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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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“Flooding the zone” is a football term, but it’s been appropriated by political people.

In football, flooding the zone happens when a team sends a lot of receivers to one side of the field – to force the other team to overcommit defenders to that side of the field, and thereby leave the middle or opposite side of the field exposed.

Political guys loves sports metaphors, because it makes them sound like tough guys, instead of what they mostly are, which is dweebs who never got picked for any team, and who got involved with the debate club instead.

Donald Trump’s Reubenesque former Chief of Staff, Steve Bannon, is apparently out of jail now, and he loves to use that term. In 2018, Bannon famously said this to a writer at Bloomberg: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.”

Politicos love that tough-guy jocky stuff. So, over on the search engine Bing, which keeps track of these things, “flood the zone” shows up in 2,280,000 places, most of them in the context of politics. Sorry, football.

So, that’s what the aforementioned Trump is now doing, albeit without the assistance of Bannon (see jail, above). He’s flooding the zone with sh*t.

There is literally not enough room in this entire newspaper to properly describe what Trump and his winged monkeys have done in the 27 days since he was re-inaugurated (feels like 27 years, don’t it?). Suffice to say it’s been a lot.

He’s thrown Ukraine to the Russian wolves. He’s threatened to use military force against Denmark, a NATO ally, to seize Greenland. He’s threatened force against Panama, another ally. He’s freed January 6 felons, and fired FBI agents. He’s pulled out of the World Health Organization and hired an anti-vaxxer and former junkie to run health care. He’s changed the names of mountains and bodies of water to things he likes better. He’s barred reporters who ask questions he doesn’t like.

And, most significantly, he’s threatened to use “economic force” against Canada. He’s said, a couple dozen times, that he wants to make us the 51st state. He’s mocked our Prime Minister and our Leader of the Opposition. He’s said that we offer nothing of value. And so on and so on.

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If the polls are accurate, this has never really happened before.

The Conservative Party of Canada has dropped nearly 30 percentage points in six weeks. 

Now, in 1984, there was a 30-point shift that ended up favouring Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives. Sure. But that happened over a longer period of time.  Same with 1993, when my former boss Jean Chretien wiped out the Tories. Thirty points, give or take, but the shift occurred over a number of months, not weeks.

Thirty points in just six weeks! How did that happen?

As the Conservative Party’s nervous-nellie caucus gathers for a meeting in Ottawa this week – and as thousands of Tory MPs, staffers and their families congregate in Ottawa’s Rogers Centre on Saturday – more than a few of them have to be asking themselves that question: what happened? What went wrong? Can we get back to where we were?

All fair questions. From being 30 points ahead of the Liberal Party at the start of the year – to now, with several pollsters suggesting the Tories and Grits are nearly tied. Or that the latter are actually ahead of the former. Ouch.

How they lost their lead is simple. As this writer opined in these pages months ago, Trump’s victory in November was always going to hurt the Tories. And it has. Canadians mostly hate Trump, and they quietly suspect Poilievre dresses up in his Donald costume at night, when no one is around.

Once Trump was re-installed in power, things got worse. In the intervening days – when Trump has threatened and belittled Canada, over and over, saying he wants to make us the 51st state – Pierre Poilievre’s predicament has become dire. See polls, above.

There are three reasons for this.  It is an open question whether Poilievre possesses the will, or the insight, to repair the damage.

One: he needs to stop aping Trump’s policies.  For example, this week the Toronto Star topped a report with this headline: “PIERRE POILIEVRE PROMISES ‘MASSIVE’ FOREIGN AID CUTS.” In any other week, at any other time, Poilievre throwing a bone to his migrant-hating red-meat base would be grist for the mill. 

But doing it now, in the selfsame week that Trump and his evil Elflord Elon Musk have shut down USAID, America’s vaunted agency for international development and foreign aid? That’s deeply stupid, Team Tory. It doesn’t exactly advance the narrative that you’re not Trumpy, now, does it?

