Trump's tariff chaos may have treaty links, other agenda: former Alberta minister Sonya Savage  

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Short of a crystal ball, it’s almost impossible at this point to divine U.S. President Donald Trump’s precise intent with the threat of tariffs and talk of annexing Canada, former Alberta energy minister Sonya Savage told Postmedia.

“There’s just so many schools of thought on what he’s trying to accomplish, and I don’t know if anybody 100 per cent knows the end game,” said Savage, now senior counsel at Borden Ladner Gervais.

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Outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was recorded last week asserting Trump’s stated annexation ambitions were a grab for Canada’s critical mineral resources.

Savage disagrees.

“For Justin Trudeau to say Donald Trump wants to take over Canada, wants to acquire us because of our critical minerals — that was crazy,” Savage said.

“I can be sure the end game isn’t to start annexing Canada.”

So where’s all that chaos headed?

Some have taken Trump’s initial attacks on the border, fentanyl, immigration and defence spending at face value, while others think Trump’s tariff plans are all about a show of strength ahead of renegotiating the whole CUSMA treaty, up for renegotiation next year, Savage said.

“Others say there’s more to it than that, and it’s about geopolitics and trying to position the United States in a more powerful position with its allies, vis-a-vis China and its growing allies, with Iran, Russia and North Korea.

“Some feel that the end game for Trump is to realign with Western allies and others feel that it’s all about money, that raising tariffs replaces income tax and corporate tax.

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“It’s just hard to know what the end game is,” she said.

If it is about the U.S. raising money in support of tax breaks, Canada’s in trouble because you can’t trade, ally or negotiate out of that, Savage said.

Eye on critical minerals

In the dizzying race for developing new economies, the American appetite for Canada’s critical minerals is huge, but Savage said the U.S. has straightforward ways to gain access to things like Canadian high-grade nickel, lithium, uranium, germanium and potash, all critical to everything from cellphones, batteries, and agriculture, to nuclear power generation and military defence applications.

“My guess would be he wants a stronger alliance to ensure that those critical minerals are sold to the United States and not to China, that Canada’s abundance of critical minerals isn’t developed in a way that makes China even when they’re decades ahead,” she said.

Savage sits on the boards of E3 Lithium and the board of Reconciliation Energy Transition Inc.

Canada’s got the goods for critical minerals to open up new economies, Savage said, citing the lithium collected in brine out of the sprawling Leduc aquifer now dry of oil and gas.

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“You don’t have to take over. You just have to create favourable trade conditions and favourable markets and help us have Canadian-American capital, private sector capital, and markets and companies help us develop our resources so that we can market them in the United States,” she said, pointing to money available under the U.S. Defense Production Act coming out of the Department of Defense, deployable in Canada to Canadian companies to develop minerals.

“That’s huge because that kind of funding, grant funding out of the United States can be the catalyst for startup companies here that are in the critical mineral space, to then be able to attract private sector equity, which then enables the companies to finance the rest of a project,” Savage said.

“The key in all of this is he needs to keep these minerals from being sold to China. I don’t think it’s helpful when the prime minister comes out and goes to the extreme end and throws that out. I don’t think it’s helpful to anything that companies are trying to do to make this happen, and it’s actually kind of undermining his own minister, Minister Wilkinson, who has been down in the United States, talking about these exact same things … on how to accelerate these markets and how to put these pieces together so that Canadian minerals can be accessed and be sold into America, be developed here and sold into American markets,” she said.

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Government through chaos

The newly sworn 47th president of the U.S. has made a career of tossing out lit firecrackers, but there may be a method to his madness.

Savage said the blueprint is laid down in his book, Art of the Deal.

“It shows how he negotiates and how you put crazy things on the table to get the opponent into a different space.”

It may not be so much what Trump says as why he says it — and Canada shouldn’t spend the next four years “worrying about every outrageous thing that President Trump says,” Savage said, citing a social media-topping news flash that Trump would not deport Prince Harry, who lives in California with his American bride, Megan Markle.

It’s likely that Trump’s brand of chaos is calculated to let his government rapidly push through an agenda, said Savage, who has landed on her feet in the business world since her ministerial portfolio roles in Jason Kenney’s UCP government.

“New governments that want to get things done really fast have a very, very aggressive agenda, a change agenda, and multiple things have to be done all at once.

“Sometimes the best way to do that is just rip it open and try to do it all at once, and you create enough chaos all over the place that all your opponents and everybody who’s opposed to bits and pieces of it will be so busy chasing stuff that you’re actually going to get stuff done and stuff through,” she said.

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“Creating a little bit of chaos allows you to get things done that you really want to and need to get done. If you just are slow about it and methodical and put one thing out at a time, you’re going to have everything opposed, and it’s just going to slow things down … You see it pretty much any time there’s a change of government, it’s just chaos.”

That’s a playbook the UCP government has called on, Savage noted.

“You saw it when our (UCP) government first came in in 2019 with 375 platform items. We sat 72 hours around the clock in the legislature and had one of the first-ever spring sessions that went right into the summer just to get stuff done.

“You just go all in aggressively. And I think Trump might be, in many cases, just throwing extreme things out on the agenda to get other stuff done.”

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