By Scott Taylor
Last week there was a brief but intense media feeding frenzy over Canada’s long since discontinued contribution to the war in Afghanistan. The genesis for this controversy was previously taped comments from U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro. The recordings were made to White House press reporter Jim Sciutto as part of the research for his new book The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the world.
The context of Navarro’s comments were related to trade negotiations and whether or not Canada had been able to curry favour at the bargaining table by sending our troops to fight in Afghanistan.
Navarro said “Were they doing us a favour or were they brought into the idea they needed to do that as part of the global effort against terrorists?”
Answering his own question, Navarro continued “I mean, if they were just doing us a favour, maybe their government should have been thrown out of office. I mean every time a Canadian shows up in uniform, it’s doing us a favour? How’s that work?”
The knee jerk reaction to Navarro’s callous dismissal of Canada’s sacrifice in that war was bitter anger. Former Chief of Defence Staff General (ret’d) Rick Hillier was beside himself with rage. Hillier had been one of the leading architects in shaping Canada’s combat role in Kandahar back in 2005, and he seemed to take the slight from Navarro personally. In numerous subsequent media interviews Hillier referred to Navarro as an “idiot” and questioned why a trade advisor was discussing military affairs in the first place.
While it was good to see Hillier's blunt and emotional defence of Canada’s “son’s and daughter’s” on the airwaves and while Navarro may have been misguided in telling a reporter those thoughts, he was simply telling the truth.
If anyone in high political office in Canada thought that our soldiers’ sacrifice in a U.S.-led unwinnable war would earn us a bargaining chip at trade talks then they do deserve to be turfed from power.
That is not how capitalism works under a protectionist U.S. administration.
In 2001, when the Twin Towers were attacked in New York and the so-called Global War on Terrorism began, Canada enjoyed a total annual trade volume with the U.S. of $380 billion, of which $52 billion was a trade surplus in Canada’s favour.
Over the subsequent two decades Canada has sent tens of thousands of soldiers to both Afghanistan. (2001 - 2014) and Iraq (2014-present). Of that total 159 soldiers were killed and at least another two thousand were wounded, injured or continue to suffer from the invisible scars of PTSD. The Afghanistan mission alone is estimated to cost Canada in excess of $22 billion once long term care costs for veterans is factored into the equation.
Despite this ‘investment’ of blood and gold, the 2019 figures show that our total annual trade value with the U.S. has risen to $600 billion but of that increased number our surplus dropped to $26 billion.
By comparison, Mexico sent not a single soldier to Iraq or Afghanistan and saw a huge increase in trade with the U.S. In 2001 their total trade value was $232 billion of which $30 billion was surplus in Mexico’s favour. Last year Mexico's total trade value with America had grown over those two decades to eclipse Canada at $613 billion, of which $100 billion was a Mexican surplus.
While Navarro’s remarks are insensitive they are accurate. While we were allegedly trying to curry favour by participating in US-led foreign military misadventures, the Mexicans have been quietly eating our lunch at the trade table!
What I found far more insulting to Canadian martial pride dates back to a January 2008 article published in the New York Times. It quoted then U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates claiming “NATO forces in southern Afghanistan do not know how to combat a guerrilla insurgency and that could be contributing to rising violence in that country.”
That’s right folks, even as our sons and daughters were fighting and dying in Kandahar, the top U.S. defence official was publicly blaming us (and our NATO partners) for losing the war.
Now that is ingratitude.
Note to editors: Dollar figures used are in US Dollars and are from the US Federal Census Bureau.
