Categories for Musings

My latest: the war begins

The Trump tariffs have arrived.

How did we get here? Simple: we – all of us, under successive governments of different political stripes – allowed our trade with the United States to balloon to 80 per cent of what we export. That was a critical mistake, and all of us went along with it. It is a mistake that has left us too vulnerable to the whims of our biggest customer. Never a good strategy.

Canadians who have been justifying Donald Trump’s bogus pretexts for imposing crippling tariffs aren’t very good strategists, either. They’ve been dutifully dancing to Trump’s tune, just like he wanted us to. The newly-returned U.S. president exaggerated the fentanyl and illegal migrant threats so he couldn’t be accused of violating the very trade agreement he himself signed with Canada and Mexico in his first term.

His fentanyl and illegal border-crossing claims were bogus pretexts to get him out of his United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) obligations. Nothing more, nothing less.

But none of that matters so much, now. What matters is changing course, and making us less dependent on trade with the U.S. What matters is getting national leadership to guide us through the difficult years ahead. And what matters now is linking arms with those who support Canada, and building new alliances.

In the United States, finding those allies is pretty hard to do, these days.

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Terrorist PR

A terrified Arbel being released after months in captivity.

If Hamas/Gazans weren’t so stupid, they would’ve kept the screaming mob away – and surrounded her with uniformed doctors and nurses. Not masked murderers and rapists.

When they show you who they are, believe them.


My latest: not every conservative is equal

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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