others. For now, Doug Ford has been the most prominent Canadian politician in the United States at least in the last three or four weeks.

Daniel: Yeah, I guess in some ways it’s good to have somebody making this case. Aaron’s right to point to, the federal government doesn’t necessarily have the mandate to do that given they’re probably going to an election soon. That would weaken the position of Mark Carney in making the same negotiations that Doug Ford would. The challenge here is that Ford probably is willing to go farther in terms of using energy exports to the United States as a bargaining chip than Scott Moe or Danielle Smith are willing to go. That creates challenges if Doug Ford is going to be a major player in negotiations with Canada and the United States. There is a danger there that Ford’s incentives are to play at the interests of Ontario and those are not always the interests of the Prairie provinces, particularly Saskatchewan and Alberta. In this tricky situation, we certainly want to avoid as much as possible these kinds of regional fights these divergent interests can lead to.

Aaron: Donald Trump is no fool. He sees exactly what Daniel is suggesting here. The ability to divide and conquer will redound to the success of the United States in all of this. So if he sees that Doug Ford is getting ahead of François Legault or Danielle Smith or anybody else, well that’s an opportunity for Washington to fracture the Team Canada approach and that’s not going to be any good for us north of the border.

What are the views that exist now that Doug Ford almost essentially called out Scott Moe in saying tariffs should be considered on potash. How does that work politically?

Daniel: I haven’t seen a lot of data on what people from Saskatchewan think of this. But this is exactly the challenge we could end up facing. It’s one thing for Doug Ford to say that Ontario is going to take a hit on energy exports to the United States. To my knowledge, that’s a smaller proportion of the Ontario economy than potash and natural gas exports are of the Saskatchewan economy. There is a long history in Canada of the West getting resentful of Ontario and Quebec and the federal government to use western resources to get things that —are probably good for the country as a whole— but may particularly benefit Ontario and Quebec. I don’t know if Ford is necessarily wrong in his approach but there’s a long history here that he’s gotta be careful here and a certain amount of resentment that could build up if it looks like a Prairie interest trade off for the other parts of the country.

Regarding the 51st State and the threat of that, how should it be handled on a provincial level, a federal level and what do both of you foresee?

Aaron: Ignore it. Because it’s just trash talk. Donald Trump does this kind of thing all the time. It’s not a surprise; he makes up names for people whether it’s Governor Trudeau or Crooked Hilary or Little Marco. The 51st State talk is really about belittling Canada, diminishing Canada in a context where there are far greater consequences regarding the economy. It makes sense for Canadian leaders to talk about it seriously in public and take it seriously in public, but keep their eyes on the prize which is coming out of this trade war with as minimal damage as possible.

Daniel: That sounds right to me. The only concern I have is this American government is less predictable than I hope it would be. I’ve always got this voice in the back of my head — is there something more there that we should be concerned about. But it’s a small voice. I think Aaron’s analysis makes sense to me. I’ve been joking that this is a guy who in his first term joked about buying Greenland. Trump says things thats sometimes are ridiculous and one of the challenges in dealing with the Trump regime is separating out the ridiculous from the stuff we need to be more serious about.

This is also the challenge in the media and with the public as well. People are turning to media for answers, and they’re turning to professionals like you two to sort of explain it to them. What am I missing? What should people know about as they’re watching this trade war play out on their screens and in their grocery carts?

Aaron: I would always start with really basic questions: What do we know and what do we assume? Those are always good starting points when you’re unpacking this big crazy world of ours. So, what do we know about Donald Trump and his views about economic policy? Well, we know for sure that he is firmly committed to tariffs. That has been a consistent part of his political program for the last eight years. He’s been talking about it since the 1980s and the 1990s. So we know that tariffs are almost an end unto themselves for him. We know that he is hostile to free trade. We know that from both his political maneuvering and his business career that he is prepared to use the market size of the United States in order to gain leverage over his smaller partners. That for sure is what we can expect. So translate that into what’s going to happen on a day to day basis: Canada should not look to attempt to persuade him back to the realm of free rules based trade. This is going to be a slugfest, this is going to be difficult and it’s going to cost Canadians.

