Upset over the Keystone XL cancellation? Here’s how we could screw over the Americans

To be clear, Canada trying to impose economic sanctions on the United States is a horrible idea that would almost certainly prompt devastating countermeasures.

If you’re an American able to pick up CBC on your kitchen radio, it’s a good chance that said radio is powered in part by Canadian electricity.

Canada exports huge quantities of electricity to border states from Washington to Maine.

Driving through Canada is still the number one method by which Alaskans access the Lower 48 states, and recent months have seen a number of American families violating Canadian quarantine on the pretense that they were merely entering the country in order to travel to Alaska.

is now the world’s number one oil producer; it has no problem getting its petroleum elsewhere if the Canadians start acting up?

refineries; if we’re going to start closing cross-border petroleum pipelines, it wouldn’t be long until filling stations from Vancouver to Sudbury started running dry.

Autos and auto parts are the second-largest source of Canadian exports to the U.S.

But for a Canadian auto parts sector already struggling to prevent business from fleeing to China or Mexico, there’s almost no scenario in which arbitrary border closures wouldn’t be a disaster for Ontario manufacturers.

Virtually every vessel participating in the multi-billion-dollar Alaskan cruise industry makes at least one stop on Canadian soil, usually in Victoria or Vancouver?

With virtually all cruise ships flying foreign flags, forbidding them from making their mandatory Canadian stopover would decimate whole swaths of the American cruise industry.

Of course, it would also be a great way for Canada to accidentally inspire bipartisan congressional support for a repeal of the 1886 act, which would have the notably deleterious effect of compromising Canadian cruise ship tourism for the rest of time.

When Canada was reeling from a series of Donald Trump-imposed tariffs in 2018, biomedical scientist Amir Attaran suggested in Maclean’s that the best way for Canada to hit back would be to expropriate American pharmaceutical patents.