Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits the White House in October 2017.
It seems a lifetime ago that many Canadians went gaga over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: for his pandemic stewardship, for his ability to stand up to Donald Trump the first time around, for his hair. Once upon a time, you could walk into a downtown Vancouver shop and buy a “Canada” T-shirt showing off a cartoonishly buff Trudeau flashing a “hang loose” sign, with a moose, a polar bear, and Canada geese flying over the mountains and a setting sun, in case you hadn’t quite absorbed the Canadiana message.
What a difference nearly a decade makes.
There are reasons that life in Canada is sometimes compared to living upstairs from a biker bar. After his November victory, Trump turned up the volume on his saber-rattling on this side of the 49th parallel to deafening levels. After Trump’s tariff threats, and complaints about fentanyl trafficking and mostly nonexistent migrant incursions, the prime minister whose public approval ratings had already hit historic lows (thanks mostly to global inflation) somehow concluded that a quick jaunt to Mar-a-Lago was all Canada needed to smooth things over. He returned to Ottawa amid furious criticism and a fair amount of snickering over Trump’s “Governor Trudeau” and “51st state” trolling.
That episode took on a grimmer cast after Trudeau asked Chrystia Freeland, his deputy prime minister and finance minister—whom Trump coincidentally loathed for her roles in NAFTA talks, Trump’s 2018 tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, and rallying support for Ukraine—to step down to a “minister without portfolio” to handle Canada-U.S. relations. Although a Trump-Trudeau quid pro quo would be speculative, the timeline is a bit too neat. Freeland quit, and Trudeau’s government unraveled. “How we deal with the threat our country currently faces,” Freeland said in her resignation letter, “will define us for a generation, and perhaps longer.”
The prospect of a trade war, and Trump’s dismissive view of their country as a fantasy candidate for statehood, has sobered Canadians. Trudeau would not have been better placed to win another election after years of scandals and other domestic missteps, but his recent actions further tarnished his legacy. With Florida and the Freeland resignation, on top of the Liberal Party’s leadership contest and an imminent election, Trudeau opted to resign, the first casualty of Trump’s dangerous foreign policy.
Trump and the Republicans appear somewhat giddy about Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, the presumptive prime minister, someone who they believe is a fellow traveler. But both Trudeau and Poilievre have delivered stinging retorts to Trump. MAGA Republicans’ belief that the next Canadian prime minister intends to embrace their views and submit to a quasi-vassal status is a serious misreading of the Canadian political environment.
Canadians know more about the United States than Americans do about Canada, a consistent source of irritation up north. Canadians have a very specific national identity, which Americans tend to gloss over. Canada has enshrined multiculturalism in legislation, accepted linguistic diversity, and operated social safety nets that stand that in stark contrast to the lack of protections and insecurities that plague Americans. “These are things that America does not have,” says Tari Ajadi, an assistant professor of political science at McGill University. “It’s an absurd proposition on its face that demonstrates, obviously, an arrogance, but it also demonstrates at some level, an incompetence by American policymakers to perceive anything outside, not even their own interests, but their own worldview.”
Barring unforeseen developments, the Liberal Party’s coming sojourn in the political wilderness sets the stage for Poilievre. Currently the beneficiary of a huge lead in recent polling, Poilievre would inherit a rare crisis in U.S.-Canadian relations and deep domestic dissatisfaction with housing affordability and other cost-of-living worries. Since mid-2023, support for the Conservatives has surged as Trudeau and his party have floundered in the polls. The party entered the New Year with wide leads in every province except Québec, where the Bloc Québécois dominates and the Liberals are in third place behind the Conservatives.
Immigration has become a flashpoint, especially in high-cost cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. Many Canadians view increases in the numbers of immigrants and refugees as contributors to housing shortages, rent inflation, and national health care system strains. Poilievre, whose popularity is rooted in his passionate stances on cost-of-living issues, has been critical of the numbers of international students and temporary workers admitted to Canada. He has proposed limiting immigration and tying it to housing availability.
The Alberta native has been a political creature since his college days, when he was active in the Reform Party, a populist, right-wing Western Canada conservative movement that emerged in reaction to the dominant Progressive Conservatives, the fiscally conservative/socially liberal national party. These wings merged into the current Conservative Party of Canada more than two decades ago.
Poilievre has been a member of Parliament for 20 years; the Speaker of the House of Commons tossed him out of the chamber last spring after he called Trudeau a “wacko.” (Trudeau had also delivered his own round of insults and accused him of consorting with white nationalist groups.) In 2022, Poilievre supported a truck convoy (boosted by American funding) protesting pandemic restrictions that surrounded Parliament for five weeks, to the consternation of the surrounding neighborhood.
He has also taken up the slogan “Ax the Tax,” a reference to Trudeau’s imposition of a carbon tax, a component of his climate program. The market-based climate solution has been criticized as a progressive design, one that has contributed to the cost-of-living crisis. Using these sorts of devices, Poilievre has become adept at wooing white middle- and lower-middle-class men, for example, who work in the oil industry. But with an election in the offing, he doesn’t want to alienate moderate voters in the major cities.
Even though Poilievre sounds like Donald Trump, it would be a mistake to view Canadian Conservatives as a mirror image of MAGA Republicans. Ajadi calls him a “a rhetorical stylist” and says that he isn’t an insurgent, but more of an establishment figure in the party. “I’m not sure that Poilievre is a true believer in anything, but at the very least there’s not the same kind of ideological fervor amongst the leadership of Conservative Party,” he says. “So they are distinctively right-wing, but they’re right-wing in ways that they have to be. They’re willing to do whatever they need to do in order to get power; sometimes that’s sneaky in ways that sounds like MAGA and sometimes that’s not doing that at all: They’re comfortable with both types of vernacular.”
After the prime minister’s resignation this week, President Biden dabbed some psychic salve on Trudeau’s wounds by declaring that “the world is better off because of him.” In the meantime, until an election is called and decided, the incoming Trump administration remains Trudeau’s problem. It would be unwise to underestimate Canada’s ability to deliver its own special kind of economic pain. Under consideration are tariffs on orange juice, certain forms of steel, and plastic products, for starters. The world’s fourth-largest oil producer could also put oil on that list. The U.S. imports more than half of its petroleum and crude oil products from Canada. A tariff imposed on the U.S. by someone presumed to be a MAGA ally would be an interesting twist.
