Anne Applebaum on Autocracy Inc., Trump, and US-Canada Tensions
This week, our guest is Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book, Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, explores the global rise of authoritarianism.
On February 6th, 2025, Anne spoke at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business annual PETRONAS International Energy Speaker Series. This episode was recorded live at the event.
Jackie Forrest moderated the discussion with Anne Applebaum, which covered a wide range of topics, including the timing of her new book, the Trump administration’s early actions and executive orders, and the recent deterioration of Canadian-US relations.
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Episode 271 transcript
Disclosure:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Announcer:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas podcast, with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest, exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas podcast, I’m Jackie Forrest, and something different today, no Peter Tertzakian. Peter couldn’t make it today, but we wanted to share with you an interview I just did with Anne Applebaum. For those that don’t know her, she’s a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and historian and a journalist. She’s written a lot about Russia, but also studied authoritarian states and democracies, and how governments change. And we just spoke, it’s February 6th, at the PETRONAS International Speaker Series. This is a series that’s from the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business and PETRONAS, and they bring international speakers to Calgary, and we had a sold out show. So, thanks for all of you, I know some of our listeners were there that attended it.
So, I’m going to cut to this interview with Anne here right away, but it obviously is an interesting time for her to visit, a time when Canadians have renewed interest in learning from history about how governments can change. I mean, we’ve thought that the American government was always going to be the same, but we’re seeing today that things can change, a new president can get in, and the things that we’ve assumed for the last 30 years can be different. So, we’ll cut to the interview with Anne, and I will have some closing remarks at the end.
Okay. Well, you’ve written on this a lot. You have a new book, Autocracy Inc., for those that didn’t see it you can get a copy of it out in the foyer. How many books have you written, what number is this?
Anne Applebaum:
Oh my goodness, it depends how you count. It’s six or seven. I also wrote a cookbook, I don’t know, does that count? I wrote a-
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, for sure.
Anne Applebaum:
Actually, my co-author is a Canadian, my co-author was Daniel Crittenden Frum. So, I wrote a Polish cookbook, but I’m not sure if that’s … Is it a book? It’s a book.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, it’s a book. For sure.
Anne Applebaum:
Then it’s more like eight, I think.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay, perfect. And I actually read The Twilight of Democracy, autocracy, you’ve been writing on these topics more recently. Why did you decide to write this book now?
Anne Applebaum:
So, this book is really the product of reporting, and traveling, and meetings that I’ve done really over the last decade. The book describes a group of countries who are not united ideologically, so autocratic countries, nationalist Russia, communist China, theocratic Iran, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela, whatever North Korea calls itself, and these are countries that don’t have a common project, they’re not part of a bloc, like the old Soviet Bloc. Nevertheless, they’ve begun to understand that they have things in common, and they begin to work together in very specific ways, transactionally when it’s in their interests, when they feel that they share things.
My understanding of them comes a lot from their opponents. So, I know well some members of the Venezuelan opposition, I’ve known a lot of the Russian opposition, Belarusian, Hong Kong activists, and they’re often very good at analyzing their own regimes and it was really from them that I began to see the pattern of how this group of countries collaborates, and it happens in different ways. Some of it is financial, the semi-private semi-state companies in one country invest in the semi-private semi-state companies, in another they sell one another surveillance technology. The Chinese are obviously particularly good at that, they help one another get around sanctions, they help one another navigate the world of money laundering and offshore bank accounts in order to take their money that they’ve stolen or acquired and move it quickly around the world.
