Guest column: Canada needs to outsmart Americans at their own game

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By: Peter F. Trent

In January 1943 during the Second World War, the U.S. joined the British bombing of Germany. One famous American heavy bomber was the B-17 Flying Fortress, which bristled with 13 machine guns to shoot down enemy fighter-planes.

But the British Mosquito fighter-bomber outclassed the B-17. So fast that the enemy could not catch it, it dispensed with the guns — and five gunners — necessary to defend the lumbering B-17.

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Since the Mosquito was built of wood, its airframe required few scarce wartime materials. With one-third the weight of a B-17, the Mosquito was 50 per cent faster and achieved three times the rate of climb. It carried a similar long-range bomb load, yet with a crew of two instead of 10.

The lesson for Canada — where 1,000 Mosquitoes were built — is that we, like the brilliant Mosquito aircraft design, need to think differently and outsmart the Americans at their own game. And isn’t Mosquito the perfect name for a small, persistent and oh-so-Canadian irritant?

Our American friends in their current delirium want to build Fortress America, defended with tariffs Trumped up in an incongruous retaliation for minute quantities of fentanyl smuggling. We should thank the Yanks for triggering Canada’s recent Damascene conversion: our realization that we were in an unhealthy relationship. Canada had become economically, culturally and (most of all) militarily dependent on the U.S.

It’s time to let go and build on other friendships — with, say, Japan, Britain and France — as equals to equals, rather than our lopsided relationship with our overbearing American brother.

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Our governments should subsidize boosted sales to these countries. For example, in Quebec, our most important export to the U.S. is aircraft. Britain receives our second-largest value of aircraft exports — but it’s a trifling four per cent of our U.S. exports.

We must rebuild our manufacturing base, improve productivity, and make products with our raw materials like aluminum. If Canadians could invent insulin, basketball, IMAX, the pacemaker, telephone and snowmobile — and, in 1949, North America’s first jet airliner — we must exploit Canada’s and Quebec’s ingenuity.

In 2024, Quebec sent $91 billion of exports to the U.S. Our aircraft/aerospace industry contributed $11.8 billion. Then came $10.2 billion of aluminum, $8.8 billion of other metals, $5.7 billion of road vehicles, $4.7 billion of wood and wood products, and $4.6 billion of paper and paper products. Just these six categories amounted to one-half the total value of Quebec’s exports to the U.S., and one-half of them are plain old raw materials.

While Elon Musk and other Trump toadies are turning American government upside down, let’s show how we can have leaner government with the help, not the hindrance, of government itself. All private and public shoulders to the wheel.

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And we can’t drop our concern for climate change. We have the second-largest extent of sky above us of any nation on Earth and we are washed by the longest coastline in the world.

We say we sympathize with citizens to the south and that we only detest their leader. But 49.8 per cent of U.S. voters chose that leader; and they did it, incredibly, after suffering under him for four years. That said, American deserters with buyer’s remorse will always be welcomed here with a Canadian bear hug.

But, to our shame, Trump does voice one complaint that is undeniably true: We have been freeloading on the U.S. military for generations. Canada’s military spending — currently at 1.3 per cent of GDP —

has not surpassed 2.1 per cent since 1970.

In spending cleverly to build up our military, we won’t have to go as far as Ukraine did in jury-rigging Quebec-designed Sea-Doos as drones to attack Russian warships. But we can show that small, nimble Mosquitoes outperform ponderous Flying Fortresses.

Peter F. Trent, a former inventor and businessman, served five terms as mayor of Westmount, QC. He was awarded the Canadian Forces’ Decoration in 2005 and the Order of Quebec in 2018.

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