Stephen Maher: Donald Trump is picking a fight on potash. Here’s how Canada should respond (spoiler: not like Andrew Scheer) - Toronto Star

This file photo shows a piece of machinery underground at the Mosaic potash mine in Esterhazy, Sask.

Stephen Maher is a longtime political journalist and author of “The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau.” 

I would like to play poker for money against the people who still believe what Donald Trump and Pierre Poilievre say, because I doubt they can tell a spade from a diamond, a deuce from a Queen.

As support for both Trump and Poilievre has diminished — they both have approval ratings of 32 per cent — I am starting to think that their remaining supporters are — how to put it? — not as intellectually inclined as other voters. 

Last year the good people of Saskatchewan dug up 25 million tonnes of potassium-rich mineral salts, and made $9 billion selling it to American farmers, who use it as fertilizer.

This has been a productive and boring enterprise since the 1940s, and nobody outside the towns where it is produced have had much cause to pay it any mind — until Trump decided that he should bully Canada into submission and imposed tariffs designed to destroy our industrial base.

Trump did not impose tariffs on oil or potash, because he can’t afford to increase diesel, gasoline or fertilizer prices. He is likely dimly aware that potash is necessary for the farmers who foolishly voted for him and whom he hopes will vote for him again. 

You can imagine timid aides reminding him — when he can be distracted from designing monuments to himself — that midwesterners are worried about fertilizer prices, since much of the feedstock for fertilizer plants around the world must travel through the Strait of Hormuz, which he has rendered inoperative.

It surely bothers him that Americans have to keep buying the stuff from Canada, so on Monday, he announced that he is working on a “massive Deal” to import potash ​from Belarus.

“The pricing would be for substantially less than we are currently paying to Canada, very good news for ​our Farmers and Ranchers.”

I’m sure he would like that to be true, but it is not. Belarus, a client state of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, produces much less potash than Canada, and can’t easily export it, since the European Union won’t allow it to pass through Baltic ports, and anyway, dictator Alexander Lukashenko says he has no potash to spare.

This is one more thing that Trump is promising to hang on the crucial dummy vote ahead of the midterms. He has previously promised them that if he wins in November, he will give every American $5,000, and that the price of diesel will fall after he defeats the Iranians, just after the election.

The proper response from Canada to this nonsense, of course, is to ignore his yapping as you would ignore the distant yowls of a deranged dog, or, if you are so inclined, mock him and his gullible supporters.

That, however, was not the reaction of Andrew Scheer, Conservative House Leader, who went to the microphones in Ottawa on Monday to castigate the prime minister for the threat to the potash industry.

“As a member of Parliament from Saskatchewan … we’re very concerned,” he said. “It speaks to what Canada can control. Mark Carney can today lift the industrial carbon tax, which adds costs to Saskatchewan potash producers.”

Scheer was cleverly turning up the pressure on Carney to reduce the industrial carbon tax, except that Carney can’t, since that tax is zero.

You may recall that during Scheer’s unsuccessful campaign for prime minister, he was revealed to possess American citizenship, which he hadn’t previously disclosed, and which he promised to renounce until he lost and changed his mind.

I think Poilievre is foolish to send him out to respond on this kind of issue, since he obviously either hasn’t done his homework, or is carrying water for Trump. After all, for all we know, he voted for him in the recent election, as his citizenship allows him to do.

Poilievre, himself, has never been a stickler for the facts, and as Carney’s government has moved to the right, doing many of the things that Poilievre advocates, he is having to stretch the truth to find ways to maintain the ferocity of his critiques.

After the European Union invited Canada to become an associate member, for example, Poilievre thundered that “Conservatives say no EU taxes, no EU laws, and no EU open-border rules on immigration in Canada,” none of which are being proposed.

He might just as well have warned us that he would fight European efforts to make us all speak Basque.

Poilievre is in a pickle. Carney is acting more like a Progressive Conservative every day, and Tories — including Stephen Harper — are noticing. That means that Poilievre is left with the cognitively impaired, the anti-vaxxers, the social conservatives and permanently outraged. 

He is like a man straddling a barbed wire fence, since the messages to his supporters alienate the much larger group of voters who don’t blame Carney’s non-existent industrial carbon tax for Trump’s threats to hard-working Saskatchewan potash miners.

The dishonesty is dispiriting, not because the Conservatives pose a threat to replace the governing Liberals, but because they don’t.

Our democracy works best when we have an opposition that looks like a government in waiting. The Conservatives look like dummies, and they should smarten up, for the sake of the country and their own personal dignity.

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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

Stephen Maher is a longtime political journalist and author of “The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau.”