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Totality fails to eclipse politics
The moon blotted out the sun across much of North America on Monday, but it did not put politics entirely out of mind.
Conservatives on both sides of the border used the occasion to compare their champion to the moon, blotting out the incumbent sun, while incumbents merely marveled at the moment.
In the United States, Donald Trump released an odd ad on his Truth Social network in which his face blotted out the sun. In Canada, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre just posted a photo of the moment, but one of his MPs posted an image showing a smiling Poilievre eclipsing Trudeau.
Meanwhile, Fox News issued a warning that the eclipse might make it easier for migrants to cross into the United States.
Justin Trudeau posted a video of himself taking in the sight from the roof of his office while Joe Biden posted a safety warning, a subtle reminder, perhaps, of the time, in 2017, when Trump gazed directly into an eclipse, which is said to be unwise.Former President Donald Trump attends the 2024 Senior Club Championship award ceremony at his Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, March 24, 2024.
Preparing for Trump 2.0
Alongside dealing with inflation, war, AI and hyper-polarizing politics — a full cart of problems already — every US ally and opponent are also busily drawing up their Preparing For Trump (PFT) playbook. What happens if Trump 2.0 cancels trade deals? What if he pulls out of NATO? Will he use nuclear bombs? Will US isolationism cede global influence to China and Russia? Could reliable, prosperous, long-standing alliances and treaties… collapse?
This week, a colleague and I had an interesting meeting with a senior Canadian minister and PFT was the main topic. Of all countries, Canada has one of the most successful past playbooks, based on the successful renegotiation of the NAFTA deal in Donald Trump’s first term. Remember that gilded time, in 2017, when Justin Trudeau had a hot political minute playing the role of “Trump Whisperer”? His Team Canada, backed by another Trump Whisperer — former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who sadly just passed away — poured their maple syrup charms up and down the Beltway and it worked. But here’s the question: Is that playbook still relevant?
The short answer? No.
First off, the Trudeau and Trump bromance ended in ashes. By 2018, at the G7 summit in Canada, Trump was calling Trudeau “very dishonest and weak.” A year later, Trump said his northern neighbor was “two faced,” so let’s just say there were no invitations to go golfing.
Trump carries a grudge the way Thor wields a hammer — so expect carnage if Trudeau is still in power when the new trade deal is renegotiated in 2026.
That leaves the other key PFT route: The Logic of Mutually Beneficial Trade. The strategy, as the minister explained to me, is to play the economic hits, just like last time.
- Canada is the US’s largest trading partner: US exports to Canada surpassed $307 Billion in 2021, while imports from Canada were $357.2 billion.
- The US imports more oil from Canada than anywhere else.
- The largest market for key swing states like Michigan? Canada.
- Critical minerals and the AI future: Canada can weaken China’s dominance of the critical mineral supply chain with reliable sources of lithium, nickel, graphite and rare earth minerals.
And on it goes. In other words, these are powerful, rational arguments in favor of open trade and against protectionism and Buy America that have the benefit of truth. On a state level these arguments are still effective, and might still be convincing to members of Congress. But as my colleague pointed out to the minister — what if rational arguments like these don’t work for the Trump administration?
The first Trump administration was, like all presidencies, a mixture of political ideology and political policy, with the president surrounded by advisors who acted as guardrails to his impulsive aggressions. They kept the alliances intact. That’s no longer the case. Those internal guards have been purged in favor of hardened partisans running a permanent war room campaign that has a strong animating force: Revenge. Just this past week Trump’s own Truth Social media channel raised billions of dollars, feeding a media ecosystem that insulates him and his team from any uncomfortable intrusions of facts that might upend his self-reinforcing political narrative. Political appetites will devour logical policymaking. So, what is the strategy in that scenario?
In 2024, PFT means trying to find a way to give Trump something that he can publicly claim as a “win,” without looking weak to your own voters.
And what is that?
Jobs.
But trying to simultaneously create jobs in America without selling out your own industries is a political magic trick most foreign leaders have yet to master, and one they may not want to. That is the challenge to the Team Canada folks who are crafting the PFT and to every country doing the same thing.
The only bright side? They had practice over the last three years. President Joe Biden has proven equally protectionist on many industries and the same arguments apply to him, only it’s much more behind closed doors, which makes the negotiations easier.
Maybe the PFT industry is why Trump supporters say he’s so effective. Before he’s even in power, he already has the upper hand. His threat of over-the-top retaliations has effectively put the US in a stronger negotiating position on trade, security and diplomacy — and he’s not yet in office. His plausible threat to collapse the status quo is his most effective negotiating tool. It may make for less trustworthy alliances, weaker international treaties and a more dangerous, less prosperous world, but it fulfills the number one Trump promise to his supporters: America First.
