They had Beyoncé. They had Taylor Swift. They had glowing magazine profiles and Saturday Night Live cameos. They had lines about guns, abortion, climate crises and taxing the rich. They had four years.
But President Donald Trump had everything else — the attitude, the podcasts, the comedians, the daily-life-affecting issues regular people care about, and most of all, the votes — which is why he is headed back to the White House.
Which means it’s Trump who Canada’s going to be dealing with for the next four years.
It’s not really a surprise that he won. When citizens are paying more for food and energy, when they’re (legitimately) concerned about migrant crime and border integrity, they’re less inclined to want a leader who says he’ll do something about it. Kamala Harris has offered price-gouging bans, mumbled commitments to mild immigration reform … and vibes. Harris might not have said much, but she walked and talked like a prosecutor, and her demographic profile offered the identity-mindful a chance to see the first female president. Vibes, however, don’t solve problems.
In contrast, Trump offered action: deportations for illegal migrants, tax cuts, tough-on-crime policy and “drill baby drill.” For Americans, it’s a promise of national strength. For Canadians, it’s a reason to be apprehensive.
Fortitude next door isn’t exactly great news for Canada, mostly because our own problems have been permitted to go downhill for so long. Trump is a trade protectionist. We’re vulnerable on trade because we aren’t exactly bursting with productivity; indeed, Canada spent the last 10 years punishing its resource sector. We don’t exactly build new ports either, and we struggle to build infrastructure that gets product to port. If border tariffs go up, it’s going to hurt.
Speaking of borders, Trump wants these secured. We can’t seem to do this to the south, adding to neighbourly frustrations even in the friendly Democrat era. Adding to this problem is the fact that our immigration system is so porous it allows accused assassins and terrorist-attack plotters into the country as international students — which could get worse if the U.S. goes forward with a revamped deportation plan. We have to rely on other countries to flag our bad guys for us much of the time because our own safeguards fail so often.
We can’t even get it right on animals: having permitted too many rabid dogs into the country, healthy dogs now face more hurdles at the U.S. border. The humans might well be next, but it’s a problem of our own making.
On the front of international security, Trump expects allied countries to support their own militaries, which Canada isn’t known for doing. The army is in a sorry state, and that isn’t going to change at this rate: just last week, the Parliamentary Budget Officer figured that our defence spending will reach a mere 1.58 per cent of GDP by the end of the decade.
Trump, lastly, doesn’t entertain the social justice demands of the progressive left. See his take on gender policies: he’s promising revisions to federal rules that will restrict cross-sex cosmetic procedures for minors and limit transgender participation in sports. In Canada, at the federal level, we’ve gone the opposite way, funding organizations that advocate for transgender interests and criminalizing the act of convincing trans-identifying children that they aren’t actually trans.
It’s going to be so, so easy for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to blame our woes on the new head manager downstairs. Even better, Trudeau will be able to continue blending Canadian conservatives — namely opponent Pierre Poilievre — with American Republicans, using the missteps of the latter to tar the former in the eyes of the electorate.
If Trudeau is sensitive to keeping Canada in the good graces of the United States, which is in the country’s best interest, he won’t go this way. He’ll call off the ads that cry wolf over “American-style” politics and leave the Trump talk in the past. He might even reflect on how little identity politics seem to matter in this election, and wonder whether stoking these fires in Canada could end up hurting in the long run.
He won’t — the temptation for cheap wins will be too much, and he’ll be doing his best to stay out of third place next election. But when he does poke the bear, probably over and over again, and when we feel the consequences, remember that Trump didn’t make us vulnerable. We did.
National Post