They also now cooperate militarily. And this, of course we’ve seen in the war in Ukraine, I’m sure you’ll want to talk about that in a few minutes, and they also begin to cooperate ideologically. And this, I think is the most important point, which is that although probably most of us here in this room don’t wake up in the morning thinking about China or thinking about Russia, there are people in China and Russia who wake up every morning thinking about us. And they have concluded partly because their own opponents, so their own dissidents, their own political opponents at home, because they use the language of democracy, of rights and of the rule of law, of accountability, of transparency. They’ve concluded that it’s very important in order for them to maintain their power to push back against those ideas. And they do so through propaganda, through their political actions. So, they don’t have much in common in terms of what they want to build or create, but they do share a common enemy and the enemy is us.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, let’s go to the question of the day, everyone’s dying to hear your views. You’re visiting after a very angry weekend for most of us where we were glued to the TVs because the U.S. announced tariffs on all imports of Canadian goods, even though we have a free trade agreement, I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. Everything is 25% except for energy, which was 10%. And then shortly after that, our Prime Minister announced counter tariffs on about a third of our exports to the United States. So, while these tariffs are going to hurt the Americans through higher prices, they’re probably going to hurt us worse, we’re probably going to have a recession. And unfortunately we have 80% almost of our trade is with one country, the United States. And so, we’re very exposed here at this time. Now, the executive order blamed drugs at the border and it also blamed-
Anne Applebaum:
We know that’s not true.
Jackie Forrest:
There’s very few so we are suspicious, especially because on Sunday morning, Donald Trump puts out on his Truth Social, basically he said, “Without the U.S.’s massive subsidies, Canada ceases to exist as a viable country,” and that, “Canada should become our cherished 51st state,” something he’s been saying for about a month now. “You’d get lower taxes, far better military protection for the people of Canada, and no tariffs.” Large cap. Okay, so we’re all sitting here in Canada. What is his motivation? Is he trying to take us over? Is he just trying to make us more economically reliable on them? Because we are already completely dependent on them economically.
Anne Applebaum:
So, here’s where I’m going to tell you something that is very hard to accept and most people won’t accept it, which is that it’s very possible that there is no particular logic involved, that there isn’t a grand strategy, that this is a thing he got in his head that he would like to pursue. It could be a negotiating tactic. We know how he negotiates, he wrote about it, or his ghostwriter wrote about it in his book, The Art of the Deal. He makes a huge fuss, he creates this anger and hysteria, he makes everybody walk out of the room and then he does his deal. So, it may be simply that someone told him Canada would be a great state, or it may be that he’s going to want to negotiate about something else. Be careful of post-hoc rationalization.
So, I was in Denmark a couple of weeks ago where I went to write about a similar problem the Danes are having with Greenland, and I’ve told you this already but I arrived there on the morning after Trump had spoken to the Danish Prime Minister on the phone, and I had some appointments with the foreign minister and so on. And I wound up spending the morning walking from place to place, and eventually all my appointments were canceled because the whole city of Copenhagen was having a political meltdown because Trump had yelled at the Prime Minister on the phone, and he demanded Greenland and said, “We’re going to boycott Danish companies.” And Denmark, like you, has an enormous economic relationship with the United States, that there are a couple of dozen really big companies, Maersk, and Lego, and Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, and lots of other companies.
But they make windmills, they do a lot of clean energy, and the idea of being cut off from the U.S. market is almost as great for them as it is for you. And the difficulty was, for all the Danes that I spoke to, eventually I found some who would talk to me, the difficulty is that there is nothing that the United States could possibly want to do in Greenland that it can’t do now. They have a base there, they kept nuclear weapons there in the ’50s, the Americans, they could drill for whatever minerals they want to drill for, they could monitor the shipping lanes, whatever you could imagine doing it’s possible now through Denmark. I mean, Denmark will allow you to do it. And what was bothering the Danes was a Kafkaesque sense that there’s no reason for this. They’re a logical people, they wanted an explanation and there wasn’t one.
