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Former Bank of Canada and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney listens to outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's speech just before being elected to succeed Trudeau as Liberal Party leader on Sunday, March 9, in Ottawa, Canada.
Carney clinches Canadian Liberal leadership
Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, won the leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party on Sunday, succeeding outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Carney, 59, decisively defeated former deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, former Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gould, and former MP and businessman Frank Baylis, garnering a whopping 85.9% of the vote. The campaign was dominated by US President Donald Trump’s threats of tariffs and territorial annexation.
In his victory speech in Ottawa, Carney said “Donald Trump has put unjustified tariffs on what we build, what we sell, how we make a living. He is attacking Canadian families, workers, and businesses, and we cannot let him succeed. And we won’t.” He added, “My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect.”
Carney is expected to be sworn in as prime minister by March 19. His immediate priorities include forming a cabinet and winning a seat in Parliament, but his minority government also faces a non-confidence vote when Parliament is scheduled to reconvene on March 24. For this reason, Carney is expected to call an election before that date. He will face off against Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in what is an increasingly tight race.
What issues will be on the table? Trump, Trump, and more Trump. Thirty-six percent of voters say Trump is the most important issue for them, with jobs and the economy second at 29%. The most recent poll found the Liberals closing in on the Conservatives, 34.3 to 36.5%. Two months ago, the Conservatives had a 25% lead, which evaporated following Trudeau’s resignation and Trump taking power in Washington.
What has Carney proposed? Carney would implement retaliatory tariffs targeting key US industries and diversify Canada’s trade partnerships. He also pledged to boost stagnant wages and lower high housing costs, and in his speech he said he would eliminate the carbon tax on families, farmers, and small and medium-sized businesses and scrap a controversial capital gains increase.
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waves as he leaves after testifying at the Public Order Emergency Commission in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Nov. 25, 2022.
Au revoir, Justin Trudeau
But Trudeau’s tenure was also marked by multiple controversies, including the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the WE Charity affair, and accusations of foreign interference. He failed to make major progress on Indigenous issues and his signature environmental policy, the national carbon tax, became a lightning rod for Conservatives. His generous pandemic aid programsdoubled the national debt, and his invocation of the Emergency Act to remove the so-called “Freedom Convoy” from Ottawa in 2022 was found to beoverreach by the courts.
By late last year, Trudeau’s Liberals had sunk so low in the polls that most assumed a Conservative government was inevitable. Since Trudeauannounced his resignation in early January, however, his party’s numbers have soared, due both to the prospect of a new leader and antipathy towards Trump’s comments about making Canada the “51st state.” Ironically, Trump gave the unpopular Trudeau a last-minute shot at redemption, rebranding himself as the champion of Canadian values and defending democracy at home and abroad. A high note to leave on after a tumultuous term.Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, is seen here officially announcing his bid for the federal Liberal Party leadership at Laurier Heights Community League in Edmonton, Canada, on Jan. 16, 2025.
Is Canada set for a snap election?
When was the vote supposed to happen? Canadian law requires that an election be held by Oct. 25, 2025. Federal elections last between 37 and 51 days and must be held on a Monday, so a March 10 call would mean a vote on April 21. Opposition parties are already planning to bring nonconfidence motions when Parliament reconvenes on March 24 to oust the minority government and force an early vote.
Why would Liberals call an early election? The resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, and talk of Canada as the 51st state have changed the political conversation. The ballot question has shifted from the government’s economic record to who can best take on Trump.
As a result, the Liberals’ poll numbers have risen dramatically. If Carney were leader, they would be tied withPierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, according to a new Leger survey. Since the opposition wants to force a vote anyway, there is arguably little to gain by waiting.
But it’s not a done deal. Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland says she would not hold an early election, citing the fact that, unlike Carney, she has a seat in Parliament and “would have the right to stand up in the House of Commons and to represent the government.” The timing could hinge on who wins the leadership – and where polls go between now and then.Can Canada quit the United States?
On Monday, President Donald Trump promised to hit Canada and other countries with 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum. The tax is set to come into effect on March 12, the same day Trump’s 30-day pause on across-the-board tariffs against Canada lifts.
