In April I wrote down four worries about where this country was headed. Four months later I went back to look at them. Part 2 of a four-part series.
There is a particular kind of discomfort in reading your own writing back.
Not the typos. Not the sentence you would build differently now.
The part where you find out whether you were paying attention.
That weekend, after I ducked a good question with a coffee emoji, I went back and opened The Puck Is on Our Stick. April 18. Right after the Davos speech.
I had gone looking for something else entirely. What I found was a list.
I Did Not Make Four Predictions
I asked four questions.
That distinction did not feel important when I wrote it. It feels important now.
A prediction has exactly one job. It comes true or it does not, and either way it is finished with you by the time you find out.
A question keeps working.
So no, I am not going to grade myself today. It is far too early, this thing is moving in real time, and anybody handing out final marks this early on a story that is still being written is selling something.
What I can do is tell you honestly where each one sits right now.
Question 1: “Strong words BUT lacking in specific action”
This is the one that has moved the most, and I want to give credit where it is due.
There is a Major Projects Office now. Headquartered in Calgary, of all places, run by Dawn Farrell, built under the Building Canada Act to pull federal approvals into a single set of conditions instead of a decade of them.
Projects have actually been referred to it. On August 17, Ottawa referred the Labrador Trough power, critical minerals and infrastructure corridor, and called it the largest clean energy investment in North American history.
That is not a speech. That is a file with a number on it.
And I will be straight with you, the fast-track approach has real critics, including Indigenous leaders who say consultation is being squeezed. Those objections are not noise and I am not going to pretend they are.
But then there is this.
On June 4, Ottawa extended the consultation period on two discussion papers about redesigning how major projects get reviewed, with legislation now expected in the fall.
Read that again slowly.
We built an office to move faster, and then extended a consultation about how to move faster.
Better than April? Yes.
Fixed? Not close. In We Had One Shot I wrote that global capital does not wait while we draft the agenda for the next meeting about the meeting. Still true. Still the pattern.
Where it sits: moving. Slowly. And still in love with process.
Question 2: “Did we just give our largest customer the middle finger?”
I wrote that one with 75%+ of our exports in mind. The current number is about 71%. Close enough to be the same problem.
August 21, talks collapsed in Washington after three days. 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion of our goods. Our answer landed September 8.
So the surface answer is obvious and it is not the interesting part.
Here is the interesting part.
While all of that noise was happening, exports to the United States rose. Four consecutive months through May, even as exports to the rest of the world slipped slightly.
Sit with that for a second.
Through the loudest stretch of anti-American economic rhetoric in modern Canadian history, we sold MORE to them, not less.
We did not reduce the dependence. We just made it hostile.
That is a worse position than either camp online is willing to admit. The flag-wavers think we walked away. The doom crowd thinks we got crushed. Neither one is looking at the actual invoices.
And here is the line from Part 1 that belongs right here. Ottawa says these tariffs touch about 5% of what we send south. Not a hammer blow to the country. But for the individual company sitting on the wrong line item, it is the whole economy. The hockey stick maker. The cement plant. The dairy operation that built its whole business on one border.
Around 30,000 Canadian companies export to the United States and nowhere else. When a company’s sales fall off a cliff, it does not write a strongly worded letter. It lays people off. Two million jobs sit behind that export line, and no government can put two million people on the public payroll.
Those are the kids. They were always going to be the kids.
And as of this week, no new talks are scheduled.
Where it sits: the dependence is intact. The goodwill is not. And nobody is in the room.
Question 3: “Did we overplay our hand and overestimate our current world importance?”
Two weeks ago I would have said too early, full stop. I still will not call it. But the people who negotiate trade for a living have started to, and I am listening.
The case that we did not: a trade diversification strategy with a real target, double non-US exports by 2035, roughly $300 billion in new trade. A Canada-China agreement that pulled rare cross-partisan support from the premiers of BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan. A free trade agreement signed with Ecuador in July. A Strategic Exports Office stood up at the end of the same month.
The case that we might have: the US still takes about 70% of what we sell. That share peaked above 90% in the early 2000s and it has taken more than twenty years to grind down to where it is. Twenty years for twenty points. Nobody is redrawing that map in one news cycle.
And then there is what the professionals are saying, and it is not what the comment sections are saying.
