Trump’s World Series wind-up

It’s thanks to good old Yankee bravado that baseball’s most important fixture is called the “World Series,” even though it’s a thoroughly North American affair.

Yet Major League Baseball, like the National Hockey League, is not restricted to the US – Canada joins in, too. Tonight, for instance, the Toronto Blue Jays will compete against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of what should be a thrilling World Series, and the now-familiar Canadian-American sporting rivalry has been given added spice thanks to a certain man who happens to be President of the United States.

Last night, Donald Trump, who relishes abrupt announcements, abruptly announced that he was suspending trade negotiations with Canada. The reason? He was deeply annoyed by a television advertisement, paid for by the Province of Ontario, which replayed some old footage of Ronald Reagan condemning tariffs as a recipe for economic catastrophe.

“TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A.,” Trump replied on his Truth Social platform. “Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED.”

In another post, Trump declared that the ad was fraudulent. He said it had been broadcast in order “to interfere with the decision of the US Supreme Court,” which is currently pondering a big legal challenge to the President’s tariff agenda.

The advert has clearly been troubling him since at least Tuesday, when he said “I see foreign countries now, that we are doing really well with, taking ads ‘Don’t go with tariffs!’ They’re taking ads. I saw an ad last night from Canada. If I was Canada, I’d take the same ad also.”

It’s always hard to tell if Trump is ever truly enraged or merely playing mind games for headlines and leverage. But he seems oddly determined to wind up America’s second biggest trading partner – and neighbor. He has said, repeatedly, that he thinks Canada should become America’s 51st state, and his blustering on that front helped Mark Carney, the impeccably globalist former governor of the Bank of England, win an election and become the country’s prime minister. Carney’s victory was widely put down to the “Trumplash,” the global reaction to the Donald’s obnoxious tariff agenda.

But the relationship between the United States (the superpower) and Canada (its more European neighbor) is more intimate and complicated than mere policy. Trump’s dismantling of NAFTA – the free trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico – and his replacing it with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is one of the important and under-discussed aspects of his two-terms as Commander-in-Chief. USMCA is still mostly in effect, despite Trump’s tariffs on Canadian steel, automobile parts and lumber.

Will Trump continue to use tariffs as a tool in his push for full annexation? Or is he just toying with the sporting hype around the World Series? We’ll probably never know. The Dodgers are favorites to win, by the way, and – despite what Sean Thomas says about American sports – I think we should all tune in.