Best Responses to the failed US/Canada Trade Deal
- 2 minutes ago
- 4 min read
August 23 2026
Taken from FACEBOOK.
Robert Frawley
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THE FACTS DON'T " LIE "!
- Failed to secure a satisfactory Gordie Howe Bridge revenue deal.
- Failed to prevent a major breakdown in Canada-U.S. trade relations.
- Failed to protect Canadian exporters from escalating U.S. tariffs.
- Failed to provide stability and certainty for Canadian businesses.
- Failed to secure a clear, reliable future for the USMCA trade agreement.
- Failed to adequately ease Canada's cost-of-living pressures.
- Failed to make housing genuinely affordable for average Canadians.
- Failed to close Canada's massive housing supply gap.
- Failed to bring federal deficits under meaningful control.
- Failed to deliver the fiscal discipline Canadians were promised.
- Failed to reduce Canada's rapidly growing national debt.
- Failed to reverse Canada's long-standing productivity decline.
- Failed to create the business environment needed to attract investment.
- Failed to fully capitalize on Canada's enormous energy potential.
- Failed to turn pipeline and energy promises into completed projects.
- Failed to establish a consistent, sustainable immigration strategy.
- Failed to prevent temporary-resident growth from overwhelming infrastructure.
- Failed to deliver major infrastructure projects quickly enough.
- Failed to justify the enormous increase in defence spending to taxpayers.
- Failed to make Canada sufficiently competitive through lower costs and smarter regulation.
- Failed to reduce Canada's dangerous dependence on the U.S. economy.
- Failed to diversify Canadian trade quickly enough to offset U.S. dependence.
- Failed to deliver meaningful relief from rising everyday expenses.
- Failed to turn ambitious announcements into enough completed projects and jobs.
- Failed to deliver the stronger, more prosperous Canada promised to voters.
Michael Law Cobb
There’s a reason a lion doesn’t wake up one morning, look across the savannah at a 12,000-pound elephant and think:
"Today's the day I teach that bastard a lesson."
It’s not cowardice.
It’s understanding leverage.
The elephant is bigger.
The elephant is stronger.
And your motivational speech about standing up for yourself doesn't magically make the elephant smaller.
Never confuse courage with leverage.
Canada can be proud, independent and tough.
But we're negotiating with the largest economy on Earth, sitting directly beside us, buying hundreds of billions of dollars of Canadian goods every year.
And behind that negotiating position sits the most powerful military apparatus on the planet.
That's not an insult to Canada.
That's arithmetic.
You negotiate accordingly.
You don't walk into a heavyweight fight weighing 145 pounds, slap the heavyweight champion across the face, and then give a press conference about how brave you were when you wake up.
Trump understands something very simple:
Negotiations ultimately happen underneath a hierarchy of economic, political and military power.
You don't have to like that.
You don't have to like him.
You don't even have to think it's fair.
But pretending the hierarchy doesn't exist doesn't make Canada stronger.
Pick the fight you can win!
And if you can't win it?
Make a deal.
Then go home and build enough strength that next time, you negotiate from a bigger chair.
A chihuahua barking at an Elephant might technically be "standing its ground."
It's also still a chihuahua.
Angela Shelley
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People need to stop pretending the United States just woke up one morning and decided to “pick a fight with Canada.”
That is not what this is.
This is a fight over who gets access to the American market, what they are allowed to sell into it, where those products are made, and whether North America continues hollowing out its own manufacturing base while becoming more dependent on China.
Canada sends roughly 72% of its merchandise exports to the United States.
Read that again.
The U.S. is not some optional customer for Canada. The American consumer market is the foundation of an enormous share of Canadian trade.
So yes, the United States has leverage.
And using that leverage to demand stronger North American production, tighter rules of origin, more domestic content, more manufacturing jobs, and less dependence on Chinese supply chains is not “picking a fight.”
It is called negotiating from strength.
For years, everyone has been perfectly comfortable benefiting from access to the American consumer while manufacturing more and more somewhere else.
That model has consequences.
Lost factories.
Lost industrial capacity.
Lost jobs.
Critical supply chains controlled overseas.
Entire industries dependent on countries that may not always be our allies.
At some point, somebody has to say:
Enough.
If you want privileged access to the North American market, then build more in North America.
Employ North Americans.
Source more here.
Manufacture more here.
Protect the industries that actually matter when the world becomes unstable.
Canada should defend Canadian interests.
Mexico should defend Mexican interests.
And the United States should absolutely defend its own.
That does not make Canada the enemy.
It means the era of assuming unlimited access to the American market without serious conditions is being challenged.
Tariffs are painful. Trade wars have costs.
But so does spending another generation outsourcing our industrial base and pretending cheap imports are worth surrendering economic independence.
This is bigger than one tariff.
This is bigger than one country.
This is about whether North America remains capable of making what it needs, employing its own people, and controlling its own economic future.
That is the fight.
And that is what people are completely missing.
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