And it was maybe Trump likes the idea of the map looking bigger, maybe he likes the idea of expanding America’s borders, maybe he’s got that into his head. And then there were a lot of post-hoc articles, people wrote about Greenland and suddenly everybody was writing about the history of Greenland and why it’s important to the United States. But it might be something even more surreal than that, it may just be that that’s what he got into his head. And I don’t know how to translate or explain that to people in a way that will make them believe me, that it might not be part of a big strategy.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, it is true, we all want a rational explanation and that’s human behavior. But there has been things, like his inauguration speech he had terms manifest destiny in there, which was a term about America going west and taking over North America. At one point he talked about territory expansion. He has said things that make us think that territory expansion is part of it-
Anne Applebaum:
I mean, he may have someone around him who’s telling him those things, and interesting. I mean those aren’t things he talked about during the election campaign, and if it makes you feel better I saw some polling, and it turns out most Americans don’t want Greenland and they don’t want Canada either. So, I think you’re safe from that point of view. But this is somebody who operates on a whim, it’s somebody who thinks … He doesn’t think in terms of win-win relationships, that we have a relationship with Canada and we both benefit and profit, and parts for cars go back and forth over the border eight times, and we have inter-compatible energy industries and so on, and that that’s good for both of us.
He thinks in terms of zero-sum, someone wins and someone loses in every transaction. And if you understand that about him, then I think that’s better than any kind of philosophy or strategy, that it’s always somebody wins and somebody has to lose. But to be clear, there are people around him that have, over the last eight years, have attached themselves to him and they have strategy. So, there are others in the Trump camp and in the administration who have more strategic ideas of-
Jackie Forrest:
Right, right. Okay. Well, and everything you said about Greenland you could say about Canada. We have military bases here, we have NORAD, they could come here. We want them to come here and bring their money to invest in our oil industry, if our government wouldn’t make it so hard. So, the same logic is here in Canada. What do you have that you would get more of if we were the 51st state, is a question mark.
Anne Applebaum:
I mean, nothing. No offense, but I don’t think it would be that popular, the idea of invading Canada and absorbing Canada.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. Well, that’s good. You can all sleep a little easier tonight.
Anne Applebaum:
But it’s very important to get used to this idea of irrationality and illogic, and I know nobody wants to accept it and they all want to see a bigger game, but that’s now a part of the story.
Jackie Forrest:
All right. Well, onto Elon Musk, since you mentioned him, we’re all very curious about him. I mean, this recent shutdown of, is it USAID or USAID? How do you say it? I didn’t even know about this organization before-
Anne Applebaum:
Usually you say USAID, but I’m not sure why that’s true. I mean, you can say USAID if you want to.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. And some of the Democrats are finally starting to complain, I’ve noticed, about this, because they’re saying he’s not the fourth branch of the U.S. government, he doesn’t have the authority to shut down something that Congress approved. What’s your take on him? How much influence will he have? Do you think that he’ll be gone in a few months because him and Trump are both very strong personalities, and it’s hard to see how they can work together? And obviously he’s doing some things here that seem, like you already mentioned, potentially illegal.
Anne Applebaum:
Oh, I think it’s very illegal. The idea that he walks into a U.S. government agency with a bunch of young guys who don’t give their names to anybody, and demands to download data from the system, or to have access to the U.S. Treasury Payments system, which pays people’s tax rebates and all kinds of other Medicare payments and so on. There’s no legal justification for it at all. Also, the idea that once again, the idea that you’re cutting waste or you’re looking for fraud, but you yourself don’t know what you’re looking at. I mean, if you’re looking at USAID for example, if you don’t know what the money you’re giving, I don’t know, a million dollars to X or Y organization or institution in Tanzania. I mean, if you don’t know what that organization is, and what it does, and who runs it, then how do you know whether that’s waste and fraud, or whether it’s legitimate?
So, these aren’t programs and institutions that you can legitimately reform that way. And so, therefore this is another kind of project, and we’re not all that clear yet what it is. There’s several different aspects of it that worry me. One, again, data. There’s now a lawsuit, there’s a group of civil service unions and some civil servants are now suing to block Musk from having access to the Department of Labor information systems, for example. Among other things, the Department of Labor produces all those, you know those statistics that move the stock market? You know the employment is up or down, or-
Jackie Forrest:
Gross domestic product?
