Tariffs: Vandalism Passed Off as Patriotism

“Sold as sovereignty, tariffs are really just smashed shop windows with patriotic decals slapped on the glass — a swindle that leaves ordinary families colder, poorer, and paying the bill.”

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Let us begin, not with dreary charts, but with a definition wrapped in ridicule. A tariff is nothing more than a tax at the border, a customs-house mugging in which the government demands tribute before your toaster or your sneakers are allowed to cross the frontier. It is dressed up as patriotism, as if every import were a foreign invader to be repelled. Still, in practice, it is just a surcharge you pay because some politician decided to make a show of “standing up” for American steel, cheese, or whatever lobbyist got to him last.

A consumption tax, on the other hand, is far less melodramatic. It doesn’t bother with border guards or speeches about sovereignty. It simply slaps a levy on everything you buy, regardless of origin, in the manner of a pickpocket who makes no moral distinctions between your Italian loafers or your Ohio overalls.

The value-added tax is the most polished version: collected in small doses at each stage of production and distribution, then finally landing, like an unwelcome dinner guest, squarely on the consumer. One is an operatic pretence; the other, a bureaucratic inevitability.

Trump’s Tariff Tantrum

Now to the pantomime itself. Trump’s tariff crusade of 2025 was announced with a flourish of his felt-tip pen, an act of doodling mistaken for economic policy.

He decreed a 10 to 20 percent blanket on all imports, with 60 percent on Chinese goods, 35 percent on Canada, and 50 percent on Brazil, all solemnly cloaked in the moth-eaten robes of “national emergency.” These numbers, of course, are written in political smoke. Wait ten minutes, and they are liable to change again depending on what he squinted at on Fox News while pounding his ninth Diet Coke.

The man’s thoughts wander like a blind squirrel drunk on fermented fruit, and his attendants long ago learned that policy is whatever can be whispered into his ear before he drifts off.

Advocates present these tariffs as fiscal panaceas, but the math makes a mockery of the bravado. Even at their peak, they scrape together $172 billion a year—barely half a percent of GDP. In the era of trillion-dollar deficits, this is the fiscal equivalent of shaking a tin cup on the steps of the Treasury.

What is left uncounted are the very real costs: tariffs bleed directly into higher consumer prices, add an estimated two percentage points to inflation, and slice thousands off household purchasing power. It is the great patriotic swindle: sold as “making China pay,” but felt most keenly in the checkout line at Walmart.

The Cargo Cult of “Reshoring”

Here is where the farce of “reshoring” enters, that nationalist hallucination in which America supposedly brings back all its supply chains, every widget and microchip, by decree of presidential whim.

The cheerleaders present it as a matter of willpower, as if the only obstacle were insufficient patriotism. But supply chains are not Lego castles to be rebuilt on command. They are delicate, elaborate webs spun over decades, optimized for cost and efficiency.

If producing everything domestically really made sense, it would already be happening: after all, local producers enjoy lower distribution costs, home-field logistics, and regulatory familiarity. If we import anything at all, it is because the sacred efficiencies of comparative advantage still exist. This is not a radical doctrine; it is Ricardo 101, the sort of thing even thick-headed clods can grasp after a C-minus in economics. That would be me.

Reshoring everything is not strategy—it is wish-fulfillment, a cargo cult for trade illiterates who think you can bully the laws of economics into obedience by waving a tariff wand.

It is as if someone stood up in Regina and demanded we “reshore” bananas to Saskatchewan. Yes, we could build heated domes across the prairies and hire battalions of workers to pollinate by hand, but the end product would cost fifty dollars a bunch and taste like damp cardboard. Comparative advantage exists because reality exists.

Canada: Smug, Broke, and Looking for a Daddy

And before we in Canada get too smug about our own economic virtue, let us admit that our arrogance and superiority are wholly unearned. We have just elected Mark Carney — not Trudeau, the old boy-emperor of selfies and socks — and we did it less on merit than on the elbows-up fantasy that Canada could square off against Donald Trump, a president of a country ten times our size, and somehow deck him with our imaginary Gordie Howe elbows.

