Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Is Canada prepared for the long fight?

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There's limits to what we can do to them, but what we can do is to, is to make it clear, um, you're not gonna win this fight. You're not gonna be able to coerce us into submission. Um, and not only are you not gonna be able to do that, but we're gonna inflict costs on you that are gonna, are gonna accumulate over time, and at the end of the day, you're not gonna have achieved your goal at-- and you're gonna, gonna have done so at considerable cost to yourself, so is it really worth it?

Welcome to today, Friday, the 28th of August, and our weekly Monk Dialogue with Globe and Mail journalist Andrew Coyne. Andrew, great to be in conversation with you.

Good to be with you.

So much to break down. A busy, consequential week on Canada and America's budding trade war. But let's start with the theater of the absurd. Um, the president has now renamed Lake Ontario Lake America. Uh, to take this just seriously for a moment, not in the context of what it does, the renaming, but more about what it says about this president and this administration. Um, Andrew, what's going on here?

Uh, he's unhinged. Uh, th-this is-- he thinks this is a funny stunt. Uh, his followers, no doubt, or his people around him, no doubt, have told him, "Great job. Yeah, g-go for it, DT." Um, who was it? Uh, Burgum, his interior secretary, raced online to say, "We're on it, chief." Uh, so nobody-- And people said this before he returned to power, that this would be the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2. Trump 1, somebody would've prevented this. Th-for the first administration, somebody would've said, "Oh yeah, I'll get right on that, chief," and it would've gone into the circular file. Uh, now he's got all people around him, and nobody tells him, "This is really stupid. You're gonna look like an idiot." Uh, everybody just, uh, you know, says, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir." You see that whenever they have these open cabinet meetings where, uh, all they do is they just spend the whole time praising him like something out of North Korea. And it, it-- These North Korean comparisons are becoming tired because it's supposed to suggest an exaggeration of the reality, but in fact, it's, it's more or less the same. So yeah, um, uh, uh, um, he proposes this crazy idea just on the fly. Um, to say that it's unpresidential is, is just a bit-- I mean, everything