As the US’ biggest source of aluminum and one of its top sources of steel, Canada stands to be hurt more than any other country by the president’s new metals tariffs. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government are rushing to find ways to wriggle out from under the tariffs, but a national discussion is also underway to find ways to diversify the country’s trade relationships and to protect the economy from what’s seen as an increasingly unreliable partner: the United States.
To get a sense of what Canada could do to fight back against US tariffs, while developing a long-term plan to build economic resilience, GZERO’s David Moscrop spoke to economist Kevin Milligan, director of the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
David Moscrop: How productive would Canadian counter-tariffs be against the US?
Kevin Milligan: The US economy is 10 times the size of ours. I've heard politicians and some others talking about dollar-for-dollar retaliation. The problem with that is our dollars don’t go very far when we put tariffs on their goods. To give an example, imagine we were to do one of the products that Canada loves to think about, like Harley-Davidson motorcycles from Wisconsin. Imagine we put a big tariff on them, and the sales to Canada dropped by half. What share of Harley-Davidson’s business overall comes from sales to Canada? Like 5% or something like that? Maybe, maybe 10%. So they’re losing a couple of percent off of their overall sales. They’re not going to be happy, but it’s not going to devastate them. In contrast, there are many businesses in Canada that sell almost everything they make to the US. When they’re faced with a big tariff, they will lose substantial sales, and it’s not going to be a couple of points off the top. It’s going to be existential to them. So that’s where the magnitude is different.
When we tariff US goods coming into Canada, that means that the cost of those goods coming into Canada goes up for Canadian consumers. And so we will be putting taxes on ourselves to make a small change to Harley-Davidson or whatever we tariff. So that’s where the counter-tariff is not something that I think will be super effective. It’s not to say we don’t do it. We have to strike back. This is an attack on our sovereignty, on our economy, and so we have to strike back and strike back hard. I’m just not sure that broad counter-tariffs are the way to go.
What about something like export controls on critical minerals or energy?
This is most easily understood in the context of oil. I’m not suggesting we do it for oil — there are a lot of political tensions within Canada when it comes to oil — but it is very tangible to think about this. Imagine the oil industry got together with the government and agreed that we’d purposely throttle both production and exports to the US. So, instead of 100 barrels a day, we’re now going to export only 50 barrels a day. If we did that, what happens? There are fewer barrels, and there are lots of people bidding for them, so the price goes up. The government doesn’t get the revenue. The industry keeps the revenue. They’re going to get less than they would’ve if they sold the full 100 barrels, but the revenue goes directly to the producers, which is better than washing it through a government program.
So you don’t have to worry about export taxes or anything else. You just do a curtailment in conjunction with the industry — though the government may have to organize that — but that just keeps the revenue in Canada by shrinking the amount of oil we export.
Trump’s threats have Canada talking about removing barriers that keep goods from flowing east to west within Canada. But breaking down internal trade barriers, primarily regulatory barriers, is tougher than people think. What are those barriers, and why are they so persistent?
There has been a lot of talk now and before, but especially now, on interprovincial barriers to trade. These aren’t like tariffs where if you buy something from Saskatchewan and you’re in Alberta, you have to pay some big tax. These are mostly regulations. And the thing about regulations is it’s kind of hard to tell sometimes which are really important regulations that keep us safe and which ones are designed for feather-bedding for some interest group.
When you dig in, what does it mean to have uniform standards across the country? The thing is that provinces are different. There’s a reason we have different regulations and different provinces. In British Columbia, we have these mountain highways where it really matters if you have snow tires. It really matters if your truck is too long and can’t snake through a mountain pass. In contrast, if you are from Saskatchewan or PEI carting a big load of potatoes, it’s a different set of regulations you need to worry about. Can you clean the truck so the potato worm doesn’t get in or out of a province? That’s a big deal In PEI, but it’s maybe less of a deal in other provinces.
One way to go forward on that is to have a mutual recognition system that if you’re licensed in one province, then other provinces will recognize that. So there’s kind of like a minimum standard that everyone has to meet. And then if a province wants to have special rules for mountain highways or potato bugs, you can do that. The challenge there is defining that minimum standard, which means 10 provincial governments, maybe three territorial governments, and the federal government all sitting around and figuring out what the minimum national standards need to be for tire size and snow chains.
What about external trade diversification? It’s easy to talk about more trade with Europe, South America, or China. It’s harder to do it. Why doesn’t Canada trade more with countries other than the US?
