So trade deficits should be allowed to continue into infinity because "fairness" guarantees permanent subsidies to all counties who have long depended on a reliable slice of US wealth as well as the protection of our military. That free ride is over at least until the dems can restore the slow bleed of the prior status quo.

You have to remember that we are the ones who built the current global financial and trading system, for the most part. And we built it to benefit us.

We set it up so that the U.S. would maintain the reserve currency, which would be used for the lion's share of the world's global financial transactions. Almost all of the major international commercial treaties (on intellectual property, on capital movements, on mail and postage, on air travel and shipping) were set up with us getting to have the dominant hand on the tiller, and to our benefit. Everyone agreed to use the dollar as the reserve currency. All of the rich countries of the world agreed to mostly (but not entirely) cooperate towards integrating their economies. Because we mostly cooperated and integrated our economies, everyone got richer than they would have - and the U.S. got the most rich of all. The Pax Americana.

Trump doesn't understand this. His business sense was formed in the dog-eat-dog world of NY real estate, where there are no "win-win" deals. If someone else is winning, it means you're losing. If they're happy with the deal, it means you've left money on the table. The idea of mutually cooperative transactions where both parties win over time, and where both parties are better off in the deal, is an alien concept to him. He thinks if he can hurt the counterparties, he can make us richer. So he's blowing it all up.

Now, that's phenomenally stupid, because that's not how the system works. We are all richer because we're (mostly) not using financial and trade policy to impoversh each other. By calling a ceasefire on trade barriers, we made all of the countries richer. Now we're just going to make ourselves poorer. And we're going to make everyone else poorer. Canada and Europe, who have spent decades integrating their economies into the global financial and trade system that we wanted, are going to get massively hurt. The cooperative partnership has been broken, and the U.S. is now going to act as an adversary to all the developed nations.

So Canada is taking steps to try to protect themselves and be less hurt by Trump deciding he doesn't want to stay in the global partnership that help make the U.S. the richest country in the world. To do that, they need a leader that will be motivated to aggressively fight for Canada's interests against those of the U.S., rather than the old way of mutual cooperation. Which is why they chose a Liberal, rather than the Conservative, government - they don't want their leadership to share a common ideology with that of Trump, so that the leadership will have maximum flexibility to fight with Trump without being crosswise with their electoral base.