Dear Natalie

It would be great if you could print this off for The Donald to read.

Even better, why don’t you read it to him the next time you both flee a foreign country in a military jet together.

The Donald started a trade war with my country, citing national emergencies over undocumented immigrants and drugs flooding over your northern border.

That wasn’t true when the original executive order was signed.

And it’s even less true today.

Canada and the US have been good neighbours for a while.

They say good fences make good neighbours.

So we went through the motions of strengthening the world's longest undefended border with a metaphorical fence.

We enlisted a fentanyl / border czar (that’s a job title that really sings on Linkedin).

We hired more Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers.

We agreed to share more data with you.

We put some drones in the sky.

We changed some visa requirements.

The RCMP has a Black Hawk down

We rented some helicopters (sure, one of them is in the shop waiting for a new certification, but the others are out there patrolling the ever dangerous Great Lakes).

We promised to pay more attention to the border, eh.

And I guess that worked.

Based on data collected by your own Customs and Border Protection folks, these actions made a difference.

Source: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/drug-seizure-statistics

In 2025, 77 pounds of fentanyl were seized at our shared border.

Don’t get me wrong, no one thinks that any amount of fentanyl is a good amount of fentanyl.

But I’m not sure that 77 pounds of fentanyl merited starting a multi-billion dollar multi-year trade war.

In 2026, year to date, that number is down to 5 pounds of fentanyl.

There are more like 3 Quarter Pounders in an actual pound

To put that into a context your president will understand, that 2026 number is actually less weight than 20 Quarter Pounders with Cheese because each burger technically weighs more than a quarter pound once you add the bun, fixings, and stuff.

Math is hard.

McDonald’s math is harder.

If there was a crisis, the crisis is over.

Now, I know that The Donald thinks that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.

That makes me think that he should probably spend more time reading the dictionary because there are a lot of other more beautiful words in that book.

Personally, I’m very fond of the words clodpole and churl.

You may have to print those dictionary pages for him too since I suspect he doesn’t have a copy of the OED handy and he isn’t a fan of Google.

But I digress.

I know he thinks that his tariff plan (whether he made it up on ChatGPT or not) will somehow make America great.

But his plan isn’t working.

He promised to “Cut energy prices in half within 12 months, or a maximum 18 months.”

It has been 19 months and he’s actually made energy more expensive with his delightful combination of willful ignorance when it comes to the cost of electricity, largely due to explosive and unregulated expansion of energy hungry AI data centers, and his overt ignorance of secondary order effects that bombing Iran has had on the price of gas.

Recently, The Donald claimed that “the United States is seeing an economic revival across our manufacturing industry. July saw the strongest expansion in domestic manufacturing activity in more than four years, marking seven consecutive months of growth in the sector.”

But those were lies.

His policies have actually reduced the number of manufacturing jobs.

In fact, his own Bureau of Labor Statistics says auto manufacturing jobs are declining in the US.

Meanwhile, vehicle prices in the US have reached record highs.

I’m not an economist, but when you make vehicles and the gas you need to drive those vehicles more expensive, three things happen.

First, you make everything that gets shipped on a boat and then delivered by a truck more expensive.

Second, the rest of the world decides they should buy electric vehicles that don’t use your drill, baby drill, oil.

Third, people gets angry at you and decide they don’t like you very much because they had to pay more for a vehicle fueled with more expensive gas while they drive to get their more expensive groceries that were delivered by a more expensive truck. And these people don’t even know how cheap Chinese cars are yet. That’s gonna really set them off.

Yesterday, trade negotiations between Canada and the US collapsed.

This “negotiation” was in response to The Donald’s plan to impose a new set of 50% tariffs on a very strange selection of Canadian exports starting this weekend (dude, stop using ChatGPT to draft your trade policies).

Our Prime Minister plans to initiate counter tariffs on a reciprocal dollar amount of US goods starting on September 8th.

And like any amount of fentanyl, no amount of new tariffs is a good thing.

Tariffs are costing the typical American household $1,100 a year in both direct collections and indirectly in higher prices, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

These new measures are likely going to hurt even more Americans and Canadians.

Prices are going to go up for all those things that get delivered on trucks.

Feelings are going to get hurt.

Fewer Canadians are going to bother to cross the Gordie Howe Bridge.

And we’re not likely going to be buying any Tennessee Bourbon any time soon.

Do you want fries with your trade deal?

Or we could try something different.

Maybe we can order some fries with our cheeseburgers and decide that 20 Quarter Pounders worth of fentanyl isn’t worth continuing this trade war any longer and make this whole bullshit tariff debacle go away.

Thanks for listening, Natalie.

Your friend in fried foods,

-Growdy