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By Patrick Leblond
CIPS Policy Brief, February 2025

At a glance…

• Canada had its Sputnik moment ten days ago when President Trump announced that he was making good on his threat to impose tariffs of 25% (10% for energy products) on goods imported from Canada into the United States.
• Like Kennedy’s ambition to put an American on the Moon in less than ten years, Canada’s moonshot should start with clear and ambitious goals. Since exports to the US hover around 75% of Canada’s total exports, a moonshot goal would be to bring this percentage to 50% within a decade. To that ambitious goal, we should add a second objective: making Canada’s interprovincial trade equal to international trade within the same time frame.
• The moonshot response rests on three pillars.
• Pillar 1 – Removing barriers to trade in goods and services within Canada should be the starting point.
• Pillar 2 – The second pillar of Canada’s moonshot must be to decrease Canadian exporters’ dependence on US markets. It is not an impossible goal.
• Pillar 3 – The third and last pillar of Canada’s moonshot response to the existential threat posed by the United States requires improving Canada’s economic productivity. Greater productivity will make Canadian goods and services more competitive on world markets.
• Where will the money come from? It will have to come from government borrowing.

Patrick Leblond is CN-Paul M. Tellier Chair on Business and Public Policy and Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Leblond is an expert on international economic relations as well as economic governance and policy. He has published extensively on banking regulation, financial and monetary integration, international investment, international trade, and business-government relations. Before embarking on his academic career, he worked in accounting and auditing for Ernst & Young as well as in corporate finance and strategy consulting for Arthur Andersen & Co. and SECOR Consulting in Montreal.