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All the polls show the same thing. The race has tightened up. The big Conservative lead has vanished. The Liberals are competitive again.

Could Mark Carney win? Of course he could. Ten reasons.

1. Trudeau is gone. Towards the end, Justin Trudeau wasn’t just his party’s leader. He had become a political death sentence – for them. The Liberals had become very, very unpopular, and Trudeau wasn’t the only reason. But he was the main one. When he was forced out – by Chrystia Freeland, by his caucus, by reality – Liberals who had parked their vote with the Conservatives or the NDP were always going to come back. They have.

2. Conservatives didn’t have a Plan B. In politics, you always have to plan for change. The Tories didn’t. Justin Trudeau is a narcissist, they’d say, and they were right. But they had convinced themselves that his narcissism would persuade him to stay. That’s not how narcissism works. Narcissists always leave so that someone else can clean up their messes. The Conservatives – arrogantly, stupidly – didn’t plan for Trudeau’s departure. It shows.

3. Liberals overwhelmingly support Carney. There’s a name for winning 90 per cent of the vote: a landslide. Mark Carney won his party’s leadership by a landslide. Conservatives can bleat about the number of Liberals who ultimately voted, or weave conspiracies about marginal candidates like Ruby Dhalla. But the bottom line is that Mark Carney won, big. And Tories are now doing what they did three times in a row with Justin Trudeau: underestimating the Liberal leader.

4. Carney is likeable. In politics, you don’t need to be the most likable person on Earth. You just need to be more likable than the alternative. And the fact is, a growing number of Canadians don’t find Pierre Poilievre particularly likable. For a long time, Poilievre’s angry man shtick worked – because a majority of Canadians were mad at Justin Trudeau, too. With Trudeau gone, their anger has disappeared, like air out of a balloon. Donald Trump has cornered the market on anger, and voters want something different from him. They want someone who loves Canada, like they do. Not a perpetually angry guy who says that Canada is “broken.”

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Tough act to follow.

Jean Chretien, that is. Following Canada’s best-living speech-maker is a pretty tall order. Newly-minted Liberal Party leader Mark Carney was never going to beat Chretien at the podium.

And, actually, now that we are on the subject, Carney’s daughter Cleo was actually a bit better than her old man, too. She was charming and fun.

Mark Carney? He ain’t going to set the world on fire with his speechifyin’, Virginia. Personally, I’ve been more excited by bowls of Cream of Wheat. I didn’t fall asleep during Carney’s victory lap, but I gave it some serious consideration.

But we all knew that already about Carney, the former Governor of both the Banks of Canada and England. He got hired to do those jobs – and he did them well, by all accounts – precisely because he was not a flame-breathing ideologue. He was a banker. So, let’s be honest with ourselves: when you go in to the bank to talk about your mortgage, do you want the person on the other side of the desk to sound and look like Kid Rock in the midst of two-week bender in Vegas? Nope.

In other words, Mark Carney’s bland, boring banker persona is not his weakness: paradoxically, it is actually his secret power. At a time when the world is quite literally on fire, and when we are facing a threat to our very existence, being dull is arguably a big asset, not a liability.

So, there are three main reasons why the Carney Grits have obliterated Pierre Poilievre’s 30-point lead. One, Justin Trudeau left, and the country was quite happy about that. Two, voters suspect that the Conservatives secretly (and some, not-so-secretly) love Donald Trump.

Three, Carney is a typical Canadian: he is calm, collected and courteous. He is the polar opposite of the ugly American – in this case, Donald Trump. Carney reminds us of our better selves. We don’t want a Prime Minister who acts like the guy we despise.

But there is a risk in all that, of course. The Canadian who has given Donald Trump pause – more than any other – is Doug Ford. Ford has been anything but polite about Trump. He has been very direct and very tough about the American president – threatening to cut off his power, removing American booze from the shelves, going on Fox to growl about betrayal. Ford has metaphorically taken Trump into the boards, many times, and Canadians have cheered every single time.

That, then, is the danger that Mark Carney faces. And it is the worry that many Canadians will have, too: that the new Grit leader will be the typical Canadian. And, when Donald Trump treads on his loafers, Carney will be the one who says he’s sorry. As some Canadians are wont to do.

Right now, we want a fighter – like Ford, like Chretien, like Don Cherry. We don’t want to become the doormat of North America. Knowing this, and towards the end of his speech, Carney talked about dropping his gloves in a hockey fight. But literally no one can picture Mark Carney dropping his gloves for a fight. (He was a backup goalie, after all.)

In the leaders’ debates, the aforementioned Poilievre and the Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet are going to make mincemeat of Carney. But as my Postmedia colleague Tasha Kheiriddin said to me on my podcast this week, that still may not matter. Sometimes, voters want a leader like Ontario’s Brampton Bill Davis – someone also calm, cool and collected. Not Bob Probert.