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that economists have something we call the gravity model of trade, where the geographic distance between countries is a really good predictor of who trades with whom. One aspect of it is transportation costs. Another aspect of it is culture, language, legal similarities, and things like that. Personal ties. It makes it easier to trade when you have kinds of business contacts that are easier to make — when there are cultural, linguistic, and personal ties.
Thinking tangibly, I mean, we are not building a pipeline to Italy for oil, right? We’re building it to Cushing, Oklahoma, where they trade all the oil. That’s a geography constraint. We can ship oil to the coast and put it on the ships, but that gets prohibitively expensive for providing oil to Italians versus wherever they might get it already, so that’s it. The trade costs are going to be a big reason for why our trade is the way it is.
If we want to diversify, I think it’s a good goal. We have an unreliable economic and political partner to the south of us. This is a big deal. This is a hugely important deal. We want to make sure that we decrease our reliance on them. I’m fully on board with that strategy, but we have to be a bit modest in what we think we can get out of that because, at the end of the day, our oil is almost surely going to be going to the US.
Are we so dependent on north-south trade that we just have to find a way to manage this relationship no matter what it might be?
I think that’s the core truth of this. We’re not putting up a big wall at the border and not trading with the US. That would be immiserating for us. What the president says I guess is true: They don’t literally need our oil, our cars, our software, or whatever we might want to trade with them; they can get along without it. But boy, they’d be paying a lot more for it from other sources. We can offer them cheaper stuff they can get elsewhere. At the end of the day, this is about managing what all of this looks like going forward. We have to be extraordinarily wary of signed agreements and giving up stuff for a signature. I’m very wary of that because that signature has shown to be worth zero. This is an amazing choice that the American government is making and giving up all of its international credibility. But even nations at war will trade with each other because there’s just a fundamental economic logic that when something is way cheaper brought in from abroad, that just is better for everyone to allow those trades to happen.
Would a Canada-first industrial strategy be a non-trade measure we could consider?
It definitely could be. You can think about industrial strategy as, say, subsidizing a pipeline. That’s industrial strategy. We’ve had a battery strategy over the past few years for EVs. I’m not quite sure where that sits now, but these are big bets that we could take. I’d be most keen on ones that involve public infrastructure for export. That could be actual tangible infrastructure. It doesn’t necessarily mean pipelines. It might mean improving our ports and things like that. But also intangible infrastructure like our trade missions abroad, like export encouragement for services and electronic services and software and apps and all of those good things that are way easier to trade across borders that don’t really matter as much for geography.
How much, if any, of the Canadian strategy should be waiting Trump out, hoping that Americans feel the pain – like with steel and aluminum tariffs, which are going to be expensive for US consumers — and say, “OK, enough, we need to change this, drop the tariffs”? Or how much of this is about just waiting for someone better the next time around?
You can think of 2016 as an accident. I don’t know that we can think of electing Mr. Trump twice as an accident. I think this is a permanent state of affairs. I think we have to think about it that way. But an important element of your question is: “What strategy should we have?” I think that we should be upfront and ask whether we should do dollar-for-dollar tariffs. For those who support that, we need to ask, what is your strategy of action? What do you expect that to bring us? I don’t think it will bring people what they think. We need to think of strategies that will put pressure on the White House right now. I don’t think that is decreasing Harley-Davidson sales by 1%.
I think there are other measures we should look at. It can be trade measures. There are things that we have that are very rare in the US, that will mess up their production. Aluminum is one of them, and they just self-owned on that. Those are things we should focus on.
We should also be very open to nontariff barriers. What I mean by that is rather than throwing a tariff on US goods, which again could be part of the mix, we could talk about intellectual property reforms. I’ve heard people talk about not allowing US coal to be exported through BC. There are a ton of nontariff measures, regulatory measures, and other things we could do. There could be diplomatic measures. We could expel diplomats. I’ve seen people talk about not allowing the US ambassador to be sworn in. We could shut off electricity to New England for 24 hours.
Maybe some of these would work, and maybe some would not. But being creative and finding things that cause pain to the US is the point, while minimizing pain to us.
