This was my first conversation with Vice-Admiral (ret’d) Mark Norman. It was a quickly-arranged Zoom call, me from my office, him from a hotel room in Brussels, where he’s visiting for the week. But it was an honour to make his acquaintance. I noticed, early on, when he became a subscriber to this newsletter, and I reached out to him after he published a remarkable op-ed in the National Post on Valentine’s Day. The headline sets the tone:
So does the nut graf — the paragraph, appearing here after a couple of paragraphs of scene-setting, where the career naval officer sets out the meat of his argument:
“When the leader of our closest neighbour, ally and trading partner says that he can destroy us with the stroke of a pen — and repeats his willingness to do so — it is more than just an expression of perceived superiority or hyperbole, it’s a real threat. To dismiss it as anything less would be irresponsible and naive. The question we must ask ourselves is whether we are going to act as a serious nation or not.”
A serious nation, Norman argues, adapts to a new normal rather than hoping past all reason that nothing has changed. The “new normal,” of course, is the rhetorical hostility, at the very least, of the resurrected President Donald Trump. It’s clear the president has picked his lane: threat and denigration. Canada should pick its own lane in consequence, Norman argues.
“Canada’s ongoing transactional approach to countering the overt and repeated threats to our economy, territory and sovereignty is flawed,” he wrote. “Trying to placate the ambiguous and chaotic demands of [Trump], or responding tit for tat to arbitrary and punitive tariffs is not a winning strategy.”
You will remember Mark Norman, if you haven’t already, for the way the Trudeau government suspended and then clumsily dismissed him in 2016, so clumsily that a court of law later found the government hadn’t come close to proving the claims it made when Norman was fired. He ended up donating much of the money that sympathetic Canadians crowd-sourced for him. To me that sad episode is well behind us all.
Of course, nothing Trump has said rises to the level of combat or physical aggression, and Norman isn’t proposing physical retaliation. And he isn’t proposing a physical response. Reference to NATO’s Article 4 was “intentionally provocative,” he told me from Brussels, although when you read Article 4, it doesn’t sound all that crazy.
But there’s a centuries-old tradition of hostility stopping well short of violence, but still being unacceptable. Lately a lot of these methods of antagonism have been referred to as “hybrid warfare.” If that’s too categorical for you, then maybe plainer language will do: Sometimes neighbours need to be taught to be neighbourly.
I spoke to Norman because he’s singing my song, to some extent: I’ve already proposed, half-seriously, that Canada levy counter-tariffs pre-emptively if the Trump administration keeps threatening tariffs, whether or not he delivers. At some point, you make your point, or you leave people wondering whether you have a point at all.
Norman doesn’t really have a plan here. He’s mostly just proposing a change in attitude: from reactive to determined. I was happy to give him this platform.
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I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
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