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My wife and I have some long-term friends who we get along with swimmingly, but we sometimes disagree, like most friendships. We work through it maturely because we value the history and the relationship. We don’t use disagreements as an excuse to rupture something built over decades.

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That’s how I feel about Canada and the United States right now. Donald Trump’s approach — the tariffs, the 51st state rhetoric, his claim that the United States doesn’t need anything from us — is genuinely corrosive. Many Canadians’ response — vacuous slogans, boycotting U.S. booze, cancelling trips, refusing U.S. products on principle. It feels like solidarity — is just therapy, not strategy.

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What that reaction misses is how lopsided the economic relationship is. More than 70 per cent of our merchandise exports go to the U.S. Trade in goods and services makes up roughly two-thirds of our gross domestic product. This isn’t a fight between equals and pretending otherwise doesn’t change the math.

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Real diversification has been the goal for decades, without ever coming close, for the simplest of reasons: we share a border and a continent with the U.S., not with whoever ends up on top of the global economy 50 years from now. That isn’t changing in any of our lifetimes.

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If symbolic retaliation isn’t real leverage, what is? Making Canada an attractive place to invest, build a business and take risks with capital is entirely within our control. And one of the biggest levers we’ve refused to pull is changes to our personal tax system.

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Canada’s top federal bracket — 33 per cent — kicks in at $258,482 of taxable income for 2026. That top bracket and four percentage point tax increase was introduced as one of Justin Trudeau’s first measures after getting elected in the fall of 2015.

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It was sold as a straightforward revenue grab from the wealthy. Instead, taxable income reported by top-bracket earners fell sharply enough that the change was a net revenue loser once behavioural effects and the resulting drop in provincial revenue were accounted for.

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In the U.S., the top federal bracket of 37 per cent doesn’t start until US$640,600 for a single filer and US$768,700 for a married couple filing jointly.

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Canada’s taxes look even worse when you add in the provincial rates. Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and some of the Atlantic provinces impose a combined top marginal rate above 53 per cent, topping out at 54.8 per cent in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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The U.S. range when including state taxes runs lower at the bottom, but isn’t uniformly so at the top. Nine states don’t levy a broad-based income tax on wages, leaving a high earner’s total federal burden at 37 per cent, while New York City and California both push combined marginal rates just past 51 per cent once local surtaxes and uncapped state payroll levies are counted.

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The floor is where the real gap lives, not the ceiling. Alberta, one of Canada’s lowest-taxing provinces, still charges 48 per cent at the top, which is at or above almost every U.S. jurisdiction outside New York City and California.