Every Canadian town has that one guy.

He's on one of the local hockey teams (his name's often Gord for some reason) and he fancies himself the bruiser. Doesn't matter what the score is, or whether the other guy is bigger; he drops the gloves, throws the first punch, and a minute later he's on the ice with a black eye and his jersey wrapped around his head.

Next period, he does it again, genuinely thinking "This time I'll kick his ass."

I've spent a lot of time in the last year watching the Americans pretend to negotiate trade deals. And I regret to inform you: It's Gord.

So the U.S./Canada trade talks collapsed. And of course they did. You only have to see how well the current American administration keeps promises to get a hint on how much good faith they'd bring to these sorts of things.

What's weird, though, is that both parties, the Americans included, had access to a secret playbook that would map out exactly what happens on the ice when you obsess over tariffs.

The playbook is called “History.”

In 1930, the American Congress passes Smoot-Hawley, jacking up duties on more than 20,000 products. Thousands of economists begged the U.S. President to not sign it. But he did. Maybe he thought the polite countries, like Canada, would just accept it. Instead, we countered with reciprocal tariffs representing about 30% of U.S. exports.

That was hard on Canadian families. So how did the public respond to those tariffs? They demanded more. They elected R.B. Bennett, who almost immediately hit another 120 American product categories.

In just four years, U.S. exports collapsed from $5.25 billion to $1.7 billion. Global trade fell by two-thirds.

In 1971, Nixon added a 10% charge on every taxable import and, breaking from decades of custom, declined to give Canada an exemption. How did that go? They backed down in just four months.

Or take lumber. Since the early 1980s, the Americans have targeted Canadian softwood five times, claiming that provincial stumpage fees are some kind of secret subsidy. By 2002, duties were as high as 27%. International bodies like NAFTA and the WTO sided with Canada every time; the Americans even had to give back $4 billion of the $5.3 billion it had collected.

And now, the Americans have broken a deal that we made in good faith, kept randomly adding tariffs, and kept changing the rationale: fentanyl, a bridge, wildfire smoke, TV ads, alcohol boycotts.

In hockey, there's a look from the bench sometimes, kind of a wide-eyed stare, when the other team watches a play happen that they didn't plan for. You can study another team, watch their past games, but sometimes they'll run a play you just do not expect.

The Americans have always underestimated Canada. They believe the simple math that tells them tariffs equal submission.

This week, I’ll bet they wish someone had cracked open that history playbook.

Every single time in the last 160 years, tariffs didn't just fail to get Canada in line, they cost the United States more than it ever collected, pummelled its own economy, and ended in a negotiated retreat once someone finally did the math.

That retreat will come here too, once the Americans fire their current coach.

Then, they'll have to figure out how to deal with a country that spent the last four years building its own bench. We signed new deals with other teams. We drafted and trained our own players, and stopped renting theirs.

And how's that going? Foreign investment is pouring into this country at a pace we haven't seen in 20 years, twice what any other G7 team is pulling in. We have four times the jobs growth as the U.S. And, we still control the tap that powers the U.S.: 60% of their crude oil imports and almost all their entire natural gas imports.

That playbook could have told them. We don't back down in this country. We lace up.

It's not just us. Other countries have realized that the American government, once respected around the world, just isn't trustworthy anymore. They break deals. They complain about getting checked into the boards, when the replay shows nobody was even near them.

We'll get through the next couple of seasons, because we support our neighbours. We'll keep boycotting American products, checking labels in grocery stores, using Canadian technology.

And as for Gord? Well, Gord'll be Gord.

He'll probably stay on the ice, looking around for the next fight, without even realizing everyone left the rink long ago.

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