Andrew Coyne says we are at war, but is that true?

0:00Welcome to Hub Headlines. Today's program features the best commentary and analysis published in the Hub for September 11. Up first is Rudyard Griffiths, writing on why Andrew Coins claim that Canada is at war with the U.S. misses the mark. Andrew Coin wrote a column this week about loyalty that is causing a stir. It does not accuse anyone of disloyalty quite. It argues that criticism of the government's trade war has boundaries. That ignoring context is culpable past one point and willfully obtuse past another. And that past a third threshold it becomes suggestive of misplaced loyalties. The examples cited for the first two points are articles published in the Hub. Trevor Tooms estimates of what retaliation costs Canadian consumers and what the looming tariffs cost in jobs. And Sean Spears argument that the August 21st deal should have been taken. The third point is attributed to sins of omission and commission by prominent conservative politicians.

1:04Oscar Wilde said the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about at all. And in the midst of a trade war with the global superpower, we welcome the attention. But the implied accusation of disloyalty to patria, however elegantly hedged, invites an examination of the premises behind it. Since premise is stated plainly, Canada is at war with an aggressive, proto-fascist regime whose object is not to protect an industry or open a market but to weaken, exhaust, and divide us with the threat of annexation on the horizon. From this everything else follows. There is no relief to be purchased. Any deal is a trap. The arithmetic of retaliation is beside the point because the assault is open-ended. If the premise holds, tombs numbers are a distraction and Spears urging of a deal of delusion. If it does not, they are the whole question. So the premise deserves the scrutiny coined declines to give it because his column is built on assertion about the president's nature rather than on the record of what his administration

2:07has actually done. The section 338 tariffs that took effect August 22nd cover roughly $20 billion USD of Canadian goods, about 5% of what we sell south. The proclamations exempt energy, potash, critical minerals, fish, and civil aircraft. Kuzma compliant goods outside the named categories, most of them, continue to enter duty-free. Four days before the tariffs bit, the president announced on his own platform that the two countries have a deal and delayed them to let it close. Bloomberg reported the American side had agreed to cut section 232 duties on our autos and metals from 25 to 15%. A regime bent on subjugation does not carve out three quarters of your exports and then offer to reduce the tariffs on the rest. It does not need to. What the record describes is an erratic and transactional administration that wants concessions on dairy, alcohol, and auto content and is prepared to inflict pain to get them.

3:08That is a serious problem. It is not a war. The China case is the test coin's thesis cannot pass. If any relationship fits his description of open-ended assault, it is Washington's with Beijing. Yet a deal was struck in Geneva in May 2025 that cut a 125% tariff to 10. It was extended in August. It was deepened at Busan in October and again in Beijing this May. And it has held for 16 months. Relief was purchased with rare earth leverage and soybean commitments, and it remains conditional. But the claim that no deal with this administration can hold is a prediction rather than an insight into Trump's character, and the year-long detente between the world's largest trading partners has already falsified it. Nor is the administration unconstrained in the way regime implies. The Supreme Court struck down its emergency tariffs in February. The replacement authority expired by statute in July. Congress has held its hand on Canada so far, but the midterms are eight weeks away in

4:11the tariffs on our Goodsland hardest in states Republicans need. This is a constitutional republic bargaining badly, not a third right in the making. The maximal frame does something not unimportant. It exempts policy from analysis. If we are at war, then $4 billion in consumer cost is the price of freedom and 90,000 jobs or casualties. And anyone who counts them is counting the wrong thing. That is precisely the move coin makes, and it is why his column contains no numbers. But a government that has just imposed 50% tariffs on American Goods owes its citizens a theory of how this ends. Demonstrate that they cannot succeed does not qualify. Tariff succeed for the country that imposes them when the other side runs out of tolerance for pain first, and Canada, which sends three quarters of its exports to one customer, and not win that contest by, in the words of our Prime Minister, matching Washington's new tariffs dollar for dollar. Coin is right that context is everything.

5:13The context is the record, and the record is empirical. Dates, rates, exemptions, offers made and withdrawn. It was the hub that published the arithmetic of this trade war while the Prime Minister was being congratulated for his resolve. If the charge is that we consulted the record, we plead guilty. No full obtuseness is refusing to. That was a commentary by Rudyard Griffiths. He is the hub's publisher. You can read the full text of his article on our website, the hub.ca. Our second essay is by Charles Lemom, writing on Canada's troubling decline in student math and reading performance. Canadian students aren't as good at math as they used to be. That's one way to read the freshly released data from the organization for economic cooperation and development. The latest program for international student assessment results, which track academic performance among 15-year-olds worldwide, just landed. PISA is essentially a standardized test that helps us do international comparisons.

6:16First, the good news. Canada still beats the OECD average across the board. Canadian teenagers continue to score comfortably above the international mean. More K-12 school systems remain relatively solid when held against a global peer group. That relative success could make it easy for provincial education ministries to pat themselves on the back. It's also an excuse to look away from what I'd call a genuine five alarm fire. And it's not for lack of money. Canadian governments collectively spent over $85 billion as of 2024 and 2025 on primary and secondary education. We should all stay focused on the Canadian trend line itself, not just our position relative to others because we're sliding. In science, Canada's score dropped from 534 points in 2006 to 510 in 2025. In reading, Canadian performance held stable around 527 for nearly a decade. After 2015, it fell, dropping to 490 in 2025.

7:20In math, we stood at 527 points in 2006 and 2009. We now sit at 485 points. In testing terms, that 42-point drop equals about two full school years of missed math learning. These are steady, years-long declines across three foundational skills every young person needs to build a career, understand the world, and participate in a productive economy. They also affect social mobility. The ability to improve one's lot in life despite one starting point, which evidence suggests has been declining in Canada recently. No single cause explains it, and it's certainly complicated, as many developed countries are seeing the same slide. Of course, digital devices in screen time don't help, but neither have marginal policy changes. Instead of mastering the basics, school boards and provincial education departments spent the past decade pursuing ideological fads and experimental curriculum overhalls.

8:21We had experiments in discovery math that sidelined basic arithmetic and standard algorithms. We saw pedagogical trends that deemphasized phonics and deep sustained reading of challenging texts in favor of fractured digital browsing. We tolerated classroom digital distractions that hurt students' attention spans. Ontario, at least, is starting to notice. Editorial final exams give parents and taxpayers something concrete to judge schools by. The rest of the education minister s package, a province-wide curriculum reset, while welcome, is highly contingent. Whether it holds over time is an open question. A affordable school choice would help too. In provinces like Ontario, parents who want something better than their assigned public school often have nowhere else to turn. K-12. Hubsan is one of government s most basic jobs. Its time provinces started treating it with the attention it needs, including better curriculum, accountability and real choice for the parents who want it.

9:26That was a commentary by Charles Lamam. He is an economic and policy professional. You can read the full text of his article on our website, the hub.ca. That s it for today s edition of Hubsan Headlines. We hope you enjoyed the program. Headlines is produced by Alicia Rao. This program was narrated by automated voices. Thanks for listening.