Two: Poilievre needs a MAGA-enema. In every Conservative caucus, at any given time, you always have a Randy White or a Myron Thompson. Remember them? Smart Tories sure do. The loose lips of White and Thompson and their troglodyte ilk sank Stephen Harper’s Conservatives when it counted – during elections. So Harper flushed them at his earliest opportunity.

Poilievre needs to do likewise. Polls show up to half of partisan Conservatives really like Trump. If that’s even partially true, that means that there are probably even more closeted MAGA types in Poilievre’s circle (Google “Pierre Poilievre staff MAGA hat” to see what I mean). So, Poilievre needs to march them out to the town square and – with a gleeful CBC and the aforementioned Star in attendance – terminate the Vichy MAGA-Canucks, with extreme prejudice. Like, yesterday.

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Now we know why the Tories wanted an election right away.

At the start of 2025, when Justin Trudeau was still in charge, pollster Angus Reid reported that the Pierre Poilievre Conservatives were at 45 per cent support nationally. The Trudeau Liberals were down to an extraordinary 16 per cent.

Back then, other pollsters showed nearly the same thing. Nanos put the Tory lead at 23 per cent. Research Co. said it was 26 per cent. And then, in the first week of January, Trudeau announced that he was quitting at the start of March. The polls didn’t meaningfully change. Not right away, anyway.

For those of us who used to work for Jean Chretien, it all seemed familiar. Kim Campbell won her party’s leadership in June 1993, succeeding the very unpopular Brian Mulroney. For months, we Liberals had been ahead, sometimes – like Poilievre – by as much as 30 percentage points.

As soon as the Tories selected Campbell, however, the bottom start to fall out. Under Campbell, the Progressive Conservatives (as they were then known) surged ahead. By the time the Canada Day weekend rolled around, Campbell had become one of the most popular Prime Ministers in history.

So what happened? A few things – because, in politics, you never win or lose because of just one thing. Chretien ran a superior campaign in the Fall of 1993. Campbell was inexperienced and undisciplined. The Tory campaign ran an ad mocking Chretien’s facial paralysis.

Mostly, however, Campbell and her party lost because they’d been in power for almost a decade. People wanted change.

It’s dangerous, then, to suggest – as some Liberals are now quietly doing – that they could now somehow snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Under Mark Carney, they whisper amongst themselves, perhaps a fourth consecutive Liberal win is possible.

Their reason for making such bold claims is, again, the polls.

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A reprieve. Or is it?

The 30-delay notwithstanding, this much we know: Canadians, who apologize when someone else steps on their foot, are still very, very angry. When we boo the American anthem at NBA and NHL games – instead of helping out with the singing, in those occasional microphone-failure moments – well, that’s Canadian-style angry. World War II take-no-German prisoners angry.

And Trump? “Anger” doesn’t quite capture it. Free advice from a former adviser to a Prime Minister, Secret Service: even after the eleventh-hour change of course, don’t bring him to the G7 at Kananaskis in June. Just don’t. You’ll be contending with a lot more than the grizzly bear threat. Believe it.

The stuff I’ve heard from otherwise mild-mannered Canadians about what they’d like to see done to Trump? Stay away, Yanks. It actually isn’t safe.

Meanwhile, despite Trump’s momentary change of heart, Canadians won’t soon forget the feelings of anger and betrayal. We are angry at Americans themselves, too – and not just the death-cult MAGA Republicans. When even arch-Leftist Senator Bernie Sanders is saying he favors an American takeover of Canada, you know we don’t have friends down there anymore. Even the Canadian comedians we mail South by the truckload are silent when their homeland is under attack.

We might delay the tariffs for 30 days or more. But it’s clear Trump views tariffs as a tool to get his way. He’ll be back.

Meanwhile, we Canadians will never fully trust him or his government ever again. As one pal said to me this weekend: this isn’t a friendship anymore. It’s an abusive relationship. “And we’d be crazy to go crawling back to our abuser,” said he.

Trump is a thug, but it’s foolhardy to believe he’s now going to abruptly change his strategy – because threatening punishing tariffs works.

So, in the meantime, what do we do? Where do we stand? Five points.

