originally published for The Breach
Donald Trump’s tariff threats have sent most Canadians into a panic. But for the country’s corporate class, the crisis has spelled opportunity.
They’re pushing their long-standing wishlist of corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and austerity—and even expressing appreciation for the U.S. president’s bullying.
The head of the country’s most powerful lobby group, the Business Council of Canada, sounded positively grateful while attending Trump’s inauguration.
“I think we owe the president a thank you,” CEO Goldy Hyder told journalists in Washington, D.C. “He’s woken us up.”
Beyond tax cuts and deregulation, Hyder’s Business Council of Canada, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and other corporate lobby groups are pressuring political leaders to jack up military spending, clamp down on migrants at the border, and hand even more resources to oil and mining companies—claiming these policies will make Trump’s threats go away.
Clearly, Canada’s corporate elite are intent on not letting this crisis go to waste.
Corporate priorities masquerading as the ‘national interest’
Corporate lobbyists wasted no time posing as Trump whisperers who could divine what the new president really wanted.
Almost immediately after he issued his threat of tariffs, they drew up a long list of proposals—concessions that had little to do with tariffs or borders and everything to do with their pre-existing demands.
Designing pro-business policies and repackaging them as serving the “national interest” is basically what the Business Council of Canada was created for in the 1970s.
The lobby group, representing the CEOs of the largest companies in the country, played a key role in the push in the 1980s and 1990s for continental free trade and the dismantling of much of Canada’s welfare state, in the name of slaying the deficit.
Now, the Business Council is seeking to leverage Trump’s threats to push a similar agenda.
Hyder has argued that Canada’s best response to these threats is to improve its “competitiveness” by slashing corporate taxes, weakening environmental regulations, scrapping the proposed carbon emissions cap and expediting major infrastructure projects like pipelines, ports, and railways.
The Business Council also believes that appeasing Trump requires a dramatic increase in military spending. The lobby group has urged the federal government to massively boost annual military spending to reach a target of 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2034, surpassing even the NATO target of two per cent.
This would hike current defense expenditures from $41 billion to $110 billion in less than a decade.
To pay for this, the Business Council is calling for $90-billion in cuts in non-defense spending over three years. Hyder told the CBC this could happen through a “program spending review,” modelled after Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s government dramatic cuts to social programs and federal health and education transfers in the late 1990s.
“This is not a choice anymore,” Hyder said, speaking of the need to boost defence spending at the expense of everything else to please Trump.
A race to the bottom
Already, Canada’s political class is embracing much of the Business Council’s corporate agenda, dressed up in nation-building garb.
At both the federal and provincial levels, a “growing consensus” is taking shape around accelerated increases in military spending, building more east-west oil and gas pipelines (in the name of “removing interprovincial trade barriers”) and other pro-corporate measures for “increasing Canada’s competitiveness.”
And it is not just conservative leaders like Pierre Poilievre or Alberta Premier Danielle Smith who are championing it.
In order to counter Trump’s tariff sabre-rattling, Defence minister Bill Blair has suggested it would be “absolutely achievable” to hit NATO’s benchmark military spending in two years. Liberal leadership hopefuls Chrystia Freeland and Karina Gould have committed to meeting the threshold in the same timeline.
Federal Liberal politicians have also been lining up to oppose the planned increase to the capital tax.
Finance Minister Dominic Leblanc announced a deferral until 2026 of the tax hike, which would almost exclusively affect the wealthiest Canadians who sell large amounts of assets. And Liberal leadership contenders Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney have both said that they would scrap the capital gains tax increase.
Provincial leaders of all political stripes have also started moving on this Trump-inspired “competitiveness” agenda.
Nova Scotia’s Premier Tim Houston has announced he will lift the province’s bans on uranium mining and fracking for natural gas as well as the moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has floated the idea of a “Fortress Am-Can” partnership with Trump that would secure American access to critical minerals in the north of the province.
In B.C., Premier David Eby has pledged to accelerate permitting for mining projects, including for projects on lands covered by Aboriginal title. And Quebec’s Premier Francois Legault is looking to restart a previously rejected liquified natural gas project along the Saguenay river, citing the need to diversify its exports in the face of U.S. economic hostility—and hinting that he might reconsider his province’s prior opposition to west-to-east tar sands pipelines.
The consensus on pro-corporate trade has been shattered
If there is one thing to be genuinely thankful for, it’s that Trump’s threats have shattered the decades-old consensus on corporate trade deals that the Business Council played such a key role in crafting.
Popular outrage at Trump’s economic coercion and his trolling comments about making Canada a “51st state” has dramatically shifted public debate.
Questions about how to disentangle Canada politically and economically from the U.S. superpower are on the table in a serious way for the first time in a generation.
There is no shortage of ideas on how to build an economy that is more resilient, more just, and less reliant on exporting to the U.S.
Such ideas include public procurement and Buy Canadian policies, or aggressive green industrial policies to develop publicly-owned cleantech industries rejected by Trump.
They could even include nationalizing the oil industry, which is dominated by U.S. investors, as a first step towards a just transition away from fossil fuels.
If the corporate class is treating this crisis as an opportunity, it’s time progressives do the same.
Nikolas Barry-Shaw
Nikolas is the Trade and Privatization Campaigner for the Council of Canadians and author of the book “Paved with Good Intentions.”