In truth, it was less a triumph of vision than the tantrum of a nation of teenagers swapping one unserious father figure for another. We were tired of the hippie dad who lived off mystery money, who never paid the bills, who left envelopes fluttering unopened on the dining-room table in the vague hope they’d somehow sort themselves out. So we brought in a new daddy: awkward, temperamental, prone to bursts of rage, but at least he looked like the sort of man who had a job, who knew when garbage day was, who might even wash the dishes. Canadians voted for competence as they imagined it: a father figure who could keep the household solvent.

But the gamble is obvious: is this new patriarch really a provider, or just another delusion in a different guise?

After CUSMA: Trump’s Vengeance Economy

For now, Canadians console themselves that tariff rates remain relatively low thanks to the Canada–United States–Mexico–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA, called USMCA in Washington). But this treaty is only as strong as the American president’s mood, and Trump has made plain his contempt for it. He doesn’t honour agreements; he tears them up when it suits him.

Do we really believe he wouldn’t slap 30% tariffs on Canadian goods the moment it pleases him? Of course he would. He seemed to despise Trudeau personally — and Trudeau, with his endless preening, poked the bear one too many times. Trump, a bitter and shallow man, holds grudges like coin in a miser’s purse. His vengeance will not be tempered by Canada’s protestations that “we dislike Trudeau too.” To him, Canada is Trudeau, and Trudeau is Canada. When CUSMA comes up for review, it will not be about free trade but about payback. And the bill, inevitably, will be handed not to Ottawa but to ordinary Canadians at the checkout counter.

Tariffs: The Poor Man’s VAT

Meanwhile, tariffs themselves do not so much protect as punish. They inflate input costs for domestic manufacturers, forcing companies that rely on steel, aluminum, or electronics to pay more. They shred efficiency like confetti, as firms divert time and money into dodging duties rather than innovating.

The result is a distorted economy in which “protected” industries grow flabby, while consumers foot the bill in higher prices. A VAT, by contrast, raises more revenue with fewer distortions: boring, predictable, and efficient.

Think of it this way: a VAT is like a sales tax with receipts — the government taking its skim in daylight, in amounts you can see on the bill. Tariffs are more like your neighbour smashing your car window, then charging you for the privilege of driving it. And when you complain about the shards of glass in the seat and the draft blowing through the cabin, he puffs out his chest and tells you it’s all in the name of “sovereignty.” You still have to get to work. You still pay. You just do it colder, poorer, and with a patriotic sticker slapped on the cracked windshield.

This is the economic patriotism of tariffs: vandalism passed off as virtue. The single mother at Walmart isn’t buying sovereignty — she’s buying toothpaste that costs 20% more because someone in Washington thought smashing the global supply chain would show China who’s boss. The shards land in her cart, not Beijing’s.

And north of the border? Ottawa is no better. We smash our own shop windows while boasting of “resisting Trump,” then hand the broom and dustpan to Canadian consumers. Tariffs on U.S. goods inflate grocery bills and retail prices here, but our politicians preen about “standing tall.” It is sovereignty as cosplay: wreck your own storefront, stick a maple leaf decal on the jagged glass, and declare victory.

Worse still, Canada doesn’t stop at smashing foreign windows. We delight in smashing our own. Fully 35 percent of our economy is walled off from foreign competition, and what’s left is often strangled by internal barriers between provinces. It is Alberta telling Ontario that its beer is not welcome; Quebec insisting that its dairy is sacred; Ontario snarling at B.C.’s wine. Each province lobs a brick through the other’s shop window, then sends the repair bill to its own citizens. Economists estimate this juvenile vandalism costs us nearly 7 percent of GDP — the equivalent of burning tens of billions of dollars a year in the name of parochial pride.

