Justin trudeau

It is difficult to overstate how much Donald Trump has changed the dynamics of Canadian politics. When Justin Trudeau resigned on January 6, his Liberal party was on just 16 percent in the polls — 25 points behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. Within six weeks, that had narrowed substantially, with Nanos suggesting there was just two points between the two parties. The top issue of national concern? Donald Trump and US relations. Visiting Ottawa in January, I was struck by the remark which one Member of Parliament made to me. “We don’t see America and tariffs as foreign affairs — we see them as actually an extension of our domestic economic policies.

It was a field day for the Canadian freight industry on Monday. Every truck in the country, stuffed to the gills with product, was racing the clock to the border. The few drivers still available commanded ridiculous prices — up to $12,000 higher than normal. At the stroke of midnight, the 25 percent blanket tariff kicked in. Trucks that had yet to make it across the border hit the brakes and turned around. The party was over; the coaches became pumpkins again, it was time for Cinderella to go home. The whole week before, business owners, brokers and shippers were asking each other: "Have you seen anything official on this? Anything from the Canadian government?" They hadn't.

You couldn’t have written a better comedy script than the one playing out in the apparently real war that has erupted between America and its usually irrelevant northern cousin. The hockey rink is particularly sacred ground for Canadians, which makes the ego hit doled out by President Donald Trump this week all the more painful.   “I’ll be calling our GREAT American Hockey Team this morning to spur them on towards victory tonight against Canada, which with FAR LOWER TAXES AND MUCH STRONGER SECURITY, will someday, maybe soon, become our cherished and very important, Fifty First State,” he posted on Truth Social Thursday morning.   “I will be speaking before the Governors tonight in D.C. and will sadly, therefore, be unable to attend.

An extreme form of mental gymnastics is required to believe that a pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ, pro-immigration philosemite in an interracial marriage is also Canada’s beachhead for an invasion of American-style white nationalism. Then again, Canadians have extremely flexible imaginations. There are armies of politically literate Canadians who earnestly think that Pierre Poilievre would be comfortable among the members of the Republican Party — even in the Freedom Caucus that comprises its rightmost flank. Not a few of them — grown adults who can tie their own shoes and read without moving their mouths — genuinely believe that Poilievre is something other than a mild-mannered, ideologically malleable, Ottawa-tempered functionary.

In February 2022, I attended the Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and struck up a conversation with a hunting guide from Newfoundland. We talked about guided trips to hunt moose and caribou and about how much of a haul it is to get from Newfoundland to Pennsylvania (and to pretty much anywhere else, for that matter). At the time the “Freedom Convoy” — in which Canadian truck drivers were joined by thousands of demonstrators protesting Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates — was in full swing. My newfound Newfoundland friend seemed to be as polite and self-effacing as the stereotype, so I felt comfortable asking his thoughts on the Freedom Convoy.

In May 2021, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the remains of 215 children had been found buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. The Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation band had confirmed the story, they claimed, quoting Chief Rosanne Casimir. “To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” she said. “Some were as young as three years old. We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc is the final resting place of these children.”  The outcry was enormous.

Two cheers for a brief hiatus in the Canadian stampede towards suicide for all. Earlier this month, David Lametti, Justin Trudeau’s justice minister, announced that legalization of euthanasia for the mentally ill will be delayed by one year. This, he said, will give the health system and regulatory bodies more time to prepare. Mentally ill adults will now become eligible for euthanasia in March 2024. Sadly, it’s a mere hiatus. Despite the international wave of horror in recent months pushing back against Canada’s sickeningly casual euthanasia regime, the government clearly has no intention of walking back its plans to make death on demand available to the most psychologically fragile.

Contrary to media messaging, Pierre Poilievre, the new leader of Canada's Conservative Party, is no Donald Trump. But he does represent a challenge to the left, so the brush must be dipped in the most lurid colors available. On September 10, Poilievre won the Conservative leadership contest in a landslide, giving the party its first credible leader since Stephen Harper. Andrew Scheer, a former leader who squared off against Justin Trudeau, was likable but failed to project confidence, notably when the left held his feet to the fire over his Catholic pro-life views. Far less convincing was Scheer's successor, Erin O’Toole, who wasn’t even likable. When it came to policy, O’Toole acted like a Liberal who’d somehow wandered into the Conservative caucus.