1. We still need to continue to expand trade with other countries and the European Union. We can never again let one customer control so much of what we sell. We need to end inter-provincial trade barriers, too. Also: build pipelines. Now.

2. Taking a Buy Canadian approach is still smart. It energized people across the country, and it made them feel they were helping a greater cause. It made them feel less powerless.

3. Stopping fentanyl is always worthwhile – but we only account for .2% of what the Americans caught at the border. As such, this was always about something else. It was always about the main thing Trump has been saying every single day for weeks: annexation. Don’t forget that.

4. We’ve seen the true colors of the US – we can’t let our guard down ever again. We need to remember the past few days, and get ready for the next round.

5. Trudeau did a good job. Good way to end his tenure. He can retire knowing he helped the country in a moment of crisis.

There’s only thing Donald Trump understands or appreciates: money. Going after Trump, the politician, is entertaining but it won’t move the political needle. Going after Trump’s decisions – particularly the economic ones – will move the needle. That’ll change his behavior.

Nationally, provincially, municipally, we need to do what Trump could never do: get people together. We need to assemble every living Canadian Prime Minister and Opposition leader to speak with one voice and rally the country for the uncertainty that lies ahead.

And we don’t need an election in the middle of this crisis, folks. Sorry. That’ll just showcase our divisions to the Americans. If anything, we need the opposite: we should consider an all-party coalition government, ideally led by Poilievre, who has the best plan and a seat in the House of Commons. Because, really, none of our leaders disagree on the fundamentals about what needs to be done. That’ll showcase unity. Do that instead.

What works with bullies, everyone knows, is pushing back. We need to be ready to push back.

Because Trump isn’t done with us yet.

Not by a long shot.

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It came!

Canada’s (sovereign) future is so bright, I gotta wear shades!

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CALGARY – There are different types of conservatives. In Canada, all will be facing big tests very soon.

All of them get categorized as conservatives. But in personality and style, they could not be more different.

There is Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal Conservative Party, which was previously known as the Progressive Conservative Party. When the party’s name change happened in 2003 – via a merger that was more of a take-over – those conservatives still on the progressive side of the spectrum fretted about what would happen to the party of Mulroney and Stanfield.

Stephen Harper mollified them for a decade. While Harper would sometimes employ the rhetoric of his Reform Party antecedents, his actions, in power, were decidedly centrist. Ominous predictions that he would end gay marriage and abortion – including by this writer – never came to pass.

Harper mainly abstains from commenting on current affairs in Canada. A few days ago, however, he gave an important interview in which he excoriated Donald Trump, saying that the newly-installed president was neither a friend nor ally of Canada. Harper, then, is a conservative who knows the lexicon – but embraces a kinder and gentler approach when it counts.

Poilievre, on the other hand, favors bumper-sticker articulations of policy – which arguably works well in the Internet age, when everyone is competing for attention in a cyber-space filled with a trillion channels. But it’s a style that has aroused suspicions that Poilievre favors simplistic solutions to complex problems. And, perhaps, it has contributed to a significant recent slide in Conservative support in Ontario, which he needs to win majority power.

It is a puzzle, because Poilievre can give thoughtful answers when he is in the mood – during a recent tour in Atlantic Canada, for example, his plan to respond to American tariffs was more comprehensive than anything heard to date by federal Liberals. Then, a few days later, Poilievre actually accused a Zionist Jewish Liberal MP of favoring Hamas. It was disgusting, and it was the sort of thing of which electoral defeats are made.

Trump, of course, is who he is: no one can accuse him of hiding the flavor of conservatism he espouses. He is a conservative in the mold of former president William McKinley, an empire-building conservative Republican who once admitted he couldn’t locate the Philippines on a map – but seized it anyway in 1898.

Trump’s military threats against Panama, Greenland and Denmark – an actual NATO ally – eerily recall McKinley’s manifest destiny madness. Canada, which has also been repeatedly threatened by Trump, would be unwise to dismiss Trump’s McKinley-style expansionism. (Trump, meanwhile, would be wise to avoid McKinley’s fate: an anarchist assassinated the 25th president in 1901.)

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