The casket of late former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is carried by pallbearers following his state funeral at the Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal, Quebec, Canada March 23, 2024.
Trade champion laid to rest
The Canada-US trade relationship lost its greatest champion when former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was laid to rest in Montreal on Saturday.
Mulroney was the architect of the original Canada-US free trade deal, which he and President Ronald Reagan signed in 1988. He negotiated the NAFTA agreement, which extended the arrangement to Mexico, although it was signed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and President Bill Clinton in 1994. Then, after the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, who threatened to tear up the deal, Mulroney played a key behind-the-scenes role in helping keep the negotiations between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Trump’s team from going off the rails.
In an interview last year for a forthcoming book, Mulroney spoke about the importance of the efforts he and Trudeau made to save the trade relationship: “Had it collapsed, the economic backbone of Canada would have collapsed, because today, NAFTA is a grouping of three countries, and 500 million people, which represents seven percent of the world's population, and it generates 28 percent of the entire wealth of the world every single year, and the millions of jobs that goes with it.”
The relationship will be in jeopardy again if Trump wins in November. Trump has promised to impose a 10% tariff on all imports to the US.
To prepare for that eventuality, dozens of Canadian diplomats descended on Washington this week to meet with American lawmakers. Nobody knows what a re-elected Trump would do about trade with Canada, and he has other things on his mind.
Valeria Murguia, 21, a university student, poses for a photograph in a field near her home in McFarland, California, U.S., December 17, 2020.
The kids aren't alright
Last week, when the World Happiness Report landed in the inbox of La Presse reporter Vincent Brousseau-Pouliot, he contacted Professor John F. Helliwell, of the University of British Columbia, to ask him about the happiness of Quebecers. Professor Helliwell, who has helped produce the annual report since 2012, typically doesn’t crunch numbers at the subnational level — but he was intrigued by Brousseau-Pouliot’s question and had a look. He discovered that Quebecers are very happy. Quebec would be sixth happiest country in the world — well ahead of Canada and the US.
The discovery gave Brousseau-Pouliot a scoop, and got Professor Helliwell thinking: What makes Quebec different? Is it just joie de vivre?
Miserable youth. The big news in the report this year is not who is at the top — the cheerful Finns and their Nordic neighbors are still the happiest countries in the world — but a dramatic increase of misery among the young in English-speaking Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand.
In most of the world, as long as Professor Helliwell and his colleagues have been studying this, young people are happier than their parents and grandparents. In recent years, though, there has been a dramatic shift to misery among the young in the anglosphere, which is driving down the overall score. The US, which was the eleventh happiest country in 2012, is now twenty-third. Canada, which was fifth in 2012, is now fifteenth.
Older people in both countries are upbeat. For over 60s, Canada ranks eighth and the US tenth. But for under 30s, Canada ranks 58th and the US 62nd. This misery among the young is unprecedented, and has huge political implications — unhappy people are typically less likely to vote for incumbents.
That’s a serious challenge for both President Joe Biden, who faces an election in November, and for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is expected to seek re-election next year. If they lose the youth vote, they’re both toast. Almost two thirds of voters 18-24 voted for Biden last time, while Trudeau got about a third of the youth vote. In both countries, that was more votes than the margin of victory.
Consider the culture. What is making young North Americans so glum? Commentators have pointed to the pandemic, climate change and the rising cost of living. But those factors are as much a part of the lives of young Quebecers as those in the anglosphere. The Quebec exception makes Professor Helliwell wonder if something else is at work here.
“This isn't happening all over the world,” he says. “And it's chiefly in Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand, so we began to think it had to be something to do with the information feeds, or the life circumstances of those people relative to their peers in the rest of the world.”
Helliwell wonders if an increased perception of social conflict — the result of rising discord in social media platforms and the fragmentation of media sources — is making young people unhappy. As social media has reduced the personal interactions of young people, they may perceive the world as more hostile and full of conflict than it is.
“In the absence of personal contacts, it’s what you read, what you hear. And it's possible that social media are amplifying that. I don't have any very direct evidence of that, but it certainly makes sense,” he says.
A broken promise of online prosperity. Pollster Frank Graves, of EKOS Research Associates Inc., is alarmed by the sharp rise in misery among young Canadians, particularly by how gloomy they are about their long-term prospects. A root is the failure of the economic promise of the Internet, which was supposed to offer young people a ticket to a golden future.
“It didn't happen,” he says. “It was a hoax. So not only is it the toxicity of algorithm-driven information and all this other bullshit, it's a whole economic model that didn't work.”
