By Don Newman

November 5, 2025

The Carney government has acted as promised, presenting a budget that will change the way both the federal and provincial governments operate in Canada and boosting private-sector economic opportunities.

What is not certain is that it will protect Canada from the devastating, capricious tariffs that President Donald Trump has imposed on the country and could add to or increase in the future.

At this writing, the Supreme Court of the United States has just heard arguments on the legality of Trump’s most extreme tariffs, levied in an unprecedented fashion using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). But it’s not clear yet to what extent the SCOTUS ruling in the case will provide relief for Canada and Trump’s other targets.

The Prime Minister and members of his cabinet have correctly argued that amid a coercive economic war being waged by the Trump administration, Canada must take control of what we can control, build big and build quickly, and replace the economic activity the nihilistic and ruthless tariffs imposed by Trump have deleted from Canada.

Carney has insisted that changing the way the government budgets and operates will allow Canadians to replace more economic activity in our country than Trump can take from us. The budget this week is the start of this process, designed to spur private investment both in Canada and from abroad with low tax rates and tax write-offs for corporations who make the investments.

However, now that our country is taking action and fighting back against Washington, there is nothing to stop the Americans from fighting back against us. If Trump’s ultimate goal is to use trade as a form of economic domination, we should not be surprised to see new American tariffs on Canadian exports in response to this budget.

After all, if a television commercial featuring a 35-year-old speech by a dead president can set off commercial retribution from the Oval Office, think what a budget containing billions of dollars of incentives to get foreign countries to invest in Canada when they could be investing in the United States is going to do.

The economic cost of Trump’s tariffs isn’t just about the competition-driven sectoral devastation, it also involves the loss of access to the American market as an incentive for investment in Canada.

Based on Trump’s volatile record since his second inauguration, it is not out of the question that he’d move to further restrict Canadian access to the U.S. market. Canada is a market of 42 million people. That is about the population of California. The United States is a market of 340 million people. Foreign companies have invested in Canada because free trade agreements with the United States have given them access to the American market as well as the smaller Canadian one, because of the lower Canadian dollar, and because of other benefits such as free public health care for their employees.

The economic cost of Trump’s tariffs isn’t just about the competition-driven sectoral devastation, it also involves the loss of access to the American market as an incentive for investment in Canada.

Which is why it is imperative — as Carney, the Business Council of Canada, and others have pointed out — that Canada find new markets beyond Washington’s reach, to sell our commodities and manufactured goods. To that end, Carney’s trips to Europe and Asia have produced more than photo ops and nice words.

But it also puts pressure on the Major Projects Office, the federal agency set up In Calgary this past summer and headed by former Trans-Mountain Pipeline CEO Dawn Farrell. The office has sweeping powers to designate projects in the “national Interest” and speed up the approval process to bypass federal and provincial permitting with a single approval study and in some cases exempting them from certain laws and requirements.

These projects have to trigger mining and mineral exploration, including the critical minerals in Ontario’s Ring of Fire, pipelines and processing facilities to expand Canada’s energy exports, and transportation corridors to move our exports to expanded port facilities on both the East and West Coasts.

In September, the office announced the first series of projects approved “in the national interest” but most of them were already in various stages of completion. The Prime Minister has said new nation-building projects will be revealed the weekend of November 15th.

The major projects designated could be as important as Tuesday’s budget. They could help bring the country together to fight American attempts to dominate our economy and country. They could, in fact, be more than just major projects with huge investments of public and, hopefully, private money. In the face of Donald Trump’s trade war, they could constitute an economic arsenal.

Policy Columnist Don Newman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a lifetime member and a past president of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery.