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Columbia River Gorge
Hard Numbers: A river runs through US-Canada talks, Indian hackers hit CAF, Swedes supercharge Quebec investment, Unifor sets sights on GM, Canada emits mixed picture on climate progress
40: The US and Canada are in an eddy of difficult negotiations about water use from the shared Columbia River, whose dams provide half of British Columbia’s electricity and 40% of all US hydropower. Time is running out — the 1964 treaty that governs the two countries’ use of the river expires next September.
2: Canada’s bad blood with India is now spilling into the cyber realm. The website of the Canadian Armed Forces was knocked offline for two hours on Wednesday in an operation carried out by a pro-Indian hacking group called Indian Cyber Force. The group had threatened to attack Canada just days after PM Justin Trudeau accused New Delhi of involvement in the murder of a Sikh separatist leader in British Columbia.
7 billion: Sweden’s Northvolt, a major battery supplier to Volkswagen and BMW, has chosen a site in Quebec for a new $7 billion factory that will manufacture EV batteries. The company had been scouting locations on both sides of the US-Canada border. The deal will be the largest-ever private investment in Quebec and is the latest in a slew of EV battery production deals reached with US and Asian manufacturers.
3: After reaching a last-minute strike-averting deal with Ford, Canada’s Unifor, a trade union, is now targeting the Motor City giant’s crosstown rivals at GM. Unifor wants a 3-year contract based on the one they inked with Ford, which increased worker’s wages and pensions, while also providing more support for labor during transitions to EV production. Across the border, the UAW’s unprecedented strike against all three major US automakers continues.
2.1: Canada’s emissions rose 2.1% in 2022 compared to the year before, according to data released on Thursday. While that seems like a red flag for the country’s aim of cutting 2005 emissions in half by the end of this decade, the larger picture is greener. Emissions are down more than 6% since 2005, driven largely by the power sector, where the shuttering of coal plants has halved emissions. Still, oil and gas sector emissions are up more than 20% since then, driven largely by the boom in oil sands production over the past two decades.A US roadtrip.
Vacation warnings & 1776 time travel
The long weekend is upon us, and you’re probably traveling to see family or friends in that last escape from work before summer fades away like a political promise to balance the budget. It never lasts. But plans for some Canadians got complicated this week after Trudeau’s government issued a travel warning to the LGBT community to be careful visiting US states that have enacted restrictive new laws and policies.
This isn’t Afghanistan or Russia, where you might normally expect these warnings, but this is the USA. Is this just another log on the “woke,” virtue-signaling bonfire of the sanities that is torching the political landscape?
Well, the data is compelling. The ACLU is currently tracking more than 495 anti-LGBTQ bills in different US states that restrict accommodation in washrooms, educational curriculums, and healthcare access, and weaken non-discrimination laws. In other words, it’s a real thing, but does it make a US visit dangerous?
Back in May, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on the rise of violence against the LGBTQ community, saying “These issues include actions linked to drag-themed events, gender-affirming care, and LGBTQIA+ curricula in schools." Countries like Canada, which have already warned about things like mass shootings, are clearly taking notice of this as well.
It's stylish to dismiss all this as merely a “culture war,” as if the Jello-ey bloviations of pundits trying to build a social media profile are just low-rent cultural entertainment for the politically craven. But the emphasis is shifting from the “culture” part toward the “war” part, where open attacks on the human rights of citizens are cast in the flag-waving, revolutionary rhetoric of battle.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the sudden rise of the tech-bro Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy casts his entire campaign as a “1776 moment” of revolution against the Woke Straw Man. (I am so tempted to write “Straw Person” just to see the social media brushfire, but we have had enough summer fires, haven’t we?) Ramaswamy told the House Anti-Woke Caucus that to defeat the woke agenda there needs to be “a new kind of American Revolution in our country, reviving the ideals of 1776.” Fellow candidate Ron DeSantis is on the same train, and his war with Disney — yes, taking on Mickey Mouse is frontline political work — was meant to affirm his anti-woke bona fides.
1776 was a revolutionary and foundational moment, but it’s not some Paradise Lost that needs to be reclaimed. It was merely the starter pistol for a historic period of transformative change. After all, it took hundreds of years, a bloody civil war, constitutional amendments, and countless political movements to end slavery and extend full rights — including the vote — to women and multiple minority groups. Not a lot of folks would want to live in 1776 America, where the idealism about freedom (written by a whole bunch of dudes who owned slaves) and the reality of it only had a passing relationship. The whole point of the 1776 Big Bang was to accelerate more freedoms for individuals, not less. That makes it hard to jibe with the campaign rhetoric of restrictions today.
It is an issue boiling up in Canada as well. In New Brunswick, Premier Blaine Higgs is embroiled in a battle over gender self-identification in schools and the balance between parental and kids rights, a topic picked up nationally by Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who believes these are parenting issues, not government ones. Is this why the Canadian government suddenly made the travel warning announcement? Trudeau is fading in current polls while Poilievre is surging, and this is a convenient wedge.
Or is this another part of the same culture war, only this time trying to animate the left, not the right? “It seems like too much of a coincidence for the Canadian government suddenly to make this announcement and there be no connection to domestic politics,” Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, told me.
