Seems it was a waste of our time and money. If anything, Canada should be asking the USA to increase their own border security as guns and drugs come into Canada at a much larger scale. And why even have a fentanyl czar etc if none of our actions will stop the tariffs? This was never about the border or drugs but Trump said jump and Canada asked How high?
Actually, the money we allocated to border control occurred in December 2024, at least a month before Trump threatened tariffs. Trudeau then gave it a fun name (Fentanyl Czar) and Trump accepted that as yielding to his demands. We didn’t budge an inch, but we bought ourselves a month.
And we also bought ourselves the perception of being the “reasonable ones”, with the US being even more blatantly painted as flagrant deal-breakers.
That will be useful as we build new alliances with the rest of the world.
And while they try to make new deals.
Who in their right mind would make a deal with a country/president who casually breaks deals whenever they feel like it?
Unless that other party is completely manipulating Trump in the way Putin routinely does…
We allocated $1.3b in early December as a response to Trump’s initial tariff threat.
We budged.
I don’t think it was the wrong choice, but I don’t think it had the desired effect.
I see the other side of that where we’re upping border control in case Trump decides he wants to invade. That’s not a bad thing.
And you think that allocation was unrelated to Trump?