This is from a segment Sen. John Kennedy did yesterday with Greta van Susteren on Newsmax talking about the tariffs President Trump has imposed on Canada and Mexico this week, which has turned into a hot-button issue leading to threats of all kinds of horrors.

The Canadians are threatening to shut off transmission of electric power to parts of Michigan and the northeast United States from power plants in Quebec and Ontario, and there’s an enormous amount of gasbaggery being spewed forth at Americans as the result of a tariff the Trump administration is slapping on goods from our northern and southern neighbors.

Why? As Kennedy explains, because of the fentanyl epidemic.

Here’s the segment. We have thoughts we’ll lay out below.

What’s really happening here is that China is conducting a modern-day Opium War on the U.S. If you don’t understand what that is, here’s a quick synopsis…

Fentanyl is the new opium, and China is doing everything they can to hook as many Americans on it as the British hooked Chinese, sapping their national strength and forcing them into a subservient posture given the civilizational costs of so many people rendered dysfunctional and unproductive by drug addiction.

If you study Chinese history, what you’ll realize is that the Chinese play everything out according to their own experiences. They want to bring America down, and in their experience the way you do that to somebody is to get them hooked on drugs you sell. So, Chinese companies make fentanyl components and ship them to Mexico and Canada – and then Chinese nationals in those countries cook it and distribute it to, in the case of Mexico, drug cartels who ship it over the border.

As van Susteren notes, this is mostly a Mexico thing. If you look around on the internet you’ll see people howling that there was only about a backpack’s worth of fentanyl seized last year coming in from Mexico. Of course, a backpack’s worth of fentanyl is enough to kill almost ten million Americans, so it’s not nothing.

Why this is a sufficient Canadian problem that Trump would slap down those tariffs really isn’t so much a specific fentanyl problem as it’s a drug policy problem. Here’s Pierre Poilievre, who is Canada’s Conservative Party leader, ripping into Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau a few weeks ago in the advent of Trump first announcing plans for those tariffs…

Trudeau did nothing after being challenged by Poilievre on that issue. In fact, he has since prorogated the Canadian parliament – putting it in recess for almost three months now.

Why? Because the left-wing parliamentary majority coalition which made him Prime Minister has broken apart, and when they meet again it’s a virtual certainty there will be a vote of no confidence and he’ll be out of power. Trudeau has said that he’s resigning, effective as of the date his party chooses a new leader. But their parliament isn’t in session, so rather than resigning he’s effectively governing Canada as a dictator.

And when Trump announced the fentanyl tariffs, Trudeau responded by throwing out some vacuous promises on border security – helicopters and more guards and a bunch of other things which don’t get at the real problem, which is that he’s created a legal environment in which addictive and life-destroying drugs like fentanyl are wide open and basically institutionalized in that country, so that criminal gangs operate freely and can grow as large as the Mexican cartels do.

Trudeau has done absolutely nothing to reverse Canada’s drug policy which has put them in Trump’s crosshairs. And to Poilievre’s shame, he’s essentially sided with Trudeau in trashing Trump’s tariffs.

This was Poilievre when Trump originally announced the plans for the tariffs. It was a good statement which outlined the reality of Canada’s circumstances.

But this is Poilievre now…

What the hell is that?

Obviously he’s playing to the crowd in Canada, the same people who booed the U.S. national anthem at hockey games and are now caterwauling over the pain Trump is causing.

But Poilievre is talking about retaliatory tariffs, and that’s utterly idiotic. As Trump noted earlier this week, on April 2 he’s imposing reciprocal tariffs on everybody in the world – so everything Canada does to punish us will get matched.

There’s a giant trade surplus Canada is running with the U.S., mostly because of the oil from the Alberta tar sands they ship down to refineries in Texas and Louisiana – Canada doesn’t have export facilities for oil and gas other than pipelines and rail lines into the U.S. But it isn’t like Canadian goods are otherwise important to our economy. Their farm products are basically identical to ours. They have timber; we have it in abundance as well. There are auto plants in Canada, but Trump has noted he wants to bring that production stateside, which is easily done. Canadian supplies of raw materials like aluminum aren’t special; Vladimir Putin offered Trump two million tons of Russian aluminum last week.

As Poilievre noted, exports to the U.S. are 40 percent of Canada’s economy, and some three-quarters of everything they export comes here. Getting hit with these tariffs is a crippling blow to their economy.

But this is not a Trump problem. This is a Canada problem. Specifically, it’s a Trudeau problem. Trump is using the leverage he has to get Canada to tighten up their unforgivably terrible pro-drug laws, and Trudeau has had months to comply. Instead, he’s too busy trying to hold on to his job for just a little longer after nine years of failure to do anything to cooperate with us on an issue of grave importance.

We’re losing 100,000 Americans a year to fentanyl overdoses. And that’s a euphemistic way to describe what’s actually happening; the vast majority of the Americans dying of fentanyl are dying because they think they’re taking less-deadly recreational drugs only to find those laced with fentanyl, and they’re being poisoned to death. You might struggle to have sympathy for some cokehead who drops dead because he OD’s on fentanyl, but when you consider that somebody actually murdered that cokehead by poisoning him, maybe then you’ll realize this isn’t acceptable.

Particularly in the numbers this is generating, and the grief and misery it’s causing for hundreds of thousands of American families.

So Trump runs on doing something about this, and he rattles the cages of our neighbors demanding action, and Trudeau essentially blows him off.

Canadians ought to be steaming over this, but not at Trump as so many are. It’s Trudeau who should make them furious. Trump is acting in America’s interests, and he’s giving Canada a clear path forward whereby Canada’s interests should perfectly align with ours – not only in aligning Canadian drug policy with ours, but also in dropping some of the punitive tariffs Canada imposes on American dairy products, beef, and other agricultural and manufactured products.

Canada’s average tariff on American products was just above 13 percent. The average U.S. tariff on Canadian products was 1.8 percent. That isn’t free trade. With Trump’s reciprocal tariff policy, the win for the Canadians is to get those tariffs as low as possible and open their economy to the freest trade relationship possible with us.

Maybe if and when Poilievre is elected as Canada’s next Prime Minister, something which should happen by this fall but ought to happen a lot earlier, if the Canadian parliament ever were to re-open, this progress can be made.

But until then, this so-called “trade war,” which isn’t a war at all but rather a demand for Canada to stop poisoning our people with destructive drug policy, will do a lot more damage to our neighbors to the north than it will do to us.

And Trump is not the villain here.