BY SHANE WENZEL 

This time of the year I usually like to speculate on what may lie ahead for Alberta in 2025. However, Canada turned out to be ‘the neighbour who isn’t paying our share’ and everything got sidetracked by talk about the implementation of USA tariffs as high as 25 per cent on Canadian goods.

Team Canada included nine premiers and some territories, the fill-in PM and several outsiders who decided the best response was to bargain with Alberta’s resources by stopping the flow to the USA as a ‘punch back.’ In other words, the industry some want to eliminate became their bargaining tool regardless of it being Canada’s single largest revenue source.

Thankfully, our premier wouldn’t allow them to use our ‘oft-maligned resources’ as their main bargaining tool. With that she was subjected to calls of not being a ‘team player’ by some premiers, bureaucrats, hand-picked negotiators, journalists, and wannabe PMs and advisors. She steadfastly refused to let them lobby with our resources and met with the president and congress to state her case. Thank you, Premier Smith!

She encouraged ‘Team Canada’ to deescalate their rhetoric, abandon their list of retaliatory tariffs on USA products and build a fair response package around what the USA advised could stave off their tariffs. Their main concern is Canada’s lack of meeting commitment to securing the border between our countries from illegal transport of drugs and weapons into the USA and stopping illegal crossings from Canada into the USA. While the package is simply us meeting commitments, Canada needs to look for more markets for our products and not be mainly dependent on one customer, restricted by silly regulations and never-ending activists so we can build more pipelines to more markets.

The list of silly retaliatory tariffs on Canadian products to the USA were removed and Premier Smith’s request to hire a border czar to work directly with the USA border guard, along with a host of other outstanding commitments were added to a $1.3 billion border security package. To my knowledge, no mention was made of how we would work to meet our NATO promise of two per cent that is still outstanding. No silly retaliations were included. In other words, USA bourbon is back on our shelves. The offer did garner us a 30-day stay on tariffs, until March 1, 2025, which is just a week before some people vote for a new PM. Personally, I would prefer an election.

This leads me to wonder whatever happened to an idea that was once talked about with respect to the idea of a ‘merged USA/Canadian economy.’ The suggestion made sense for both sides. The discussion arose out of the growing danger of growing world superpowers and their threat to Canada, and the USA. Both countries have been facing the danger of declining economies while these superpowers such as China grow larger and become more aggressive. It just may be worth exploring it again!

We may love our Country, but we remain reliant on the U.S. for defense and they are our neighbour. Our media and some Canadians could help by talking and writing less negatively about the USA.

And please, no booing the USA anthem at hockey games. It is embarrassing, un-Canadian and downright disgusting.