Anne Applebaum:
… number of people who’ve changed jobs, that’s what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does. Imagine now that those statistics have been taken over by an outside person or group and can be manipulated, and Trump himself has complained about them in the past. They weren’t to his liking or they didn’t show the right results that he wanted. I mean, once we’re in a world where the U.S. government doesn’t produce statistics you can rely on, then we’re already almost in a different kind of country. The Soviet Union, before I wrote books about contemporary politics I wrote several books about Soviet history, and very famously they had corrupt statistics because Stalin, he didn’t want you to be able to read, see that there had been a famine in the statistics so he just changed the population numbers. I mean, that’s not the analogy I mean to make, but when you change statistics, when you politicize government departments, when you make people afraid to speak out or tell the truth about what’s going on in their departments, you also begin to change the atmosphere and the way that government works.
Jackie Forrest:
So, the last chapter of your book you have a concept, I think it’s-
Anne Applebaum:
Democrats unite.
Jackie Forrest:
Democrats unite.
Anne Applebaum:
Build coalitions.
Jackie Forrest:
And it basically says when you see behavior that is corrupt or that is from this playbook of the authoritarian leaders, or some of the stuff we’re seeing in the U.S., people need to really call it out. You need to have lawyers and different people challenge these things, take them to the court system. What I’ve seen so far with the U.S. is there isn’t a lot of voices speaking against some of this stuff yet, which has surprised me. And this is important for Canada, because we want to get our allies in the U.S. and our friends to complain that putting tariffs on Canada is bad for the Americans too. But even with the tariff situation, it’s been very quiet. A few groups have spoken out against the tariffs, but not as many as I would’ve liked to see. So, are you concerned that that we’re not seeing opposition?
Anne Applebaum:
So, it’s only been three weeks, or maybe it’s two weeks. Have you lost track of time-
Jackie Forrest:
It feels like a year. Has it only been three weeks?
Anne Applebaum:
No, no. It hasn’t been a very long period of time.
Jackie Forrest:
It’s the 20th of January, right?
Anne Applebaum:
Some of what is happening was expected and people were prepared for it. Actually, people were prepared for an assault on the civil service. Some of it has been surprising, I don’t think anybody expected Elon Musk and teams of recent high school graduates to go into the Treasury Department and demand to have access to the payment system, that wasn’t foreseen. And so, some of the delay is simply people being unprepared and not being ready to find ways of challenging it. I mean, as you and I were discussing, it’s clear to me that what he did was illegal but it’s not clear to me who’s responsible for stopping it, because the U.S. attorney, the federal attorney for Washington, D.C. is a Trump-appointed person who won’t stop it. So, is it the D.C. police who stops it? Is it the courts?
So, some of this is going to be people are going to work out what’s the path forward? What’s the right way to do this? You’re about to see a lot of lawsuits and a lot of judges trying to stop things, you will see some protests. You’re beginning to see several important senators and members of Congress are motivated. I mean, if you follow them on social media you will begin to see it build.
Jackie Forrest:
Let’s talk a bit about energy. The topic of energy, Canada has woken up to the fact that we’re actually that energy secure, especially in Ontario and Quebec. We depend on all of our crude oil transferring through the United States-
Anne Applebaum:
I’m amazed by that, I didn’t know that until you told me.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah.
Anne Applebaum:
There you go, that’s-
Jackie Forrest:
And half our natural gas, even though we actually have our own natural gas pipeline on our own soil, it was cheaper to move it through the U.S. And so, half of the gas coming into Quebec and Ontario is coming through the United States as well today, and some of it coming from Pennsylvania where they’ve had the big gas fines there as well. We depend on refined product imports into pretty much every province, BC, Quebec, Ontario. Everyone thinks of Canada as having all this hydropower and exporting it all to the U.S., but the reality is that’s changed quite a lot and today our trade is very balanced. We need them as much as they need us in terms of power. So, if we got into a trade war and we talked about cutting off energy supplies, we’re very vulnerable.