One of the country’s most experienced trade lawyers put it this way. Every other country in the world got to an agreement with this administration and moved past it. Nobody else is doing what Canada is doing. And by walking away with no room left to manoeuvre, we boxed ourselves into a corner, which is poor negotiating in any deal and worse when you are the smaller party. He also does not buy the idea that the midterms or a change in Washington will ride to the rescue. Whoever is in charge, the tariffs on steel and aluminum are in every deal they sign.
A former banker turned business professor made the other half of the argument. The claim that nobody can negotiate with this president is contradicted by the record, he counted nineteen trade deals since the start of last year. Not great deals, he said. But deals. And a phrase that has been rattling around my head all week: elbows up is an emotional response. It is not a policy. It is not a negotiating strategy.
I am not saying they are right. I am saying they are the ones with the scar tissue on this exact file, and they are both saying the same thing.
And then there is the number that stopped me.
Canada already has fifteen free trade agreements, spanning 51 countries, covering more than 60% of global GDP.
Nearly three in ten Canadian exporters who are eligible to use them do not.
We have the friends. We have the paperwork. We are just not picking up the phone.
That is the next article, and I am going to spend the whole thing on it.
Where it sits: still open. But the people who do this for a living are leaning one way, and it is not the way the crowd is leaning.
Question 4: “Is the current Canadian system set up to support entrepreneurs? Are we set up to win?”
This is the one that has gotten worse, and it is the one almost nobody is talking about this week.
In January the IMF put a number on our interprovincial trade barriers. They function like a 9% internal tariff. In some service sectors it runs as high as 40%.
Take them away and the estimate is roughly 7% in real GDP. Around $210 billion.
One economist put it about as plainly as it can be put: Canada is not really one economy. It is ten.
So here we are.
Losing our minds over a tariff a neighbour put on us… while quietly charging ourselves one every single day of the week.
And it is the small operator who pays first. Small business carries over 60% of the private sector jobs in this country. Thin margins, thin capital, and the highest failure rate of any sector in any year. A 50% tariff on inputs is not a policy debate for that owner. It is a runway, and it is short.
A tariff we wrote. A tariff we control. A tariff that needs no negotiation, no summit, no counsellor, and no permission from anybody in Washington.
Where it sits: this is the fight we could actually win, and it is the one we are not having.
What Four Months Taught Me
Here is what I actually took away from rereading that April post, and it has almost nothing to do with trade policy.
Everybody who posted a hot take that week is gone. Nobody remembers who was loudest about the Davos speech. Nobody is circling back to check.
The four questions are still doing work.
Predictions expire. Questions compound.
I have been doing this for 26 years and I think this is the most useful habit I have, and I have never once written it down as a habit until this week.
When something big lands and I do not know what to think, I do not force an opinion. I write the questions. I date them. I put them somewhere I will find them again.
Then I let the world answer them at its own pace.
You already do a version of this on a deal. You do not decide a property is good, you list what would have to be true for it to be good, and then you go find out. Same muscle. Bigger board.
Do This Tonight
1. Open a blank document. Write the date at the top.
2. Write down four questions about YOUR market. Not four predictions. Four things you genuinely do not know yet, phrased as questions. What happens to my material costs. What happens to my buyer pool if rates hold. Whether the demand I am counting on is real or borrowed.
3. Do not answer them. That is the discipline and it is harder than it sounds. Resist the urge to resolve them tonight just so you feel settled.
4. Put a note in your calendar for 90 days out to open the file and see where each one sits.
That is it. Fifteen minutes.
In 90 days you will have something almost nobody has, which is a written record of what you did not know, in your own handwriting, with a date on it.
That file will make you a better operator than any prediction you could make tonight.
One More Thing
Every one of those four questions has real people standing behind it. A crew waiting on a project. A family on one side of the border whose paycheque comes from a customer on the other. A business owner in Edmonton pricing steel on a weekday morning.
The longer this goes, the more of them get hurt. That is the only part of this I am certain about.
Bad months end. They end faster when somebody gets in the room.
Next
Fifteen agreements. Fifty-one countries. Sixty percent of global GDP.
And three in ten of us are not using them.
In the next article I want to talk about other friends. What that actually means, why it is not disloyalty, and why the same lesson lands just as hard on a portfolio as it does on a country.
I believe in you.
The Rough Patch: A Four-Part Series
Part 1: The Fight
Part 2: Four Questions (you are here)
Part 3: Other Friends (next)
Part 4: Nobody Knows. Do The Work Anyway.
In your corner,
Russell Westcott
#Inspire #Encourage #Love
