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Trump Tax™️.

President-elect Donald Trump may call it a “tariff,” but essentially that is what he is promising to impose on his first day in office: a tax. “Tariff” comes from a Turkish word meaning “prices.”

So, the price of just about everything is where the Trump tax will be most keenly felt. In his late-night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote that he intended to slap tariffs “on ALL products coming into the United States.” His targets: China, Mexico and – notably – us.

For most of our history, we have been the closest allies and trading partners of the Americans. No more. If he carries through with even part of his tariff, Trump will effectively cripple the Canadian economy. He will be treating us like we are the enemy.

For Canada, the Trump Tax will mean that further interest rate cuts are over. Rates will likely need to go up, in fact, to shore up the Canadian dollar, which started to plunge the moment Trump made his announcement.

More broadly, the Trump Tax will strangle consumer spending just as the critical Christmas season kicks off.  Many firms will scuttle Christmas bonuses, and not a few would now be contemplating layoffs – they’d be fools not to. Inflation will return with a vengeance, and some analysts are even quietly wondering if the Trump tax will usher in something akin to a depression.

Trump has fans in Canada, mainly on the political Right. Those partisans will dispute all of this, of course, just like the millions of Americans who ignored warnings from Kamala Harris that Trump’s tariffs would cost them, too.

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In ‘Lee,’ Kate Winslet’s new movie about the celebrated World War II photojournalist Lee Miller, the descent into the heart of darkness is slow, but it is always the destination.

The film starts with Miller and her young friends watching newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis marching triumphantly through the streets of Berlin. Miller and her friends shake their heads, disapproving, still unaware that the Nazis are marching towards them, too.

War begins. With her Rolleiflex camera, Miller goes on to document London’s Blitz, the fierce battle over Saint-Malo, the liberation of Paris. And then, with her photojournalist colleague David E. Sherman, Miller arrives at Buchenwald and Dachau, the concentration camps where tens of thousands of Jews, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, Freemasons, Communists, Catholic priests and Roma people were slaughtered. But mainly Jews.

You have perhaps seen the photos Miller took at Buchenwald in April 1945, just after it was liberated by Allied troops. They are famous photographs, now displayed in museums. In them, you see a block for medical experimentation, and other buildings set aside for executions and torture, and a crematorium. Miller described what she saw:

“The six hundred bodies stacked in the courtyard of the crematorium because they had run out of coal the last five days had been carted away until only a hundred were left; and the splotches of death had been washed from the wooden potato masher because the place had to be disinfected; and the bodies on the whipping stalls were dummies instead of almost dead men who could feel but not react.”

The movie about Lee Miller arrived around here in the same week that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a press conference to announce a tax holiday on pudding and fake Christmas trees. His smirking Minister of Finance hovering beside him, Trudeau was asked about the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants against two Jews. His government would “abide” by the ICC warrants, he said.

“This is just who we are as Canadians,” he said.

Is it? Is that who we are now? Or is it the sort of moral abasement Lee Miller and her friends glimpsed in flickering newsreel footage about Nazis? Because it certainly feels like that.

The two Jews Trudeau agreed to arrest, in the unlikely event they ever alight on Canadian soil, are Israel’s Prime Minister and its former Minister of Defence. They had committed “war crimes,” the ICC declared in a release, which went then went on to say the details of the war crimes are “secret.”

It’s relevant that the details are being kept secret. Disclosing the facts, you see, would swiftly reveal the allegations to be as phony as one of Trudeau’s tax-exempt plastic Christmas trees.

The facts are these: Palestinians – some in uniform, some not – swept into Israel early on the morning of October 7, 2023, and commenced murdering, maming, raping and stealing thousands of Jews. On that day, you might say, it was “just who they are as Palestinians.”

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