We kvetch endlessly about our lagging productivity, yet we guard these little rackets like holy relics. Canadian entrepreneurs don’t need to innovate when they can rent-seek, lobby, and fatten themselves on protectionism at home. In that universe of complacency, the only thriving business is the Ottawa restaurant scene — stuffed nightly with lobbyists toasting their latest regulatory carve-out while the economy sinks under the weight of their broken glass.

Spending on Fumes

Even if Carney dodges the constitutional backlash, the fiscal reckoning awaits. Canada’s budget is already ossified: roughly 63% of spending goes to transfers — Old Age Security, health transfers, social benefits — while another 10% is swallowed by interest payments on the debt. That leaves less than a third of the budget open to serious cuts, unless one dares touch the sacred cows of pensions and health care. And Carney, for all his rhetorical machismo, has shown no appetite for real austerity.

Instead, he behaves like the “new daddy” we hoped would finally pick up the bills from the dining-room table and pay them — but doesn’t. Under him, the envelopes keep piling up, only now they’re thicker, stamped with red warnings, and collecting interest. He prattles on about “investments” while the household credit card maxes out, insisting that his “strategic spending” will somehow earn more than it costs. Yet interest payments are already higher than what Ottawa spends on national defence, and soon they may eclipse health transfers.

This is not financial stewardship but a teenager’s fantasy of adulthood: the belief that simply having a job means the bills will take care of themselves. Carney was meant to be the responsible father who finally sorted the household accounts. Instead, he has joined the long Canadian tradition of tossing another unopened envelope onto the wobbling stack and telling us not to worry — Daddy has it handled.

Meanwhile, the house itself is falling apart. The windows are smashed, shards crunching underfoot, but rather than repair them we stick a flag decal on the jagged glass and declare it “character.” Every deficit is another pane shattered; every subsidy and boutique program another gust of cold air through the cracks. We are a nation sitting in a draughty wreck, congratulating ourselves on our “resilience” while the bills pile higher and the glass cuts deeper.

Fantasy Fortunes and a Compliant Press

And while the glass crunches under our feet, the political class helps itself to the silverware. Trudeau began public life cushioned by a $1.2 million inheritance. Add in a parliamentary salary since 2008, topped with the Prime Minister’s paycheque, and grant him the near-inhuman discipline of saving thirty percent of his gross income every single year. Even then, the arithmetic will not comply. To reach his current net worth — about $95 million in 2025 — he would need to sustain annual investment returns of nearly thirty percent for seventeen years. That is not thrift; it is fantasy. Not even Warren Buffett in his prime could pull it off.

Nor is Trudeau alone. Cabinet ministers earn around $300,000; backbench MPs less. Net worth estimates that put Chrystia Freeland or other Liberal grandees in the tens of millions invite the same arched eyebrow. From these incomes, only hedge-fund-level compounding produces such figures. Yet Canadians are expected to nod along, as if fortunes sprout naturally in Ottawa’s soil, watered by press conferences and subsidized media applause.

And what does the Canadian press, those supposed guardians of accountability, do with this mathematical impossibility? Nothing. They bow their heads, shuffle their subsidy cheques from Ottawa and Google, and make sure no spreadsheet ever spoils the fairy tale. The burglars have robbed the house in broad daylight, and we are too busy admiring their socks to notice the missing silver.

Conclusion: The Broken Home

Canada, a country that by geography, resources, and demography could be the wealthiest nation on earth, contents itself instead with second-rate governance, third-rate arithmetic, and the first-rate smugness of believing we are somehow superior to the Americans we so love to sneer at.

Tariffs are not policy but pathology, and Canada isn’t just complicit—we are the patient. Ours is a culture that prefers fairy tales to arithmetic, that wears delusion and hubris as national virtues. We congratulate ourselves not on excellence but on mediocrity: on our ability to mistake vibe-voting for statesmanship, to confuse corruption with charm.

We now live in a broken home: the bills piling up on the dining-room table, the windows smashed and covered with patriotic decals, the silverware gone, and Daddy Carney assuring us it’s all under control. And still we sit around the table, shivering in the draught, congratulating ourselves that at least we are not Americans.