An independence built on shortcuts is not a real independence
Trump’s tariffs exposed Canada’s dependence on one neighbour. The rush to fix it risks repeating the mistake at home.

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Since taking office in January 2025, President Trump, president of the United States (U.S.) has threatened Canada in many ways—from suggesting Canada should be the 51st state to imposing the heaviest tariffs in the history of the relationship. On July 20, 2025, President Trump signed three Presidential Proclamations imposing an additional 50 percent of tariffs on a broad range of Canadian products. On September 8th, Canada answered with retaliatory tariffs of 15, 25, and 50 percent on approximately CAD $27.6 billion of U.S. imports. Trump responded the same day with a ban on Canadian dairy, motorcycles, and alcohol beginning September 29th, and a threat of 50 percent tariffs on Canadian vehicles, auto parts, and steel next year.

The back and forth on tariffs, meetings, and presidential rhetoric can look like a tantrum—but that isn’t the point. The point is that Trump can afford to disturb our economy in a single summer because Canada has spent decades making sure a politician like him could. 

The decades—at least seven decades—of Canadian reliance on the U.S. were not an accident. Dependence was a choice, made over the years, because it was cheap and easy. More than 70 percent of Canadian exports head to the United States. By the federal government’s own count, about 90 percent of primary steel exports and soft wood lumber go south, and roughly 70 percent of defence procurement dollars have flowed to American firms.  

Canada is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)—a defensive alliance between 32 North American and European nations—but our defence spending sat below the NATO target for years on the assumption that the U.S. will cover the gap. In July 2026, the U.S. declined the request to extend the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement for another 16-year term, so the trade deals our economy is built on now runs on annual reviews. 

The bill for the arrangement is already arriving. According to Global Affairs Canada, exports to the U.S. fell 5.3 percent in 2025, a drop of CAD$31.3 billion. By July 2026, Statistics Canada reported the U.S. share of Canadian exports had fallen to 66.3 percent, the lowest since 1997 outside the Covid-19 pandemic. The path from 76.3 percent in 2024 to 72.5 percent in 2025 to 66.3 percent in July is real and large, and manufacturers are feeling it most.

The missing half is this: the dependence was never only who Canada sells to. It was about what Canada sells. In 2023, 97 percent of crude oil exports went to the U.S. being the largest foreign crude oil exporter. In 2024, crude oil alone was a quarter of exports to the United States. When the tariffs hit, exports fell, and Canada went looking for new buyers. Global Affairs Canada reports that Canada’s crude oil exports to China rose 165 percent in 2025, and energy exports to the Indo-Pacific rose 25.4 percent. The same barrel of oil goes to Shanghai instead of Houston, on a pipeline built for that purpose.

However, breaking our country’s historical dependence on the U.S. requires diversifying our exports and the investment we attract. Canada did not become less dependent on selling unprocessed resources; it found new people to sell them to, and it continues to do so as a potential long-term strategy for economic stability. But the plan to go further means building more of the same infrastructure, faster.

Faster has a name. Bill C-5, the Building Canada Act passed in June 2025, created a major projects office to fast-track projects. Prime Minister (PM) Mark Carney’s government deems the project to be in the national interest: energy corridors, oil and gas pipelines, ports, mines, electricity grids, and data centres. The government’s case is not empty. The act requires consultation with Indigenous rights holders before any project is added to the list; the bill’s criteria should include advancing the interests of Indigenous Peoples and meeting climate objectives. At the same time, Canada has doubled the Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program to C$10 billion. On paper, the safeguards are there.

The communities these safeguards were written for do not trust them. In July 2026, the Assembly of First Nations leaders voted unanimously to oppose further streamlining reforms that weaken environmental protections or sidestep Indigenous rights. 

On September 14th, more than 1,000 people, including labour unions, other Indigenous leaders, and climate and housing advocates marched in downtown Toronto against Carney’s investment summit, where he sought $1 trillion in private investment for 167 “nation-building” projects. Rachel Small, an organizer with World Beyond War, told CBC News that Carney “is selling our public resources without any guaranteed returns.” 

Small’s point and the Indigenous opposition to Carney’s race towards nation-building are similar. Whether the shortcut is a compressed review or the sale of social and public assets—funded by taxpayer dollars—to foreign investors, the method is identical: quickly buy independence from the U.S. and pay for it with something Canada cannot buy back. 

The bill itself says as much. It promises a two-year federal review that asks how to build, not whether to build. A consultation, whose outcome is fixed in advance, is a process, not consent.  And the same criteria that promises projects will contribute to Canada’s climate objectives sit beside a diversification strategy that consists largely of shipping more crude oil, building more pipelines, and extracting more resources. 

This is not a foundation Canada should build on. A project built over unresolved objections is not settled; it is litigation and blockades waiting to happen, which is the opposite of the resilience that diversification is supposed to buy us. Canada cannot ask the U.S. to respect its sovereignty while treating the sovereignty of First Nations as an administrative hurdle. An independence built on shortcuts is not a real independence. 

The obvious response is that Canada cannot afford to be slow. Almost 87,000 jobs are already at risk and the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has argued that Canada cannot sustain a trade war with an economy 13 times its size. Both points are fair, and Canadians have already answered them. On September 8th, an Angus Reid Institute poll found nearly three-quarter of Canadians want our government to refuse difficult concessions, and 60 percent will hold the line even if the household cost rose 20 percent. The public is not asking for speed. We are  asking for resolve, and resolve does not require shortcuts. 

What resolve without shortcuts looks like it arrived the same week. On September 16th, the European Union (EU) invited Canada to become its first “associate member.” The EU already has associate agreements with countries like Ukraine, but associate membership is a new status, and it is uncertain whether Canada would have any say in the EU’s decision or the EU in Canada’s. That uncertainty is the point: joining a rule-based bloc of 27 countries through negotiations will be slow, and the outcome is not guaranteed. It is the opposite of a shortcut, and it is what an independence built to last actually looks like. The avenues away from dependence exist. The question is, which road will Canada take? 

You may ask why any of this is relevant to us as students. Well, as soon-to-be-graduate students at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) will feel the effects, for better or worse, depending entirely on how our government acts now. The tariffs have already hit the energy, mineral and manufacturing industries that many of us are counting on for job security. Our generation gains the most from the diversification done properly and loses the most if the pivot is built on shortcuts and reversed on court, or on a blockade line, five years from now. 

The current situation will pass. There will be a new administration in the U.S., and Canada will face other challenges. But this trade war has taught us a lesson worth remembering for decades to come: dependence on one country is dangerous and so is trying to escape it in a hurry. Convenience is not security, and fast-tracking is socially responsible and consent is convenience by another name. The country our generation inherits should be independent from any single state and become honest with itself. An independence built on shortcuts is neither.

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