Graves thinks that in addition to economic explanations, it’s necessary to consider research that shows the mental health issues caused by young people spending so much time on social media via their phones, as Jonathan Haidt argues.
Whatever the cause, the youth malaise is giving headaches to the strategists behind Biden and Trudeau’s campaigns. Does that mean that Biden and Trudeau are finished? The Canadian polling seems bad for Trudeau but the American polling is inconclusive and contradictory.
Graves, who has been polling elections for decades, thinks we will have to wait and see. The polling, at least in the US, looks murky. And he is not sure that despondency will motivate people to get rid of the incumbents.
“I don't think it makes you vote to get rid of the incumbent. I think it makes you not want to vote,” he says.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau walk as they meet in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada March 24, 2023.
Biden and Trudeau: Stay or go?
If there were a political soundtrack this week for President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it would likely be “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” from The Clash’s 1982 Combat Rock album. Both have been sloshing through terrible poll numbers and facing calls – from within their own houses – to step down. Should they? Are they both now liabilities to their parties?
Polls get pundits and populists panting, so let’s start today with this: Calm the heck down.
They are not going anywhere.
For now.
Calm isn’t the order of the day, of course, so if there is a sense of collective hyperventilation, it's understandable. Take last night’s Republican debate in Miami, where the full-blown chaos machine, the isolationist candidate that is Vivek Ramaswamy opened by calling the party he wants to lead “losers” – a new approach for political strategists to consider. He went on to parrot Putin propaganda on Ukraine by calling President Volodymyr Zelensky a Nazi – um, maybe slow the roll, Mr. Fast Talking Tech bro, Zelensky is Jewish – pitched building a wall across the Canadian border (that would be 5,500-plus miles of a big, beautiful, useless wall), and then, after that baffling pitch, closed by claiming that Joe Biden is actually not the US president (Really?) and that the Democrats must come forward with their true conspiracy candidate: Gavin Newsom or Michelle Obama.
So yeah, maybe being level-headed isn’t the thing these days, but still …
Some perspective. Biden has a year of runway before he faces off against his likely opponent, former President (and full-time defendant) Donald Trump. No one on the stage last night, from Ron DeSantis to Nikki Haley, has a realistic shot of taking him down, but if he is convicted in one of his multiple trials, his already real vulnerabilities are increased.
Meanwhile, Trudeau, if his shaky deal with the NDP holds up, can wait until 2025. You count political years like dog years, and with so many moving parts – the economy, inflation, wars, labor strife, legal trials, political opponents, gaffes, health – snorting uncut poll numbers is not advisable.
In the last week alone, Biden went from albatross to eagle. After the apparently fatal New York Times/Siena College poll predicted he would lose five swing states, Biden saw his party retain the governorship in the hot red state of Kentucky, take over Virginia’s legislature, and celebrate Ohio voters overwhelmingly backing a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right of abortion.
Neither the poll nor the wins are decisive signs of much, except that the abortion issue is deeply hurting Republicans. As Ian Bremmer wrote here yesterday, Biden has a solid economic story to run on – unemployment is down, real wages are up, the economy is growing, Trump is unpopular, and third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may hurt the Republicans as much as the Democrats.
Still, Biden has genuine problems that should not be ignored.
I asked my colleague Jon Lieber, managing director of Eurasia Group in Washington, DC, to outline Biden’s challenges, and he sent me this list:
- Inflation eating away at wages.
- He’s old.
- A “world on fire” narrative that started with Afghanistan -> Ukraine-> Middle East, that he gets the blame for.
- He’s old.
- Splintering in his coalition with young people generally unhappy.
- Large majorities of Americans see the country as on the “wrong track,” and the incumbent gets the blame.
So, Biden has real troubles ahead, Tuesday aside.
Trudeau is also facing an age thing – only, for him, it’s more about timing and the wheel of change. Every day, there’s another article about people feeling Trudeau’d out, as Susan Delacourt wrote about in the Toronto Star. In the Globe and Mail yesterday, Andrew Coyne compared Trudeau’s plight to Biden’s. A recent Leger poll has the Liberals getting creamed by the Conservatives, and recently, longtime Liberal Senator Percy Downe openly suggested it was time for Trudeau to step aside.
In Canada, it’s called taking a walk in the snow, named after Pierre Trudeau, who announced in his fourth term that he had taken a long walk in the snow and decided it was time to step down. Some Liberals are busy shopping for winter boots to gift to Justin Trudeau as a way of encouraging him to follow in his dad’s footsteps and get some fresh air this Christmas. Don’t hold your breath.
