‘A defining moment’: Former foreign affairs minister says Canada needs to stand up in face of U.S. tariff threats

Former Federal Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy speaks with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins about Canada-U.S. relations.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: Let’s touch on the chaos and uncertainty surrounding Trump tariffs. What does that say to you about the state of the border separating our two nations?

Lloyd Axworthy: It’s changed dramatically. I think the launching of Mr. Trump’s economic warfare has basically cut a major, sort of severance, in terms of our relationships, our trade, or our respect for each other.

The idea that somehow these terrors are going to be the solution, and that all of us in Canada are going to fall over flat on our face. It’s just a hallucination. But he, as a president of the United States with a bully pulpit, people listen to him, and that’s the dangerous part.

MH: The prime minister has commented that Trump’s annexation talk is not a joke. How worried are you about the state of Canadian sovereignty?

LA: I think we are really at what the academics would call a defining moment where we have to make some major shifts. We have to do some resetting, some rethinking about where we are, where we’ve been relying.

I go back to the days when we thought about the free trade deal, and the whole argument then was that we could develop a strong pattern of growth if we were totally integrated into the U.S. economy. And now that we’re finding that that integration is not honored, and that one of the partners in the North American trade arrangements, uses it simply and purely for their own indulgence to make them great again. It really just breaks every kind of principle and tenant and premise that we had.

We have to start being a little bit more independent, a little bit more diversified. As someone who’s spent a lot of years in political life, I think we have to find out what it means to us. Are we prepared to stand up to this kind of intimidation?

MH: How hard does Canada need to hit back?

LA: Not only hitting them back directly, what needs to happen is we have to provide some leadership in the world for other countries, other governments, other civil societies who are feeling the kind of Trumpian treatment, and say, ‘We’re going to contain this’.

There’s no sort of containment theory in international politics. It goes back to 1948 as applied to the Soviet Union, and that was a big bully saying, ‘Because we’re powerful, we can do what we want.’ The containment was every time they do something, you react. Every time they make a motion, you contain it. There’s a whole system of putting them into an isolation war.

I think that Canada, along with others, has to come together and start not just being on the receiving end, but also being on the offensive end. Saying to the Americans, ‘You want to do this? That’s fine, but you’re going to find yourself not so much a great power anymore, because a lot of people are no longer going to follow your trail.’

MH: You’re out with a new book, My Life in Politics, and also a member of Humanity and Inclusion Canada’s Council of Governors. What is it about this organization’s work that you so deeply connect with?

LA: Humanity & Inclusion, back in the 1990s, went by the name Handicapped International and they were a major partner with us in developing the treaty to ban the use of landmines. They were focusing very much on the fact that it was a public health crisis, because so many people were being killed and maimed.

They have taken an even a wider range of work to try to demine these very vicious weapons because, as we know, the real killing impact of landmines is that they never go away. They’re stuck on the ground for decades and decades. Humanity & Inclusion has been really involved in a number of countries around the world to pull the minds out so people can go back, restore themselves, as farmers no longer have to take risks when they go for a walk.

That, to me, is one of the ways in which a partnership between a civil society, like Humanity & Inclusion, can work with the government, as we did, to bring about a major change internationally and establish a new set of standards about saving people’s lives.