United States President Donald Trump says his country’s seizure of Venezuelan oil reserves should put “Canada on notice.”

If Canadians weren’t already “on notice” as to the U.S. president’s rapacious, hegemonic approach to strategic resources in the Western Hemisphere, they sure as hell should have been. Long before now.

The Trump administration announced on Aug. 28 an agreement with Venezuela’s Interim President Delcy Rodríguez to secure control of key Venezuelan oil reserves. The Americans seized then-Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro last January, whisking him to a high-security jail cell in Brooklyn. The Trump team installed Rodríguez, who had been Maduro’s vice-president, while insisting on the right to run the country themselves.

The Americans clearly made Rodríguez an offer she couldn’t refuse, as Don Vito Corleone famously put it in The Godfather. Opposition leaders in the South American country are denouncing it as an unconstitutional assault on the country’s sovereignty and pillaging of its national patrimony.

Trump’s treatment of Venezuela illustrates a number of disturbing realities for Canada. 

When considered along with other recent moves by the Trump administration, it becomes crystal clear that Canada needs to forge an independent path that diverges from the U.S. on strategic energy and climate issues.

And we will need to withstand any blowback that that divergence provokes from the Trump administration.

The Venezuelan deal puts us on notice—once again—that the Trump regime expects preferred access to—if not outright control of—strategic resources in the Americas without much regard for the sovereignty of the rightful owners.

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