The Liberals are in desperate shape – maybe irrecoverable shape – but Trudeau does not see anyone in his party who can take on the opposition better than he can. (No leader thinks anything else, of course!) Trudeau is a superb campaigner, and he loves to be underestimated, as he has been for three elections. He hopes that interest rates fall, inflation is contained, house prices ease, and the economy turns in his favor over the next year. Hope is not a strategy, though, and he needs to regain focus, put some policies on the table that actually deliver these economic results, or he will tank his party. And as with Biden, it is getting late, and the wheel of change is picking up speed.
The bigger question remains, can the center hold? Is there a place for a left/right-centrist government, or is the pull of the populist far right or the populist far left inevitable?
That’s not just a US-Canada question, but a global question facing all democracies. Both Biden and Trudeau campaigned as progressive centrists, but both have crab walked left (on certain economic issues like climate) and sometimes back to the right (on foreign policy issues like the Middle East) to stay in power. They need to pitch a practical center as a viable option in a crisis-filled world being stretched to extremes.
So, should they stay or should they go? The fog of politics is similar to the fog of war. The important decisions are all too often shrouded in the same mists of uncertainty that Carl von Clausewitz, in his famous 1832 book, “On War,” described on the battlefields – only in politics those mists are made up of polls, pundits, partisans, and spinners on social media spewing disinformation. But there is one factor not to be ignored: ambition.
In politics, power is rarely voluntarily given up; it’s usually yanked from someone’s clinging hand. That may be the most important factor right now. Despite the potential risk to their parties, despite the terrible polls, both Biden and Trudeau will likely try to stay on and lead their parties in the next elections.
So, let’s all calm down. For now.
– Evan Solomon, Publisher
Trudeau and a dimming spotlight
Is Trudeau’s spotlight fading to black?
The New Democratic Party, the socialist third party in Canada’s Parliament, gave Justin Trudeau an ultimatum at the weekend that could push him to the exit.
At a convention in Hamilton, Ontario, on Saturday, NDP members unanimously passed a resolution calling for the party to withdraw its support for Trudeau’s government unless he brings in a national socialized pharmacare system.
Since 2022, Trudeau has relied on the NDP to maintain his parliamentary majority, so he must now either spend billions providing free prescription drugs to every Canadian or risk an election he would almost certainly lose.
The opposition Conservatives have been leading in opinion polls since August, and it is getting harder to imagine that Trudeau will make a comeback. This week is the eighth anniversary of the 2015 election that brought him to power. If he leads his party into the next election, it will be his fourth. No Canadian prime minister has won four in a row since Wilfrid Laurier in 1908. Trudeau increasingly looks like he is living on borrowed time.
Inflation – bad for incumbents
The opinion polls look grim. All the pollsters show the Conservatives with a hardening lead in the 10-point range, which shows that many voters have decided that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is an acceptable alternative.
The pugnacious Poilievre solidified his position in public opinion with a successful convention in September and is now seen as a preferred prime minister by 33% of Canadians, 10 points ahead of Trudeau. He keeps gathering momentum with deft social media performances. The polls show his party would win a majority if an election were held today.
Philippe J. Fournier, editor-in-chief of poll aggregator 338Canada.com, says the last time a Canadian government was this unpopular was likely in the 1990s when Brian Mulroney was prime minister. “At the federal level, I can't recall any precedent for a government that has two years to go that is so down in the polls.”
As in the United States, inflation is top of mind for voters. Numbers released Tuesday show Canadian inflation slowed to 3.8% in September, but prices are still too high for many. Inflation is mostly the result of global supply chain issues that started during the pandemic, but Poilievre has effectively blamed it on the free-spending ways of the Trudeau government. If Trudeau goes along with the NDP’s pharmacare ask, Poilievre will portray it as yet another costly government program.
Trudeau can’t tack to the right
Since making a deal with the NDP, Trudeau has enjoyed the comfort of knowing that his government won’t fall on a snap vote in the House, but it has constrained him from advancing more centrist economic policies that might appeal to voters who have voted Liberal but are now planning on giving the Conservatives a try.
There is no threat of an imminent election — the Liberals can drag their feet on pharmacare, and the NDP does not look to be in a hurry to end an arrangement that has given them a historically unusual level of influence over the federal government — but Trudeau is in a jam.
“On the one hand, they're talking about fiscal responsibility and the need to control spending,” says Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's Global Macro-Geopolitics practice. “But on the other hand, they depend on fairly expensive promises to the NDP to implement new social policy. And at some point, those two things are incompatible. They are a little bit damned if you do, damned if you don't.”