Ok, it’s the long weekend, and you might be annoyed that it’s so political. Where to go to spend your tourism dollars, who to visit, what’s the risk … it’s enough to wreck a good vacation. But remember, this weekend started as a political battleground. Labor Day in the US became a national holiday in 1894 after workers in places like Chicago (in the famous Haymarket riot of 1886) fought to get fair wages, better working conditions, and an eight-hour workday. It worked.
It’s worth noting that your weekend of rest came 118 years after 1776. Ready to give that back too? Maybe this long weekend is actually the best time to get political.
This column by GZERO Publisher Evan Solomon was featured in GZERO North on Aug. 31, 2023. Subscribe today.
Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and former President Donald Trump
Why Trump 2.0 could be bad news for Canada
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Justin Trudeau launched a charm offensive carefully calibrated to try to keep the crucial trade relationship on track. There were gifts, phone calls, and visits, and it worked, to a point.
The Trudeau team managed to develop a friendly relationship with Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, opening a crucial back channel.
By 2018, though, as Trump and Trudeau tussled over a new trade arrangement, tempers frayed. After the leaders of the rest of the free world ganged up on Trump at a G7 meeting in Quebec – he didn't want to sign the communique the rest favored, which left him angry and isolated – the US president lashed out at Trudeau on Twitter from Air Force One. According to a memoir by John Bolton, then Trump’s national security adviser, when Trudeau said that American “tariffs threaten to harm industry and workers on both sides of our border,” Trump’s blood boiled.
Trump, Bolton wrote, directed his aide Larry Kudlow to attack Trudeau on the Sunday shows: “Just go after Trudeau. Don’t knock the others. Trudeau’s a ‘behind your back’ guy.” Peter Navarro went further on Fox News Sunday, saying there is a “special place in hell” for Trudeau.
The blow-up in Quebec was a low point in the Canada-US relationship, which normally consists of politicians exchanging friendly pieties while officials and businesspeople on both sides of the border aim to maximize trade and minimize tension. That was true when the leaders were politically like-minded — the Trudeau-Barack Obama bromance — and during periods where the leaders met across an ideological divide, as when Jean Chrétien and George W. Bush led their countries.
Finding leverage in USMCA review
If Trump is the nominee in November, and the polls say he will be, and if he defeats Joe Biden, which polls say he might, we can expect craziness, says Bruce Heyman, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Canada.
“That craziness is not good,” he said. “Not good for the world order and not good for the Canada-US relationship.”
Trump mobilized a coalition of blue-collar workers against NAFTA – the standing trade agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico – as the reason for the economic pain many working class voters experienced as manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico and overseas. Once in the White House, Trump forced Canada and Mexico to negotiate the USMCA, a deal similar to NAFTA except with some added bonuses for US dairy farmers.
The USMCA comes up for review next year, and while Trump hasn’t indicated that he plans to renegotiate it, Heyman thinks a re-elected Trump might decide to let it lapse.
“Donald Trump doesn't have a large appetite for Canada-US relations. If we revert back to isolationism, and autocracy, and a King-of-the-Hill kind of attitude, then alliances get thrown under the bus.”
Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the United States, who worked as a Republican economic policy advisor, agrees that we should expect conflict from Trump 2.0. “His modus operandi is to use whatever leverage he has to get what he wants. We don’t know exactly what he wants yet, because he hasn’t articulated a vision for North American trade, but we know there’s these pre-existing irritants, and a big part of his political coalition is going to be auto workers in the Upper Midwest.”
Trump will need to say something that contrasts with Biden on the campaign trail, and “things that you say on the campaign end up being enacted as policy,” Lieber adds.
Poster boy for a frozen blue state
Trump was an unknown quantity in his first term, and it took him some time to find his footing as he slowly figured out how to manipulate the levers of power. As Bolton wrote: “It is undeniable that Trump’s transition and opening year-plus were botched irretrievably.”
Next time, Trump would know how to work the levers — aided by a group of policy and communications professionals who have been cooking up plans in a new constellation of MAGA think tanks. And Trump wants to exact revenge on the Democrats who he blames for his grave legal difficulties.
Trudeau, of course, has not played any role in prosecuting Trump, and the former president hasn’t gone after him, but the Congressional Republicans closest to him have taken to lobbing rhetorical potshots north of the border. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, has suggested (falsely) that Trudeau is the child of Fidel Castro while complaining about Canadian gun laws. Lauren Boebert has said that Canada needs “to be liberated,” and Tucker Carlson proposed that the United States invade Canada, although the hour-long special he had planned was kiboshed when Fox showed him the door.
Trudeau’s image as global progressive poster boy grates on American conservatives, who see him as a woke, virtue-signaling irritant, overseeing a frozen blue state where Muslim immigrants are welcome, guns are banned and vaccines mandated. Over the weekend, prominent Republican online influencers denounced and mocked him in crude terms when he posted a picture of himself and his son at a showing of Barbie. He is an irresistible target for the MAGA GOP.