An important element of strategy here is to understand we are not in a regular old tit-for-tat trade war. Too many people are thinking of it on that small playing field. This is a much broader thing. Certainly, Mr. Trump thinks about it as a much broader thing, and I’m mystified that so many Canadian pundits — the Canadians themselves, I think, get it — are still thinking, “Oh, what tariffs should we put on them to counter their tariffs?” Tariffs are just a tactic in a broader strategy from Mr. Trump. It should be the same for us.
Carney looks like he will win a chance to lose
Unless some strange things happen, the next prime minister of Canada is likely to be an ambitious, high-achieving Albertan who made a mark on the world stage after excelling at Harvard and Oxford.
We don’t know yet whether that Albertan will be Mark Carney or Chrystia Freeland. But whoever becomes the Liberal Party leader on March 9 is unlikely to ever live in the official residence, because Justin Trudeau will probably still be packing boxes by the time his successor faces a different Albertan in an election.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has an enormous lead in the national polls, which have not moved despite Trudeau announcing his long-pined-for resignation. The polls may move when the Liberals pick a new leader, but not enough to stop a Conservative landslide this spring.
It is impressive in a way that both Carney and Freeland — both extraordinarily accomplished people — have decided the race is worth the trouble because it looks like all the winner will get is a chance to lose. (House Leader Karina Gould is also running, but she is unlikely to find a way to be competitive in such a short race.)
A lot to give up
It is particularly striking that Carney — the former governor of the central banks in both Canada and England — is willing to give up a lucrative life in lush boardrooms for a difficult and uncertain political career. He has resigned as chair of both Brookfield Asset Management and Bloomberg LP and disentangled himself from a variety of other desirable gigs, giving up goodness knows how much money.
He must think he can win the leadership — and believe he has some chance of beating Poilievre — or he wouldn’t be doing all that.
Carney looks like he will win the first race. He kicked off his campaign by cracking jokes during a successful interview with Jon Stewart last week on “The Daily Show,” which drew approving reviews from Canadian Liberals who previously had found him staid, even for a banker.
But, without Stewart to loosen him up, he appeared wooden during his official launch in Edmonton, a sign of his inexperience as a politician.
Emotional and divisive
Freeland doesn’t have that problem. A former journalist who impressed Canadians with her toughness during trade negotiations with Donald Trump during his first term, she will be a formidable opponent. In her launch video, she presented herself as the candidate best suited to stand up to Trump, who is threatening to impose economy-killing tariffs on Canada.
But Freeland’s launch was interrupted by Gaza protesters and overshadowed by news that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly — a crucial organizer in Quebec — would support Carney. Former Minister Navdeep Bains — a crucial organizer in the rest of the country — is also said to be on Team Carney, as are a growing number of prominent ministers. On Sunday, François-Philippe Champagne, the influential industry minister, is expected to endorse Carney, adding a note of finality.
Canada’s Middle East policy has not emerged as a point of debate — there have not yet been any debates — but it appears to be a dividing line in the race ahead, judging from how supporters are sorting themselves. Joly has often been criticized by Israel’s supporters, and they were quick to see her Carney endorsement as a bad sign.
Freeland has spoken up for Israel in the past, while Carney has no public record on the issue but appears to be attracting supporters who are more critical.
They will likely both be challenged to take a position as the race continues, which may damage whoever wins. An emotional and divisive dispute over Middle East policy is exactly what the Liberal Party doesn’t need as it gets ready to face Poilievre, who is strongly pro-Israel — but it may be what the party gets.
An outsider? Really?
Whether that so-far sublimated division emerges into the open or not, Carney is likely to win. He has the advantage because of “the short timeline, the high buy-in, and just the sheer number of early caucus support he’s gotten,” says pollster Quito Maggi, of Mainstreet Research.
“In a long leadership, caucus matters very little. In a short leadership like this, where each caucus member is going to bring to the table a couple hundred supporters from their riding to be able to sign up for this, it matters a lot.”
And Freeland faces challenges. She will find it hard to distance herself from unpopular Trudeau policies since she was his deputy prime minister.
Carney was on the sidelines, giving him more of a credible claim to being, as he called himself on “The Daily Show,” an “outsider.” The Conservatives will ridicule that, pointing to his public support of carbon pricing, for example, but they might have to work up a sweat to make it stick. It is already stuck on Freeland.
“He’s got a lot to prove,” said a senior Liberal who prefers to remain anonymous. “Freeland has a lot to disprove, which means, I think that he has the easier go of it.”
