RANDALL WHITE. HOME AND NATIVE LAND. FERNWOOD PARK, TORONTO. MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 2026. My immediate reaction to how the Government of Canada has just stood up for the home team in the ongoing trade war unleashed on the true north strong and free by the increasingly wild and crazy Trump administration next door is four cheers (or more) for PM Mark Carney.

By way of quick prelude, note that Mr. Carney has also just won applause from as unlikely a pair of US observers as Anthony Scaramucci (“Carney now leads the West”) and Mia Farrow (“Mark Carney and Canada are now the ‘leaders of the ‘Free World’”).

For the moment I just want to offer some quick numbers that set in some wider perspective the no doubt big enough challenge to Canada in the madman Trump’s new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods.

These numbers suggest that the Trump administration’s own claims about the impact on Canada in the latest lunacy from south of the once undefended border are at best wildly exaggerated.

According to CTV News : “Roughly 87,000 Canadian jobs could be at risk because of the United States’ new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, according to an analysis conducted by University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe … The hardest-hit provinces for job losses are Ontario (36,100), Quebec (18,300) and B.C. (11,200).”

If you are or fear you might be one of the 87,000 Canadians who just might lose their their jobs in this context these numbers are no doubt seriously fearsome. And public policy must do something to soften the blow — as PM Carney and provincial premiers have acknowledged.

At the same time, according to Statistics Canada’s latest Labour Force survey there were some 21,215,000 jobs in Canada as of the end of this past July 2026. And Professor Tombe’s 87,000 jobs at risk amount to a mere 0.4% of this number.

Moreover, Ontario, Quebec, and BC are the most populous provinces in the Canadian confederation today. To say that they are also the provinces where the most jobs could be be lost (or are “at risk”) is just to say that the most jobs lost because of the United States’ new 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods will be in the most populous provinces. Which is hardly surprising.

Moreover, while 36,000 jobs could be at risk in Ontario eg, according to the July 2026 Labour Force survey Ontario gained some 52,000 jobs last month — even with all the earlier Trumpian measures meant to harm and humiliate the sovereign (and bilingual) Canadian confederation (whose modern history goes back some 400 years).

All this, I think, helps explain why more than three-quarters of Canadians, according to the latest Angus Reid poll, agree that Canada did “the right thing … by refusing the terms and ending negotiations without a trade agreement.”

As matters stand, a decisive democratic majority of the Canadian people are standing by the tough stance taken by PM Carney and the Canadian federal government, and the accompanying provincial premiers’ Team Canada.

And for good reason. While of course no one wants to see any kind of job losses, such things do happen even without the intervention of the current wild and crazy Trump administration next door. And the magnitudes involved in Professor Tombe’s estimates of job losses do not justify equally wild and crazy concerns about the Canadian future in the Canadian mass media.