Tell me if I’ve got this wrong. The Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has announced he is stepping aside after ten years of vibes-based mismanagement, and has put Parliament in mothballs because it had reached a complete impasse: no one is, at the moment, able to formally legislate for the Dominion.
Trudeau’s party has had to put its leadership race on fast-forward, erecting high financial barriers to participation to prevent a coup by arrivistes and opportunists. As a result, the front-runners in the contest to choose a nine days’ prime minister are… two closely connected northern Albertans with rhyming résumés and enormous globalist credentials, Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney.
The party is thus forced to choose which Albertan it trusts to thwart another Albertan, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. One might well think it’s a great time to be Albertan. We’re croupiers at the only game in town! But any Albertan will understand intuitively that this situation creates unbearable psychological torment for the rest of Canada.
In November, the newly re-elected president of the United States, perhaps sensing an opportunity, threatened in his inimitable style to impose crushing tariffs on Canada if we don’t take steps to increase border security and crack down on the fentanyl trade. This was a conditional threat, and the federal government reacted by creating an all-new Border Plan to invest in security, meet the condition, and perhaps prevent a trade war.
Amidst much feverish discussion of sovereignty and national unity, the outgoing PM is actively boasting about the Border Plan; no one suggests that this is an expensive sellout, or that it is an overreaction, or that it is giving Donald Trump exactly what he wants. Probably we all sense that a little investment in the border might be a decent, overdue idea for its own sake.
Naturally, while the lame-duck head of government is trying to appease Orange Hitler, the rest of the country has been left to discuss the question of what to do if the appeasement doesn’t appease. With a leadership vacuum at the top of the federation, the premiers of the provinces spotted a collective opportunity to make themselves more popular by taking the threat seriously. The immediate practical result of this has been to give a (scarcely necessary) spurt of popularity to the Conservative premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, who is conducting a masterclass of sloganeering and bonhomie.
But any substantial discussion about how Canada might conduct a trade war must inevitably turn to energy and commodities. If we are obliged to have a trade war, to follow a brute tit-for-tat strategy, and to cause maximum immediate pain to American pocketbooks, gas prices in the Midwest are the most obvious target.
So, there is open talk of emergency export taxation on oil and gas — which does equate to pointing a gun at Wisconsin and Ohio and Illinois with Alberta’s head square in the path of the bullet. That has led Alberta premier Danielle Smith to engage in unambiguous signalling by declining to sign a First Ministers’ statement on intercontinental affairs whose actual content seems completely unobjectionable.
Nobody in this confusing equation is doing a very good job of declining to dance to Donald Trump’s tune. (Who ever does?) That includes Smith, right though she is to resist Alberta being used as cannon fodder in a let’s-you-and-him-fight trade war. Observers have hardly even noticed the very surprising fact that the concept of the First Ministers’ summit got resurrected almost literally overnight after decades of total desuetude. One senses that Premier Smith is being fitted for the inside-out coat of a traitor by other Canadian leaders, and she would probably like nothing better.
Everyone, including Smith and Ford and the various people making provisional decisions on behalf of the federal government, ought to think carefully before precipitating a national-unity crisis that would infect Quebec thirty microseconds after it began in Alberta. This would inevitably look to the wider world as if Canada was in danger of falling apart — and that Trumpian rhetorical magic was having chaotic, uncanny real-world effects for the thousandth time.
National Post