And the manner in which Freeland left the Trudeau government — resigning on the day she was to deliver a fall economic update and throwing the government into chaos — may not sit well even with those Liberals who were relieved to see Trudeau pushed out.
There’s an old adage in politics: She who wields the knife never wears the crown.
It would be hard for her to win, but Carney — who is entering a demanding new profession at age 59 — might find a way to lose.
Whoever comes out on top will almost immediately face the fearsome Poilievre, giving them a good chance of beating the record set by Charles Tupper, who had the shortest tenure as Canadian prime minister when he served for just 68 days in 1896.
51st or Fight: Trudeau leaves, Trump Arrives
Justin Trudeau is leaving you, Donald Trump is coming for you.
The timing couldn’t be worse. The threat couldn’t be bigger. The solutions couldn’t be more elusive.
Canada and the US are headed for a serious and economically dangerous trade war in less than two weeks, and President-elect Donald Trump, seeing Canada in a vulnerable leadership moment, smells blood.
In politics, as in most things, there is no opponent more powerful than time and, after nine years in power, time crushed Justin Trudeau’s political career. The “Sunny Ways” majority government of 2015 for Trudeau gave way to the medieval darkness of his current minority government, beset by dire polls, recurring scandals, and painful internal betrayals. What happened?
In short, there were no new policy ideas to bring back the light. The list of victories that Trudeau mentioned in his resignation speech (some genuinely transformative, others still deeply divisive) — the Canada Child Benefit that lifted over 300,000 children out of poverty (child poverty rates in Canada are now going back up), the first G7 country to put a price on carbon, renegotiating NAFTA, leading the country through the pandemic, legalizing cannabis and medically assisted dying, negotiating a health accord with the provinces, bringing in universal daycare — all these were, in the end, not nearly enough. Politics is all about tomorrow, not yesterday, and the tomorrow promise of Trudeau, once his brand, was gone.
Since the pandemic, Trudeau has been, like incumbents around the world, on his back foot on the trinity of core issues galvanizing populist support: inflation, immigration, and housing prices. His policies to address these were reactive, well behind the instincts of the leader of the official opposition, Pierre Poilievre. It didn’t help that the fiscal guardrails Trudeau had set up were blown. The Liberals were more than CA$20 billion past their target ahead of the fall fiscal update, an update his finance minister was set to give on Dec. 16. Instead, she dropped a radioactive resignation letter that very morning, pointing to Trudeau’s fiscal strategies as “costly political gimmicks” — and laying bare the internal divisions within the Cabinet. He was out of supporters, out of ideas, and looked out of touch.
It finally ended on Monday, an icy Ottawa day with the kind of cold that you can almost grab with a gloved hand and snap over your knee. The prime minister stood alone in front of the cottage where he had done so many press conferences during the pandemic and where I recall sitting to interview a gray-bearded version of him on a similarly frigid winter day back in 2020. Now, he was notably different. Stripped of the pretense and dramatics that sometimes characterized his tenure, he presented a more authentic version of the man most Canadians had long ago lost sight of, telling them that he was resigning as leader and prime minister.
For a boy born on Christmas Day, the pathetic fallacies that marked Justin Trudeau’s life had one last small signal to send. Just before he left the shelter of the cottage to make his resignation announcement, a gust of wind suddenly blew his speech off the podium, papers scattering into the January air. It was over.
For his party, Trudeau’s departure could not come soon enough, and while Liberal Party leaders are still dithering on the rules for a leadership race, the math is cruel. Parliament is prorogued — suspended — until March 24, on Trudeau’s orders. There will be a confidence vote soon after, so expect a Canadian federal election to kick off immediately and run into May. In other words, Trudeau gave the next leader a short runway — more like a cliff. The next PM will barely have time to find the bathrooms and grab a cup of coffee before they will have to hit the hustings and try to climb out of the political hole that finds them 25 points behind the Conservatives.
For Canada, this could not come at a worse time. In less than two weeks, Trump will be sworn in as US president, and he has promised to slap Canada with 25% tariffs and use “economic force” to try to absorb the country as the 51st state.
As I wrote last year, Trump’s threat to absorb Canada as the 51st state has gone from a joke to a trial balloon — and it is quickly becoming a policy goal.
