The Trump Administration has long set about breaching a bond of trust with Canadians but an excellent writeup in the Toronto Star reminded me that it’s not just us they’ve broken trust with— they’ve broken trust with the rest of the free world, too.
There’s a great scene from The Newsroom where Jeff Daniels responds to a question at a panel debate. It’s actually closer to a tirade, but within, he says,
And with a straight face, you’re going to tell students that America is so star spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom. Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. So 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.
Actually, it’s more like 84 “free” democratic nations, with 65 being “partly free,” so it’s closer to 150. The speech is just very good otherwise. According to Freedom House, which has been keeping track of democratic movement across the globe since 1973, worrying trends are showing a decline in many democratic countries. The U.S. lost three points on the scale of 100, moving down to 81. Canada has a 97.
There wasn’t an easy list available, but doing a little bit of math (with my usual caveat; I already had to change the number of free and partly free from 130 to 150) on the countries I know are in the index outside of the U.S.— E.U., U.K, Canada, Australia, and Nordic countries— there are more than 600 million people. Not quite double the U.S. population, but also not inclusive of all 84 countries.
Canada doesn’t have an official boycott of U.S. products but many Canadians are turning away from them in protest. Switzerland has added an official boycott. The Administration’s complete incompetence in foreign affairs has a price and U.S.-based businesses will be paying it; not just today.
Howell said Canada appeals to him for two reasons: its duty-free trade agreements with European countries and Japan, which account for the majority of global ski binding sales, and the quality of the Quebec subcontractors he has worked with.
The growing boycott of American products in countries such as Switzerland is another concern. Howell believes manufacturing in Quebec could make it easier for his company to earn customers’ trust.
“I think a lot of people might be holding out too much hope right now in the midterms,” he said. “I can’t bet my business on that.”
“I want to be with Carney, and I want to be where there’s a stable economy that I can rely on,” Howell said.
It was that quote that pulled me out of my Canadian-centric view for a moment. We’ve been saying throughout this attack from the Trump Administration that trust has been broken. We’ve been saying that the midterms won’t fix it. Another democratic Administration won’t fix it because they’re always going to be one election away from putting another despot into power.
The politics of it were always questionable but as it turns out, politics has consequences in the real world.
Businesses rely on reputations that convey trust
A week and a half ago, I wrote about the saga of Good Good Golf, a group of influencers who went from making YouTube videos for fun to building partnerships with big names in the golf world. Unfortunately, through a series of poor decisions, they also torched their partnerships with Callaway, the Golf Channel, and the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA). The CEO was removed this week.
Reputations, like trust, take a long time to build and only a moment to destroy.
They’ve taken generations of building a reputation and alliances and blown it up in less than 18 months. They’re not done, either— because they haven’t won anything.
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