Preston Manning  

Rank and file Americans are best positioned to insist upon a relaxation of Mr. Trump’s tariff policies – that populist base which Mr. Carney neither understands nor respects but whom the President cannot afford to ignore or alienate if he wishes to retain their political support.

By now it is becoming apparent that Mark Carney’s government is seriously bungling Canada’s response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff initiatives. By ill-advisedly imposing counter-tariffs only to withdraw them later, Ottawa temporarily played with “elbows up” – only to learn that, as in hockey, pursuing such a strategy in the absence of a strong offence simply draws penalties and gives the other side a manpower advantage.

As the list of Mr. Carney’s missteps on the tariff file grows – costing Canadians jobs, incomes, and increases in prices – surely it is becoming clear that a fundamental reset is required in Canada’s approach to Mr. Trump and his tariff initiatives if their negative consequences for both Canada and the U.S. are to be overcome.

So what and where is the reset button that could be pushed to redress those initiatives? Who is in the best position to push it, and when is the best opportunity to do so?

That button is not to be found in Washington or on Wall Street, but rather among those to whom Mr. Trump made a promise – time and time again – namely, the American people. “We’re going to get the prices down. We have to get them down. It’s too much. Groceries, cars, everything. We’re going to get the prices down,” he declared repeatedly throughout the 2024 presidential election campaign.

That was the promise. But the current reality is price increases for Americans on food, energy, furniture, and paper products, as well as projected increases in the cost of homes, industrial structures, and public infrastructure as tariffs on steel, aluminum, softwood lumber and timber take their toll. In other words, the reality is not a decrease but an increase in the cost of living for millions of American consumers and voters.

Who then is best positioned to insist upon a relaxation of Mr. Trump’s tariff policies? Not Mr. Carney and his officials, nor even the traditional Washington influencers, but those rank-and-file Americans comprising the massive populist wave that put Mr. Trump in the White House for a second time – that populist base which Mr. Carney neither understands nor respects but whom the President cannot afford to ignore or alienate if he wishes to retain their political support.

So when will be the first real opportunity for Mr. Trump’s core constituency to speak to him effectively – through their votes – about modifying his approach to tariffs? It will be in the months running up to the midterm congressional elections in November, 2026, in which the 435 seats of the House of Representatives and, more crucially, the 35 seats in the US Senate, will be up for election.

Most of those Republican candidates standing for election will want to be pro-Trump to retain hardcore Republican voters, but they will also want to be anti-tariff to secure the support of voters suffering from tariff-induced price increases. How can they be both? By being fully supportive of Mr. Trump’s war on illegal drugs and migrants, bloated bureaucracies, and the mis-management of government finances, while at the same time campaigning as “tariff modifiers”. By asking voters to send them to Washington to support Mr. Trump but to remove the price-increasing-sting of his tariff policies through the negotiation of “reciprocity agreements” with major US trading partners to achieve that objective – just as former president William McKinley, whom Mr. Trump professes to admire, did many years ago.

The election of just a few tariff-moderating Republicans to the U.S. Senate in 2026, to be present when the tariff bill embodying Mr. Trump’s policies eventually gets to that chamber, will do more to improve tariff-disrupting Canada-U.S. trade relations than the ineffectual efforts of those like Mr. Carney who seek to get to Mr. Trump by traditional elite-to-elite negotiating practices.

Getting to Mr. Trump on the tariff issue through his own populist base raises some obvious questions. Which U.S. states, for example, are experiencing the greatest price increases as a result of the tariff wars, and of those, which offer the greatest opportunities to nominate and elect tariff-modifying Republicans to the Senate? Where in the U.S., at the state or national level, are there the beginnings of a grassroots tariff-modification movement, and how might such a movement be encouraged and supported by Canadians as well as Americans.

Americans of course have a vested interest in securing research-informed answers to such questions. But so do Canadians. More on these questions and answers shortly. They are the keys to achieving the desire of the vast majority of rank and file citizens on both sides of the border for a restoration of amicable economic and social relations between our two countries.