After Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday, Canadians will learn whether he intends to follow through on his threat to immediately impose 25 percent tariffs on exports from Canada to the United States.
Many people here have told me they are looking forward to the details of the federal government’s response to any American trade action. Matina Stevis-Gridneff, our Canada bureau chief, reports that it will be much like Canada’s response to the tariffs on aluminum and steel that Mr. Trump introduced during his first administration. Any coming retaliatory tariffs, she writes, will “focus on goods made in Republican or swing states, where the pain of tariffs, like pressure on jobs and the bottom lines of local businesses, would affect Trump allies.”
[Read: Canada’s Plan for a Trade War: Pain for Red States and Trump Allies]
But given the size of Canada’s economy, the country cannot inflict the same amount of harm that the United States can. That raises the question of whether retaliation, no matter how politically targeted, will be effective.
There is, of course, no way to answer that question. But an earlier trade war between Canada and the United States might offer some indications of what’s to come.
Back in 1930, as today, the North American neighbors were each other’s largest trading partner. But the mix of goods was quite different: For one thing, Canada was importing most of its oil from the United States, while today oil and gas are Canada’s largest exports.
A movement by American farmers to close off competition from imports, including those from Canada, to bolster prices ballooned into a sweeping piece of legislation known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It raised already high U.S. tariffs, eventually bringing the average import duty to a staggering 59.1 percent.
Then as now, the tariffs were denounced by many economists. Over 1,000 of them unsuccessfully petitioned President Herbert Hoover to veto the bill.
Historians and economists still debate the effect of Smoot-Hawley on the Great Depression. But a 1997 paper by three economists at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania documents how it harmed Canada’s economy and profoundly influenced its politics.
Most of the seven largest exports from Canada to the United States at the time, the paper says, had large declines. Exports of milk and cheese plunged by 65 percent, and cattle sales to the United States fell by 84 percent.
Before Smoot-Hawley, William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberal prime minister, had been planning to reduce tariffs on Canadian imports of U.S. goods. In the hope of avoiding a trade war, Mackenzie King matched the new U.S. tariffs on only 16 products, which accounted for 30 percent of imports from the United States.
Like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today, Mackenzie King led a minority government. He passed bills with the support of the Progressives, a party supported largely by farmers.
During the 1930 election campaign, R.B. Bennett, the Conservative leader, relentlessly attacked Mackenzie King for not retaliating more forcefully against the United States.
Bennett’s speeches about the merits of high tariffs were remarkably similar to Mr. Trump’s social media posts on the topic today.
“How many tens of thousands of American workmen are living on Canadian money today?” he said while campaigning in Quebec. “They’ve got the jobs, and we’ve got the soup kitchens.”
He promised the crowd that he would use tariffs to “blast a way into markets that have been closed.”
A vote analysis in the Lehigh paper concludes that tariff issues were a key factor in Bennett’s victory in the 1930 election, which brought the Conservatives their only majority government between 1911 and 1958.
While Bennett did increase tariffs, they failed to blast a way into any market, according to Robert Bothwell, an emeritus professor of Canadian history at the University of Toronto.
But, Professor Bothwell told me, Bennett found another solution, which involved expanding on one of Mackenzie King’s actions: When he imposed the tariffs on U.S. goods, Mackenzie King also cut them on 270 products from Britain and other countries within its empire.
Bennett hosted a conference in Ottawa that led to a series of agreements between Britain and its former colonies that greatly opened up trade between them by reducing and in some cases eliminating tariffs.
That arrangement, Professor Bothwell said, could neither offset the economic collapse of the Depression nor fully replace the American market for Canadian exports, but it did greatly mitigate the harm caused by Smoot-Hawley.
“We had an out of sorts, and it really did work in the ’30s,” he said. “Every time the Americans jacked up their tariffs, we would tend to trade more with the British.”
When Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded Hoover as U.S. president in 1933, Professor Bothwell said, his administration soon noticed the loss of exports to Canada, driven by the combination of American tariffs and the Imperial arrangement with Britain, and moved to compromise on trade.
Today there is talk that Canada will again try to build up exports with nations other than the United States. But Professor Bothwell said that changes in trade, manufacturing and transportation have made a repeat unlikely.
“We don’t have an obvious alternative,” he said. “I don’t see us having a way to absorb the same amount of exports as we did in the ’30s.”
Mark Carney, former governor of the Canadian and British central banks, and Chrystia Freeland, the former deputy prime minister, have both officially announced their campaigns to succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the Liberal Party leader.
With the Buffalo Bills and the Detroit Lions both Super Bowl contenders, N.F.L. fans in Canada have two border city teams to cheer for.
Canada is sending air tankers and dozens of its battle-tested wildland firefighters to Los Angeles.
Home security-camera footage shows a puff of smoke, along with the sound of an explosion, as a meteorite lands in Charlottetown.
In a lawsuit, Drake accused his own record label, Universal Music Group, of putting his life and his reputation at risk by releasing and promoting a popular diss track by his musical rival Kendrick Lamar.
In Opinion, the Times columnist Ross Douthat makes the case for Canada’s joining the United States. Two readers respond with letters declining the invitation.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at austen@nytimes.com. More about Ian Austen
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