Trump the Isolationist has looped inside out and become Trump the Expansionist, with designs on Greenland, Canada, and Panama. His foreign policy for Central America is basically now the famous palindrome: a man, a plan, a canal, Panama.
Is he serious?
Yes.
Always take the president of the United States seriously, especially when he says he’s being serious. He may be using aggressive rhetoric as a negotiating tool to get better deals, but the threats are very real. Trump believes in tariffs like a priest believes in God.
When Trump threatens to beggar Canada with the economic force of 25% tariffs, it is the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS.
Canadian industry is bracing for a dramatic, painful economic shock. From. Its. Closest. Biggest. Trading. Partner.
All this lines up perfectly with the Top Risks of 2025 that our parent company, Eurasia Group, released this week, as you have read about. Risks such as Trumponomics — high tariffs on all allies and foes — mixed with the risk of The Rule of Don, a mercurial leader who has destroyed norms and wants the rule of the jungle over the rule law, is a lethal combination for a middle power country like Canada.
The rules-based international order is the architecture of the multilateral world, one that the US built in its own image after World War II and, until now, has been the backstop. This order has led to incredible prosperity for both the US and Canada, and billions of others. It is now disappearing faster than the fact-checkers at Meta.
As Trump throws economic bombs, Canada will have to muddle through the next three to five months without a leader who has a national mandate, leaving premiers like Ontario’s Doug Ford to lead the fight. And credit to him: Ford, so far, has done a superb job defending his province and speaking out.
Trump is coming for Canada and wants it to be the 51st state, in part or in whole — and if there was ever a time for someone to prove they have the stuff for leadership in a time of crisis, it is now. To twist an old expression, it is the 51st or fight.
Canadians better be up for a fight.
Trump wants something, but likely not a 51st state
It has been a long time since the United States got any bigger.
In the 19th century, the American governing class believed in Manifest Destiny — that the country should govern the whole continent, spreading democracy and capitalism — and the young republic acquired Alaska and much of Mexico. Recently, though, Americans have seemed happy with their territorial limits.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump signaled that this may be about to change. In a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, the soon-to-be president expressed the desire to acquire Greenland, reacquire the Panama Canal — by force, if necessary — and use “economic force” to acquire Canada.
Observers do not think he can seriously intend to absorb his northern neighbor, but it’s hard to be entirely confident.
Trump has been teasingly calling Justin Trudeau “governor” for weeks and cracking jokes about making Canada the 51st US state, but his tone on Tuesday was different. He sounded serious.
Trump referred to the Canada-US border as an “artificially drawn line” and complained about the cost of the relationship with the United States.
“We don’t need their cars,” he said. “You know, they make 20% of our cars. We don’t need that. I’d rather make them in Detroit. We don’t need their cars. We don’t need their lumber. We have massive fields of lumber. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their dairy products. We have more than they have.”
Trump said he would impose “very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada,” and complained about drugs and migrants crossing both borders.
Since Trump first threatened to hit both countries with tariffs in November, Canadians have shown signs of distress. Premiers, fearing the impact on exports to the United States, have urged Ottawa to cooperate on the border, and Trudeau flew down to Mar-a-Lago to kick-start talks. Canada rushed to present a border plan. But even as they sought to placate Trump, the president-elect increased the intensity of his rhetoric.
Snowball’s chance …
After Tuesday’s news conference, Canadian leaders responded by telling Trump that Canada is not interested in joining the United States — an idea that is just not that popular.
“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” Trudeau tweeted.
“Canada will never be the 51st state,” tweeted Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre. “Period.”
“Cut the crap, Donald,” tweeted the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh. “No Canadian wants to join you.
Canadian commentators also expressed that they were shocked and appalled by Trump’s suggestion.
South of the border, though, Trump’s supporters were cheering him on. Matt Walsh, Jack Posobiec, and Jesse Waters all want to conquer Canada.
It is hard to know how seriously to take any of this.
How serious is he?
Trump’s complaints about Canada seem manufactured. Little fentanyl comes across the northern border. The $100 billion trade deficit that Trump gripes about is largely the result of oil and gas exports, which help keep US gas prices low at the pumps. If the Americans don’t want it, Canada could find other markets. Imposing tariffs would wreck the Canadian economy, but it would also damage American interests, especially if Canada imposed retaliatory tariffs on, for example, Florida orange juice.