Anne Applebaum:
The U.S. is vulnerable too, though. I mean the U.S. economy would also suffer.
Jackie Forrest:
Yes, for sure. But it wouldn’t be great for us, they probably have a few more options. But you’ve obviously lived through what’s happened in Russia, when Russia invaded the Ukraine, and then we had the recognition that, oh, we’re actually quite dependent on Russian gas and maybe that we thought that was a good thing but it’s really a vulnerability. And very quickly Europe has switched to new sources of supply for their natural gas. Would you advise Canada to diversify our customers for our energy, but also boost our own energy security?
Anne Applebaum:
So, I think diversification and coalitions are the way to begin thinking about the world actually. I’ve talked about it in other contexts as well. I mean, obviously we don’t want to be overly dependent on China or another country that could cut us off for any particular kind of trade. For Canada to have diverse people to sell to as well as to buy from is also … I mean, you have a sort of geographic problem, I mean-
Jackie Forrest:
We’re a big country, but we build big long pipelines through the U.S.-
Anne Applebaum:
I mean, you have one large neighbor, so it’s not like you’re Belgium with lots of options all around you.
Jackie Forrest:
True, but we have some coasts.
Anne Applebaum:
And there are ships and pipelines.
Jackie Forrest:
That’s right. We just have a province that’s closest to us that doesn’t really like pipelines, but-
Anne Applebaum:
Yeah, no, no, no. So diversification, also coalitions. I mean, Canada’s natural partners also are in Europe, in the European Union. In Asia, you have many potential Asian partners. In Mexico, in Latin America. And I think in an era when quite a lot of international institutions are breaking down as well, I mean, this isn’t just an American problem. The UN is like a shadow of its former self and is really not able to be a force for peace in most of the world. We’re really in an era when if you want something done, I mean, in my book I talk about pushing back against kleptocracy, for example, but if you want something done internationally, going through the old institutions might no longer be the way. If you want to create an energy alliance with the countries who you feel comfortable with, that might be the way to do your policy rather than sticking to NATO or just bilateral trade with the United States.
So, beginning to rethink. If there’s a problem you have internationally, beginning to rethink who are your natural partners? Who can you fix this problem with, and how can you do it? Focusing not so much on creating new institutions. I mean, I think the era of the international institution, meaning like a big building in New York or Geneva stuffed with bureaucrats, I think that’s probably over, but there is a future for international coalitions, and Canada is actually perfectly poised to be a member of several of them.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, and I mean, we offer diversity of supply for them too. Many foreign countries that have wanted to come here and invest in our energy sector to get access to our energy, and we haven’t been that welcome to that, but hopefully we’ll change that. I want to come to this UN thing, because there’s been a real change in the narrative around climate and net-zero, and it’s happened very quickly, really in the last three months I think. So, what are your thoughts around net-zero? Is it dead? And can groups like the UN really do anything anymore to reduce emissions? And because you’re coming from Europe, that’s the place where we think that the green policy is very stable, but even in Europe there’s a new EU parliament much more right leaning in terms of the makeup of it. Are we going to see some erosion in the green policies there, what’s there?
Anne Applebaum:
So, it’s true that the demand that people sacrifice something for green policies has not gone well. And actually the first conflict along those lines that we saw was the one in France, if you remember a few years ago the yellow vest protests-
Jackie Forrest:
Right, yeah. And that was over fuel prices, I think. Yeah.
Anne Applebaum:
That was over fuel prices. And that was people in rural and provincial France being angry about taxes and charges that were making fuel prices high, and the taxes and charges were there in order to persuade people not to use so much fuel. But if you live in the countryside, that’s much harder for you. And so, the conflict between people who care about climate change and who want to reduce emissions, and people who don’t want to pay higher prices for fuel and other things has become part of national politics in a lot of countries, more so in some places than in others. I mean, France is one where it is. The U.S. is one where you see that.
I would add to that something else though, which is that we, and this is back to some of your question about social media, there is a piece of the conspiratorial world, that the idea that climate change is complete fiction, that it’s something that’s been thrusted upon us by fake climate scientists. That it’s been promoted by left-wing bureaucrats, even that it’s a secret plot to against rural people, for example, by people in the cities. This is now very current online, and some of what you’re hearing from the Trump administration is reflecting that. So, they’re responding to what they read and what people are saying on podcasts, and on YouTube, and on the internet. So, it’s not just about economics, there’s also a cultural reaction against the idea that climate change is important.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay, we’ll talk quickly about China. Your book explains how China has developed effective systems to spy on people, and some of these new technologies are actually making these authoritarian regimes even more powerful, and this is one of them. And they’re even selling this technology now to other authoritarian regimes, another area of collaboration. But yet at the same time, things are not going as well for China. Debt levels are high, the economy isn’t growing, people aren’t continuing to get more wealthy, which was I think, part of the reason they were okay with giving up a lot of personal freedoms. Do you see China as having any issues in terms of changing government or changing the way they do things? Or do you see status quo from China?
Anne Applebaum:
Actually, one of the things that worries me about China is exactly what you just said, namely that like as in Russia 20 years ago, there is a deal between the government. I mean, it’s not an explicit deal, but there’s an understanding that you will accept the one-party state, but at the same time everybody continues to grow more prosperous all the time. Once that ends, and it did come to an end in Russia, then I worry that the Chinese Communist Party needs to offer people something else. And in the case of Russia, what Putin began offering people was nationalism, and an idea of Russian greatness, and we will build a new Russian Empire. This is the tricky moment for China if they made a decision that what they need to offer people is some kind of new triumph.
It could be, and we-
Jackie Forrest:
Like in Taiwan.
Anne Applebaum:
We could imagine that it could be Taiwan, we could imagine that it could be other things, that we would be in trouble. I mean, you remember also, maybe this is where we can finish because we don’t have that much time, remember also that authoritarian states are also deceptively weak. And we just saw an extraordinary collapse in Syria, a regime that had been in power for 50 years. A family dynasty that had been in power for 50 years collapsed overnight, and not because of a military loss, but because the soldiers, and police, and security officers who worked for the regime stopped fighting, and they stopped fighting because they weren’t being paid, because they too were part of society and they experienced economic suffering as well as they saw people being … Political repression was horrific, and they stopped supporting the regime and it collapsed from one day to the next.
There is a weakness built into those systems. Russia has an extraordinary weakness as well. I mean, you have here, if something were to happen to Putin tomorrow, if he were to fall out a window, for example, or fall down the stairs, who would be the next leader of Russia? So, not only do we not know who that person would be, we don’t know how he would be chosen. There is no committee, there’s no Politburo-
Jackie Forrest:
[inaudible 00:26:53]
Anne Applebaum:
… we don’t know how power would be transferred. And so, you would immediately have some kind of crisis, either exactly at that moment or some weeks later there would be a crisis. I mean, China had a system of rotating leaders, that worked for a long time. They’ve now changed it, and Xi Jinping has become a, in effect a single leader. But that creates a problem for China, when he becomes a problem, when people begin to doubt him or when something happens, when he falls out his window, then immediately he’ll have a crisis there too. So, there are weaknesses in these states that we also need to watch out for, and I would actually say that if there’s a black swan you should be thinking about, it’s an abrupt change in one of the big autocracies.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, that’s good, because after reading your book I was a little scared, so I’m glad to hear there’s some weaknesses because you talked about things like these spying systems, and social media, and cryptocurrencies and all things that are making these authoritarian leaders stronger, but I’m glad there’s a few weaknesses still. My belief was democracy was good and stable, and that communism and authoritarian states are not stable, they’re not going to last very long. And I think a lot of us are revisiting those beliefs, because we had a blind trust that the United States to our south was a democracy, the bellwether democracy, and they would always be the same, and we’re waking up to the new reality that democracies can change. And if we’d read your book earlier, we would’ve known that that was a reality. And I think we’ve had this blind trust in the American institutions, and we let ourselves become very vulnerable-
Anne Applebaum:
Have some faith in the American people. We like Canada. Americans don’t wish ill to Canada. And I think you’ll still find that your relationships with Americans and with American companies are going to be as good as they ever were.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, I hope you’re right. And I hope though, by the way, you come back here in four or five years, it may take that long-
Anne Applebaum:
And say I was wrong.
