February 13, 2025
“A responsible nation would have built a house of bricks, and we built a house of sticks,” Balsillie said. “The big bad wolf has shown up, and everybody’s running around freelancing, saying, ‘What do we do now’?”

Jim Balsillie says Canada came ‘sleepwalking’ into Trump tariff crisis

Former chairman and CEO of Research In Motion Jim Balsillie — known for creating the BlackBerry — says Canada’s relative economic vulnerability amid a potential trade war with the U.S. is “an issue of our own making,” adding that while “they come prepared,” “we come sleepwalking.”

“We’re in a vulnerability,” Balsillie said in an interview with CTV Question Period airing Sunday. “No other nation state allowed themselves to become this vulnerable in so many critical aspects of their prosperity and security, and so these are self-inflicted wounds.”

U.S. president-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Monday and has threatened to impose blanket 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian imports as one of his first of “many” executive orders, as soon as he’s back in the White House.

Trump initially used the flow of illegal migrants and drugs over the border as reason for imposing tariffs, but he has since shifted emphasis rhetorically to praising the use of tariffs — as he sees it —on their own merit, and as a way to address the U.S. trade deficit with Canada.

Speaking to host Vassy Kapelos, Balsillie argued that Canada has been slow to foster resiliency within its borders, as the nature of the economy has changed over the past decades.

“It’s not a trading economy, and so the key is to build resilience in value chains and security as a nation, because there isn’t the same kind of economic allies of the post-World War Two trading system,” Balsillie said. “So, the game changed 30 years ago. All other successful countries changed their strategies, and Canada doubled down on old strategies and put us in this place.”

Canada’s economy has faced a productivity challenge for years, with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) predicting Canada’s per capita GDP growth will rank last among OECD economies over the next 40 years. Canada’s overall 1.8 per cent decrease in labour productivity in 2023 was also the worst in the OECD.

Balsillie insists the signs were there, pointing to signals during Trump’s first term in office in which the president’s former adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner lauded the “sunset provision” in the trilateral trade agreement — the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) — which allows the deal to be reviewed every six years. The agreement also has a 16-year lifecycle.

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