Who will be the one who fights best for Canada? That’s what elections are for. We are going to decide that. And the election, if the Liberals are smart – and not all of them are dumb – will happen very soon. Conservatives may think it is wise to keep demanding an election right away, but I don’t think they are.

What if Trump abruptly calms down? What if someone medicates him? The best asset of the Liberal Party, right now, is the rabid, crazier-than-an-shithouse-rat Donald Trump. Why do Tories think having an election now is in their interest? Why not wait until the Fall, when Trump has inevitably moved on to some other issue?

Liberals won’t wait. They’ve benefited from Justin Trudeau’s departure, yes. They aren’t going to wait for Donald Trump to move on to his next chew toy.

They are going to go now – because, even with a bland banker at the helm, they might just pull this off, the biggest political comeback in recent Canadian political history.

And Jean Chretien, who I know rather well, would smile about that.

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I’m a longtime subscriber – that’s not going to change, either, because (a) they are the official opposition in the United States and (b) they are literally the only American media that pays serious attention to the Canadian perspective – so I will share with all of you, who are my friends, this story by the Times’ Matina Stevis-Gridneff. It contains truly shocking details which no Canadian media outlet has published to date.

We are under attack, friends. Trump’s America is the enemy. Read this.

After President Trump imposed tariffs on Canada on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an extraordinary statement that was largely lost in the fray of the moment.

“The excuse that he’s giving for these tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false,” Mr. Trudeau told the news media in Ottawa.

“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” he added.

This is the story of how Mr. Trudeau went from thinking Mr. Trump was joking when he referred to him as “governor” and Canada as “the 51st state” in early December to publicly stating that Canada’s closest ally and neighbor was implementing a strategy of crushing the country in order to take it over.

The February Calls

Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau spoke twice on Feb. 3, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, as part of discussions to stave off tariffs on Canadian exports.

But those early February calls were not just about tariffs.

The details of the conversations between the two leaders, and subsequent discussions among top U.S. and Canadian officials, have not been previously fully reported, and were shared with The New York Times on condition of anonymity by four people with firsthand knowledge of their content. They did not want to be publicly identified discussing a sensitive topic.

On those calls, President Trump laid out a long list of grievances he had with the trade relationship between the two countries, including Canada’s protected dairy sector, the difficulty American banks face in doing business in Canada and Canadian consumption taxes that Mr. Trump deems unfair because they make American goods more expensive.

He also brought up something much more fundamental.

He told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.

The border treaty Mr. Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States.

Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.

Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

During the second Feb. 3 call, Mr. Trudeau secured a one-month postponement of those tariffs.

This week, the U.S. tariffs came into effect without a fresh reprieve on Tuesday. Canada, in return, imposed its own tariffs on U.S. exports, plunging the two nations into a trade war. (On Thursday, Mr. Trump granted Canada a monthlong suspension on most of the tariffs.)

Glimpses of the rupture between Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau, and of Mr. Trump’s aggressive plans for Canada, have been becoming apparent over the past few months.

The Star, a Canadian newspaper, has reported that Mr. Trump mentioned the 1908 border treaty in the early February call and other details from the conversation. And the Financial Times has reported that there are discussions in the White House about removing Canada from a crucial intelligence alliance among five nations, attributing those to a senior Trump adviser.

Doubling Down

But it wasn’t just the president talking about the border and waters with Mr. Trudeau that disturbed the Canadian side.

The persistent social media references to Canada as the 51st state and Mr. Trudeau as its governor had begun to grate both inside the Canadian government and more broadly.

While Mr. Trump’s remarks could all be bluster or a negotiating tactic to pressure Canada into concessions on trade or border security, the Canadian side no longer believes that to be so.

And the realization that the Trump administration was taking a closer and more aggressive look at the relationship, one that tracked with those threats of annexation, sank in during subsequent calls between top Trump officials and Canadian counterparts.

One such call was between Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — who at the time had not yet been confirmed by the Senate — and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc. The two men had been communicating regularly since they had met at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and club in Florida, during Mr. Trudeau’s visit there in early December.

Mr. Lutnick called Mr. LeBlanc after the leaders had spoken on Feb. 3, and issued a devastating message, according to several people familiar with the call: Mr. Trump, he said, had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.

Mr. Trump was interested in doing just that, Mr. Lutnick said.

He wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

He wanted to tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions between the two nations that lay out how they share and manage Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario.

And he is also reviewing military cooperation between the two countries, particularly the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

A spokesperson for Mr. Lutnick did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Mr. LeBlanc declined to comment.

In subsequent communications between senior Canadian officials and Trump advisers, this list of topics has come up again and again, making it hard for the Canadian government to dismiss them.

The only soothing of nerves has come from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the four people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Rubio has refrained from delivering threats, and recently dismissed the idea that the United States was looking at scrapping military cooperation.

But Canada’s politicians across the spectrum, and Canadian society at large, are frayed and deeply concerned. Officials do not see the Trump administration’s threats as empty; they see a new normal when it comes to the United States.

