The Best Canadian Response to Trump is Socialism

Jan. 18, 2025

We need to start reversing 40 years of neoliberalism with economic planning and public ownership

Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has taken to musing publicly about using “economic force” to annex Canada. The threat is so brazen that many are treating it as a joke, unable to accept that a United States President could hold such an economically existential threat over our heads. 

But these comments are no joke, and Trump must be treated as a hostile actor to Canadian economic security. At the federal level, the NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, to his credit, has called on others to back his plan against Trump, which is to promise retaliation to any Trump tariffs, as well as restricting American access to minerals in Canada.

But these retaliations, however necessary, sidestep a major problem. We will not solve this quagmire with tariffs and Twitter posts. Rather, we need to wrestle with the cold, hard fact that 40 years of neoliberal capitalism in Canada have put us in this predicament where one president can so threaten our economic fortunes. 

To truly resist American aggression, we need a solution that includes nationalization, economic planning and worker ownership—in other words, socialism. 

Canada’s past offers some lessons and ideas about how to do this. Canadian leftists once offered a vision of a robust state and strong labour unions as a method of building an independent democratic socialist society. It’s time to revive that.

Public ownership as a bulwark against American empire

Part of the issue is that Canada’s economy is so deeply integrated into the U.S. economy.

When American and foreign capital own so much of Canada’s economy—especially in strategic industries like energy, mining, and heavy manufacturing—we can’t be surprised that an American president would use that as leverage.

There was a moment nearly 60 years ago when it appeared Canada was learning the correct lesson about building a more self-reliant economy. Led by left-wing intellectuals and labour activists within and beyond the NDP, there was an effort to not only study the extent and effects of American economic control of Canada, but also push back against it. 

Amid the publication of the Watkins Report, which detailed for the federal government the implications of foreign ownership of our economy—revealing for the first time just how deeply Canada was economically controlled from abroad—a flurry of left national organizing was happening.

Leftists pressured Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government to emphasize greater control over the Canadian economy, including the nationalization of key industries, energy chief among them. (It has to be acknowledged that these left nationalists often, though not always, failed to reckon with the importance of Indigenous rights and self-determination.) They eventually won successes like the formation of publicly-owned Petro-Canada, achieved only because NDP leader David Lewis demanded it as part of a deal during a Trudeau minority government in 1972. 

But these early gains quickly fell apart as Canada and most of the western world embraced privatization and neoliberal capitalism. The Mulroney and Chrétien governments empowered American and private ownership, but more importantly, Trudeau Sr.’s initial approach was from the beginning too preoccupied with empowering Canadian capitalists.

We need to learn from these historical failures: Canada should challenge American dominance by asserting public control of all strategic resources and production. 

Canada has tried privatization and integration into the American economy for 40 years. It has failed to protect Canada’s economic security, as Trump’s threats make abundantly clear. 

This is where the NDP needs to develop some fortitude and start saying it plainly: capitalism has failed us. Socialism can put us on another path.

Reviving economic planning

It’s clear that Canada needs public ownership and long-term vision in order to be able to stave off threats like the ones Trump has started issuing.

But achieving these goals is not a matter of snapping our fingers. It requires thoughtful economic planning to challenge the American hold on our economy. 

Indeed, it was the NDP in its earliest days in the 1960s that argued alongside labour unions that unless we planned for our economic future, we would be unable to stand up to the United States when the time came. Well, the time has now come, and we did not plan ahead.

At the time, the NDP and labour unions demanded not only crown corporations like the aforementioned Petro-Canada, but also a central crown corporation to invest in projects in return for equity and control by Canadians, who could assert economic goals in a way capitalists would never allow.

They also argued that this planning could better build an east-west economy to reduce dependence on trade with the United States. The goal was never, of course, to eliminate trade with our southern neighbours, but to avoid our current predicament. 

Sadly, all this was either rejected by Liberal and Conservative governments, or quickly dismantled in the wave of government sell-offs in the 1980s. 

Trump has threatened, for example, to cut off Canada’s access to the American auto manufacturing market. Many components are built in Canada, and shipped south for manufacturing. More beginning-to-end production in Canada would lessen the power of Trump’s threats.

Countries like Norway have been much more foresightful, creating nationalized energy industries that have made their citizens wealthier than Canadians, all while having funds in place to better plan their economic futures. Here, on the other hand, and to quote the old western bumper sticker, we repeatedly “pissed away” oil booms.

The solution isn’t to just surrender to maple-clad capitalists instead of Americans, though. Galen Weston isn’t going to protect the Canadian working class any more than a tycoon from Texas. 

There have been positive glimmers of NDP political action here, with the NDP leading the charge in taking on the billionaire class by hauling them before parliamentary committees to question them on price gouging. They’ve been vindicated in his attacks on Canadian grocery capitalists by a recent CBC investigation that found they’ve been ripping Canadians off by overcharging for meat.

But parliamentary committee hearings are not enough. Yes, we need to take on the corporate welfare bums, but we also need to address the question of ownership and planning directly. 

A bold socialist vision for the future

One misconception about socialism is that it is concerned only with government control.

A socialist platform must include worker control of industry, from universal unionization to workers directly owning the means of production in their workplace—the broadest possible economic democracy. This means collective ownership of businesses, greater worker control, and residents having real input into how our economy operates. 

A robust democracy that extends beyond voting once every few years and into exercising collective control on a regular basis is critical in building defenses against American dominance. 

Today, working-class people are alienated from the decisions, products, and profits their work generates. Because of this, Canadian workers have little direct control over their own destiny, either within Canada or in our relationship with the United States. 

Only by restructuring our society so that Canadians have some ownership over their workplace, economy, and country can we build a bulwark against Trump’s attacks.

Crucial to remember, however, is that resisting American dominance via economic nationalism cannot be allowed to sidestep the pursuit of justice for Indigenous peoples. They must be essential partners in building a democratic society and economy, including by ending our own Canadian colonial aggression with real land restitution. 

This is a time for democratic socialism to shine again, and the NDP could seize the opportunity. Recent polling shows a supermajority of Canadians reject Trump’s plans, and New Democrats are almost unanimously opposed. 

The Conservative Party base includes many wishing to become American, and the Liberal Party’s commitment to neoliberal capitalism leaves them unable to respond with any coherent plan beyond waiting for a Democratic president to win the White House again.

In the immediate term, the NDP has a priceless chance to seize the anti-Trump moment by standing up for workers and jobs. But this isn’t nearly enough: the party must make fundamental structural changes to actually and meaningfully embrace a leftist vision.

The NDP becoming a champion for a bold socialist future must be the path forward.