Currie Dixon Ministerial Statement Response to Canada-US Relations

From Hansard. March 6, 2025.

Mr. Dixon: Mr. Speaker, it’s an honour to rise in response to this ministerial statement on the state of relations between our country and the United States.

Like many people of my generation, I have grown up with the United States being our closest neighbour, ally, and friend.

Our economies, societies, and cultures are intertwined. There has rarely been an international incident, event, or even war in which we haven’t worked and fought alongside each other. So, the shocked response that we have seen from Canadians is entirely understandable.

Canadians’ response to the current administration’s statements about our sovereignty and about the imposition of what is clearly a trade war has been that of betrayal, insult, and anger.

All of those feelings are well justified.

At the federal level, we support the retaliatory tariff measures announced by the federal government, and I am pleased to hear from the Premier that the federal government has worked closely with all provinces and territories on that response.

In addition to that response, there has been a range of non-tariff retaliatory measures proposed by provincial and territorial governments.

There have been too many individual measures to comment on all of them, but my general view is this: The best way to describe the US administration’s actions and approach is, to put it simply, chaotic.

They seem to change from one day to the next, and there seems to be a profound absence of coherence or rationality to them.

In the face of that chaos, we need our leaders — our political leaders — to offer the opposite. We need to remain cool, calm, and collected in the face of this chaos.

Our political leaders need to meet that irrationality with rationality. We also need to recognize that these measures will create significant economic pain for both American and Canadian families alike.

We need to remember that this is not the American people who have taken these actions against us; it is an increasingly unstable and unpredictable American federal government.

I start to get concerned when I hear proposals like forbidding Alaskan children from participating in the Arctic Winter Games or cancelling parts of the bike relay or road relay or fining American tourists who want to visit the Yukon — measures that, while symbolic or performative, will do very little to influence political decision-makers and will do a lot to hurt Yukoners or Yukon communities.

I have no doubt that whatever the situation is today, it will change tomorrow or next week. Perhaps it has already changed today. The nature of this US administration has been consistent only in its inconsistency.

In the face of that, we need our political leaders here to remain calm and to focus on what we can control and to ensure that we take a long-term view of what we want the American-Canadian relationship to be.

We need to chart a path that looks beyond these current troubles to a future where our two countries can work to repair what has been damaged and to ensure that our abiding friendship can persist.

I’ll close with a quote from a former Prime Minister: “Canada is, and always has been, our country. And we want Canada to be a True North that is as strong and as free as it can be in every way that matters: the best country in the world. That’s why we’re here, that’s why we strive, that’s why we serve.”

So, Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to speak on this matter and look forward to tending to the business that Yukoners elected us to address over the course of the rest of this Sitting and of this Legislature.

I would close as well, Mr. Speaker, by noting the Premier’s comments about the change in approach from the federal government and I would ask if he could use his response to indicate whether or not any of the non-tariff retaliatory measures that he has announced will be removed as a result of the announcement made today.