On Thursday, at a news conference, a reporter asked Mr. Trudeau: “Your foreign affairs minister yesterday characterized all this as a psychodrama. How would you characterize it?”

“Thursday,” Mr. Trudeau quipped ruefully.

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If countries have hearts, and they actually do, then Israel’s heart was found – for more than 500 days – at a little place called Nir Oz.

That’s where an entire country’s wounded heart had taken up residence: at a modest single-story home, with a red roof and white walls, and a backyard full of kids’ toys. There were bikes and trikes, and a multicoloured soccer ball on the picnic table. There were Tonka toys, too, and a folded-up baby’s carriage on its side. It looked like play had been suspended for dinner, and then bedtime. Life, suspended.

There was a hammock strung between a post and the single kumquat tree that was in the backyard. If you stood there long enough, and I did, you could picture Yarden or Shiri Bibas in the hammock, smiling, laughing, watching Ariel running around, playing in his Batman jammies. Ariel, who looked like what an angel would look like, was just four years old.

Ariel will be four years old forever. His little brother, Kfir, was nine months old, and that is what he will be forever, too. Some monsters in the shape of men took them from their home in Nir Oz on the morning of October 7, 2023, and – shortly afterwards, no one knows for sure when – murdered them with their bare hands, and then crushed their tiny bodies with stones and concrete, to make it look like they had been killed by Israel, during an airstrike.

Someone has planted some flowers at the base of the kumquat tree, which Ariel loved. The flowers are reddish-orange, as if to recall the color of Ariel and Kfir’s hair. For more than 500 days, all of Israel, and millions of Jews and non-Jews around the world, held out hope that the Bibas boys were still alive. They would post online reddish-orange words of prayer, and everyone knew what it referred to: Ariel and Kfir. Those boys, and their home in Nir Oz, became Israel’s centre, its beating heart, for more than 500 lightless days.

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Canada could experience a lone-wolf terror attack soon, intelligence authorities have advised the federal government – and antisemitism is overwhelmingly the motivating factor.

“Amid [rising] anti-Semitic hate, an undetected lone actor could commit an act of serious violence in Canada at any time,” one June 2024 secret assessment reads. Multiple other secret assessments in 2024 similarly warned Ottawa about likely terrorist violence inspired by Jew hatred. 

The documents do not indicate what, if anything, the Trudeau government did to prevent such attacks from taking place, however.

The unsettling warnings are contained in a number of recently-declassified security reviews conducted by the Ottawa-based Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC), the federal organization tasked with assessing threats of terrorism in Canada. The documents were obtained under freedom of information laws by the University of Ottawa’s Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

Among ITAC’s disturbing findings:

• “ITAC continues to monitor the rising tide of antisemitism and violent rhetoric associated with the conflict in Gaza in Canada with concern…Online actors continue to share violent rhetoric and antisemitic content related to the conflict.”
• “There has been a significant increase in the number of demonstrations in Canada. The number of events from May 1to 17 was approximately triple the volume during each of the preceding months.”
• “Demonstration tactics have become more targeted and disruptive…Pro-Palestinian protestors have grown frustrated due to perceived government inaction on their demands…groups that are listed [terrorist] entities in Canada, namely al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah have voiced their support for the demonstrations…”
• “Violent extremists have been known to target large demonstrations for recruitment, networking and radicalization opportunities and will likely try to do so again in Canada.”
• “Criminal activities and intimidation tactics on campus and online are likely to continue.”

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As a starting proposition, I am grateful my parents are not alive to see any of this.

Babies and mothers abducted and murdered, for the sin of being Jewish, and much of the world shrugging. Monsters disguised as men, spraying schools and places of worship with bullets. Swastikas and symbols of death being paraded through places where ordinary people live, with impunity. Science being denied, democracy being denuded, ignorance being celebrated.

And, now, the most powerful man on Earth – in just one month – upending Western civilization, demonizing allies, and forming a Satanic alliance with the fascistic, genocidal Russian regime.

It is a cliché to say that we are living through history. But this? This? This feels like what my parents must have felt, observing the rise of Nazism and Hitler, and wondering if it was ever going to get better. Wondering if it could all be actually happening.

Now, as then, it is probably a waste of time to speculate about the motivations of madmen. Is Donald Trump mentally ill? Is he fashioning a dictatorship? Is Putin blackmailing him with some decade-old footage taken one night at the presidential suite at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel?

The same sorts of questions were asked about Hitler and his ilk, and no one had the answer. So, then – as now – politicians and pundits sought to defend the indefensible. All of us are familiar with the symptoms of that disease: asserting that Donald Trump is right on borders or fentanyl or dairy products or banking or military spending, or whatever lie he conjures up to justify his psychopathy. As long as he has the right ideology, these Vichy Canadians believe, Trump’s thuggery is justifiable.

Except it isn’t, not ever. Three years ago this week, Russia invaded Ukraine.

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