Jackie Forrest:
No, no, no. And you’re right, but also Canada has taken this situation and turned it into a benefit for our country, and we are spending more of our energy to international markets, and we’ve got rid of these foolish things like interprovincial trade barriers that we were talking about, and we’re a much more resilient country five years from now. And hopefully we’ll have you back.
Anne Applebaum:
Very often when you have a crisis and you take advantage of the crisis, you can emerge better on the other end. So, yes.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, thank you so much for coming-
Anne Applebaum:
Thank you. Thank you all so much for inviting me.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, I hope you enjoyed the interview with Anne Applebaum. It’s got me really thinking about how governments can change, and that actually democracies don’t really last that long if you look at history, especially reading some of her work. And it got me thinking a little bit, especially since February 1 when the U.S. announced that they wanted to put tariffs on Canada. Now they’ve given us a 30-day pause, but the threat is still very live. I’ve always thought democracy was really strong, and that comes from the beliefs I had growing up. In my childhood in the ’80s we had fear of communism, and then in 1991 the Soviet Union fell, so it was obviously a weak system. And then during my childhood, in grade 12 we signed the NAFTA agreement. And nothing that I understood, free trade was only good for Canada. Now, John Manley reminded us last week on the podcast that John Turner warned that free trade could make Canada vulnerable.
But I had bought into free trade being a stable thing that would last for decades. And in fact, it’s lasted for my entire career. So, my belief system was democracy is strong and lasting, and things like communism, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships are the weak ones. Now, Anne has showed us that some of these authoritarian regimes are actually getting stronger because of the technology that exists, like the systems that China has invented to spy on citizens, the use of social media for influence, things like cryptocurrency. But at the same time, they still do have weaknesses, as she explained at the end of her talk with us as well. But we have to recognize that democracies can be weak and can change as well, and that the American democracy is changing. And Canada had this blind trust really, that the U.S. institutions would never change, and so we’ve made ourselves quite vulnerable in terms of our trade.
I mean, 80% of all of our trade is with one country. If you think about that, if we were a company and 80% of all of our revenue was coming from one customer, that would be a problem and we’d be working very hard to diversify our customer base in case that one customer would leave us. And so, I hope that this tariff shock, and I hope that it ends just being a threat and not being real, but it has exposed vulnerabilities, and I hope that we’re opening our eyes to the new reality. We’re not energy secure in Canada, we’re going to talk about that in a future podcast. We’ve talked about that a lot in the past, but I think people are more interested in hearing it now. Even on the electricity trade, we are pretty exposed and needing electricity from the Americans as much as they need electricity from us.
And with two exceptions, the Trans Mountain and the Coastal Link pipelines, we have not built pipelines to export our energy to Asia, despite many foreign and domestic companies trying to come here and spend tens of billions of dollars and not being successful in doing that. So, we have to ask if we had all these energy pipelines and they were going to Asia and Europe, would Donald Trump be threatening us now? We’ll never know, but I would think we would be in a much stronger position. So, Donald Trump is providing a wake-up call to Canada that governments can change, and therefore we cannot let ourselves be vulnerable. Of course, we’re always going to trade with the U.S., our biggest partner and our closest neighbor, but we have to have diversity in our trade partners.
And I hope that over the next several years that Canadians start working towards making our exports more diverse, making our Eastern Canada more energy secure, and fixing other longstanding issues like not trading amongst our provinces. Well anyway, I’ve learned a lot from following Anne’s work. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. And of course, you can get her book Autocracy Inc., and we’ll put it in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to, and tell someone else about us.
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