Since many Liberal MPs are staring at the near-certain prospect of defeat, it’s possible that more of them will start to oppose unpopular Liberal policies, giving Trudeau’s government fresh headaches. They must be wondering if they would be better off under a different leader.
Alternatives to Trudeau
Several of his ministers are interested in the job, but none have much of a national profile, and it’s hard to know how they would do in the job.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland — the most important minister in his government — won admiration for her forthright and energetic advocacy for Canada during trade negotiations with Donald Trump, but she has not demonstrated an ability to rally support for her economic policies, and it is not clear she would want the top job.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is telegenic and enjoys a high profile, especially in Québec, where she is an important political organizer, but she struggled as heritage minister, and critics have portrayed her as a lightweight. Also, she is a Québecer, and by tradition, the Liberal party alternates leaders. It’s not a Québecer’s turn.
The popular and unbelievably energetic industry minister — François-Philippe Champagne — is another Québecer.
Treasury Board President Anita Anand, meanwhile, won praise for her work procuring vaccines during the pandemic and dealing with a sexual harassment crisis in the defense department, but she has not demonstrated the ability to connect with voters.
Some Liberals are longingly pinning their hopes on Mark Carney, former governor of both the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, but he has never held elected office, and the Conservatives say they would be delighted since he is just the kind of elitist that populist Poilievre would like to run against.
The good news for Trudeau is that there is no obvious successor waiting in the wings. The bad news for the Liberals? They can’t be sure that any of the alternatives would be any better.
Justin Trudeau
Trudeau vs. Big Tech, round three
The stated aim of the process, which applies to services with more than $10 million in annual revenue in Canada, is to ensure that streamers “make meaningful contributions to Canadian and Indigenous content.” This may mean imposing obligations on them similar to those that traditional broadcasters meet as a part of the cost of doing business in Canada.
But registration is just the first step, and it is not clear what the final regulations will require, leading critics of the Trudeau government to worry that Big Brother will soon be deciding what content Canadians can consume online. Elon Musk and Glenn Greenwald said on X that it was part of an effort to crush free speech in Canada, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre denounced it as “power-hungry woke bureaucracy.”
Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge says that’s all nonsense, portraying it as an updated version of Canadian content rules, which have long been used in Canada to nurture a domestic cultural industry. While likely true, critics are concerned that the process could eventually open up podcast distributors, for example, to content controls. Until the regulator takes the next steps, months from now, it will likely be hard to rule out those concerns.
The Trudeau government is engaged with struggles with the tech titans on several fronts as it attempts to impose European-style regulatory order on unregulated cyberspace while critics, both domestic and foreign, offer fierce resistance.
Cultural policy is traditionally treated as a carve-out in the Canada-US trade relationship, so the Biden government is unlikely to pressure Canada over this. Still, it is one more irritant between the Trudeau government and rich and powerful Amercian tech companies. Members of Congress, meanwhile, recently warned Canada that it will face consequences if it proceeds with plans to impose a 3% digital services tax on the Canadian revenue of tech giants. Canada has not backed down and plans to levy the tax beginning Jan. 1, 2024.
A sign outside the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara temple is seen after the killing on its grounds in June 2023 of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.
Canada accuses India of assassination
In a bombshell accusation on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told lawmakers that India was responsible for the murder of a Sikh community leader in British Columbia in June.
Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down in his car near a Sikh temple, was a Canadian citizen.
The accusation is a bombshell. “This is like if the Saudis had killed [Jamal] Khashoggi in New York,” one former adviser to Trudeau’s government told us.
Sikhs are a religious minority that make up less than 2% of the Indian population. A militant wing of the community has long agitated for the creation of a Sikh state called Khalistan. In 1984 Sikh bodyguards assassinated India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Nijjar, a supporter of the Khalistan movement, was accused by New Delhi of involvement in terrorist acts in India.
Canada is home to the largest Sikh community outside of India. Barely a week ago, Narendra Modi scolded Trudeau about anti-India protests by Canadian Sikhs. The Canadian prime minister clapped back that his government respects “freedom of expression” in a veiled rebuke of Modi’s own human rights record. Trudeau has also included India in a broader investigation of foreign meddling in Canada’s elections.
The revelation about the Nijjar killing comes at a time of rapidly worsening relations between Canada and India. Trudeau had reportedly raised the issue with Modi at last week’s G20 summit. Whatever answer he got in private was evidently unsatisfactory, and he decided to go public.
All of this puts the US in a tough spot: Washington has been cultivating India as a much-needed partner against China. But New Delhi has now allegedly murdered a Canadian citizen in Canada, one of the US’s closest allies. It’s a staggering violation of international law and norms, especially between two democracies. The Biden ardministration now has some tough choices to make.