What do we assume? With Donald Trump, many have been assuming that we can bargain with the guy, that he will listen to reason or that tariffs are part of some larger plausible strategy. Those are big assumptions to make in this moment. I think what we can reasonably assume from everything that we’ve seen about Donald Trump is that he really only listens to one thing which is the logic of force. If Canada wants to make it through the next couple of years, Canada needs to make it painful for American consumers, impose a cost on the Trump administration for following this economic policy and essentially play for time and hope that there’s a turnover in Congress in 2026 and that by 2028, Americans are ready to throw the Republicans out.

Daniel: I would add a couple of things. This is less an assumption and more of a hope, but I think a reasonable one. The tariffs themselves can do damage to the American economy and I think Trump is sensitive to that. You’ve got a lot of people that work in auto manufacturing in places like Michigan and people that work in other sectors that depend on imports of raw materials from Canada. The price of materials for all those industries just went up because of Trump’s tariffs, regardless of whether we impose counter tariffs or not. So part of me thinks that one of the advantages we have here is that the tariffs in and of themselves affect the American economy and that could put pressure on Trump. But that’s a hope. I think it’s well-grounded. I think a lot of economic theory suggests that’s the case, but we don’t know that’s going to play out until we actually see the more median terms effects of these tariffs.

A couple of things to suggest as Canadians try to grapple with this moving forward: The first is I think we’re going to be in a better position when we have a federal government that’s got more of a mandate. What Doug Ford has been doing probably is better than nobody doing anything, but it really should be the federal government taking the lead on this. The other thing for Canadians both provincial level and the federal level looking at this: There’s a real risk when you look at the day to day on this. It’s so volatile. We know so little about what’s happening the moment it’s happening that I think everybody would be well served by taking a step back, waiting a bit before rushing to judgment on things and letting things unfold before making any assumptions or judgments about where this is going to go. There’s going to be a lot of twists and turns to this struggle. Some of them are going to be unexpected; a lot of them we haven’t seen yet. Just a bit of caution with respect to assumptions and predictions and the willingness to be patient I think will be important at this point and time.

Aaron: I would add that we’re still within the first, what, eight weeks or 100 days of this kind of conventional metric of an American presidency. And it’s in this first three-month period that an American president is at his most powerful. He has the mandate, he has the energy. Usually the losing side has retreated to their corners and licking their wounds. Right now Trump is at his most powerful and yet we have seen a capability among countries to push back and gain at very least a small strategic reprieve from the greatest excesses of the Trump administration. I would expect this to continue, and as the mistakes pile up as the contradictions pile up, as events unfold, it’ll become much more difficult for Donald Trump to actually pursue programming that he’s been planning out since the end of January.

Daniel: The other thing for me, I think for Canadians, it’s time to have some honest conversations about what we do in the long term and what the costs of those actions are. I think regardless of where this plays out, over the next four, eight, 10 years, we’re probably looking at a world where we can trust the United States less. What does that mean for our foreign policy commitments? What does it mean for our trade commitments? What does that mean for our defence?

These are the conversations we need to start having and wherever this goes, this is probably going to have a cost. We’re going to have to think both in terms of the taxation rates we pay and the kinds of programs we invest in, how we cover and how we ensure we’re able to manage those things that we’re going to need to do over the longterm to deal with a United States that’s less predictable. If we’re going to have a defence capacity between us and Europe that is not reliant on the United States defence shield, that costs money. In the short term maybe you finance that out of debt, but eventually that’s going to come through in taxes or the way we fund social programs. If we’re going to put more economic aids and assistance in so we’re less vulnerable to tariffs, well again in the short term you can finance that through debt, but in the long term that will have tax spending, deficits that we’re going to have to grapple with. So it’s time for us to start having some honest conversations about what we want to do, what the cost of those things are going to be and how we’re going to cover those costs.

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glynn.brothen@pattisonmedia.com