But some well-connected people are rattled by Trump’s talk. Could he plan to wreak havoc with the Canadian economy? Will he try to divide and conquer by offering oil-rich Alberta the chance to join its biggest market, creating a Donbas on the 49th parallel? Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee joked that the United States might like to take Alberta and leave the rest.
But it doesn’t seem like the MAGA movement would want Canada. Its left-leaning voters would make it hard for any future Republican to win the presidency. English Canadians have been struggling to accommodate prickly French Canadians since the country was founded.
What does MAGA want? So this doesn’t look like a practical proposal, and in the same news conference, Trump sounded unhinged, opining that windmills are driving whales crazy, for example.
The best-informed observers doubt that he is serious about annexing Canada.
“I think he is rattling cages so that he can expand the boundary of acceptable outcomes,” says Eurasia Group Vice Chairman Gerald Butts, who, as a senior adviser to Trudeau, negotiated with Trump. “Something like, sorry we screwed up your auto industry and dairy market, but at least you still have a country.”
“Trump’s threats against Canada seem less than serious as of now, though his comments about Panama and Greenland should not be dismissed,” says Clayton Allen, Eurasia Group’s US director. “Those are a clear effort to expand the range of potential actions and have in-built strategic benefits which Trump or those in his orbit view seriously.”
“He’s negotiating like a real estate developer negotiates,” says Jamie Tronnes, executive director of the Center for North American Prosperity and Security. “He sees a bunch of land and thinks it would be really cool to have his name on it, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Trump is softening his targets up for negotiations to come,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group. “He’s obviously serious about getting concessions on trade issues and the border, and he’s very happy to continue poking where he finds weakness.”
He has found it in Ottawa. Trudeau, who announced his resignation on Monday, could not be weaker. For the next few months, most of his best people will be occupied by the race to succeed him, and then whomever they choose will likely lose an election to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
Until then, Trudeau is an unpopular lame duck. The last time Trump was president, Trudeau managed to drive a hard bargain as the two countries negotiated the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement.
This time, Trump should have an easier time getting whatever it is he wants, and Canadians had better hope that does not include their sovereignty.
Meta scraps fact-checking program: What next?
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
What do you make of Meta ending its fact-checking program?
Well, it's a direct response to Trump's victory and a little late. They probably could have done it a few weeks ago, but they wanted to line up their new board members with people that are more aligned with Trump and also their new head of public policy. Now that Nick Clegg, who was much more oriented to Harris, is gone. So, they're like everybody else, heading to Mar-a-Lago and wanting to get on board with the new administration. That is what's happening. And of course, it means implications for those concerned about safety features on social media are going to grow. This is a complete shift of the pendulum in the other direction.
What is the fallout from Justin Trudeau's resignation?
It's not surprising. He's been there for 10 years. His popularity had really fallen off a cliff. And that was even before Chrystia Freeland, his deputy prime minister, shot him in the face a few weeks ago. So, it was clear that he was going to go. The most important implication is that after elections coming up, you're likely to have a conservative government run by Pierre Poilievre, which will be much more aligned with Trump. I don't consider Poilievre's policies to be very America First-ish for Canada. He's not quite that kind of a politician. But he will be, I think, very supported by Trump, Elon Musk and right-wing populists in the United States.
So, in that regard, as you think about re-upping the US-Mexico-Canada relationship, agreement-trade relationship, you talk about tariffs and all the rest, I suspect that relationship will be more normalized and more stable for the Canadians going forward.
As Trump is about to kick off his second term, who are his friends around the world?
A lot more than he had last time around. I mean, you could focus on Argentina and President Milei. In the recent G20 Summit, Trump wasn't there yet, but Milei was. And I mean his talking points were as if Trump was in the room. Of course, Giorgia Meloni, who just made her trip to Mar-a-Lago, she's very strongly pro-EU. But she's also very aligned personally with Trump. And that is going to be a strong relationship for them.
Germans are going to have their election shortly. Friedrich Merz is likely to win. And I suspect he's going to be much closer to Trump, certainly than outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been. The Gulf States, Israel, that was Trump's first trip as president back in 2017, will be his early trip. I am very sure in this presidency, very strong relations. Don't sleep on Narendra Modi in India either. That's it for me. I'll talk to you all real soon.