‘Deeply fearful’
As the culture war increasingly dominates American politics, and the two voting blocks come to resemble warring factions, it is possible that the domestic American impulses may find expression in the Canada-US relationship, which has for decades been dominated by arcane disputes about softwood stumpage fees and dairy quotas.
Lieber thinks that’s likely just noise: “Fundamentally, none of these people have reason to care about US-Canada trade relations or do anything to upset it. It’s not like Mexico.”
Heyman, though, is uneasy. “I am deeply, deeply fearful for the Canada-US relationship if Donald Trump is back in the White House.”
Next time, if it happens, Trudeau would be unwise to rely on charm.
The Graphic Truth: Canada rolls out the welcome mat
Canada’s population is booming, and a huge portion of that growth is being fueled by record-high immigration. The Trudeau government aims to grant permanent residency to 465,000 people in 2023 and raise that number to 500,000 people a year by 2025 – betting that immigration can spur economic growth and support its aging population. This commitment to immigration is why Canada is the fastest-growing G7 country, even as its peers brace for population contractions.
Meanwhile, across the border in the US, immigration is a much more polarizing issue. But contrary to what many on the right think, immigration numbers have declined under President Joe Biden.
We compare immigration in the US and Canada over the last two decades.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks during the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference in Ottawa, Canada.
Two battles at once in Alberta, the home of key US energy exports
Alberta is in the middle of a tight election, the first for United Conservative Party Premier Danielle Smith. She won the party’s leadership after former Premier Jason Kenney resigned last May following his poor showing in a leadership review vote. This election is really a battle pitting Smith’s UPC against the left-wing New Democratic Party and former Alberta Premier Rachel Notley. But suddenly, a third player has emerged, and it could prove decisive.
Take Back Alberta, an ultra-conservative third-party organization, is reportedly working to get Smith to lean in harder to her already libertarian beliefs and to push the UCP father to the right – and away from its more centrist policies. The trick? Take Back Alberta must stay within the lines of third-party election rules. Indeed, they claim to actually control the UCP and the premier’s office! The battle is an extension of the struggle that led to Kenney losing the leadership after he too could not control or corral the more libertarian sides of his party.
Why does this matter to US-Canada relations? Canada is the largest source of US energy imports, with much of that coming from Alberta. In 2020, the oil-rich province exported CAD$77.5 billion in goods to the US, its primary global trading partner. So who runs the province is material to the energy sector.
Smith – who is being hounded this week after an old recording surfaced in which she compared those who got the COVID-19 vaccine to followers of Hitler (Yes, Hitler has become part of the election campaign) – supports loose energy regulations and says federal climate policies are an “existential” threat to the province.
Smith has also said US Republicans, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, are models for creating “little bastions of freedom.” If Smith wins, and with her party controlled by the Take Back Alberta crowd, the province will see more open hostility toward the federal government’s climate and natural resources policies, creating volatility that might give energy investors pause. It could also lead to more legal fights over provincial-federal powers and create confusion on what rules will apply and when. After all, investors just love instability, don’t they?US and Canadian flags at the Peace Arch border crossing in Blaine, US state of Washington.
Rolling back COVID restrictions
Unvaccinated Canadians will be able to travel freely to the US next week when the US lifts its vaccine requirement at the border. Democratic Congressman Brian Higgins, who represents Buffalo and Niagara Falls, cheered the news, noting that the restrictions had “kept families apart and impeded economic recovery.”
Canada uneasy about Biden-Trump rematch in US
“Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies,” John F. Kennedy said in a 1961 speech to Canada’s parliament.
Politicians and columnists like to refer to that quote whenever they consider the warm and enduring relationship between Canada and the United States. But Canadians are watching with a mounting sense of dread as Americans set up a potential rerun of the 2020 election, with Donald Trump, 76, facing off against Joe Biden, 80, for a grudge match that promises to be as distasteful as a punchup at a nursing home.
Until Tuesday, it seemed possible that Biden might decide he would prefer to spend more time with his family, or napping, and let someone in their 70s take over. But, no. He’s in.
And this week, Trump started to look like he has a lock on the GOP nomination. Of course, it is still early. By this time in the 2016 cycle, Trump had not even declared, and the Times’ resident poll interpreter was predicting an easy win for Jeb Bush. Lots can happen before the Republicans meet in Milwaukee next July, but I think we all know the arc of history is bending toward the “rough beast” of Mar-a-Lago.
The first big clue was the reaction of Republican voters to his indictment for allegedly funneling hush money to a porn star, which was apparently just the signal that on-the-fence Republicans were waiting for. The second was the continued failure of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to respond effectively to Trump’s putdowns, a familiar pattern from 2016 when Trump ran his hapless rivals through the woodchipper one by one. Desantis is no better at handling the Donald than Sens. Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio and looked weird and rattled when asked about that in Tokyo this week.
So Americans look intent on setting their aging champions against one another again. Canadians can only say good luck, and may the best man win.
But if Canada had a vote, Trump would be out. Canadians prefer Biden by a huge margin, polls show.
PM Justin Trudeau, like most Canadians, will be pulling for Biden. Trudeau doesn’t seem as close to Biden as he was to Barack Obama, but they are progressive allies, and in Ottawa last month he and Biden announced a new border deal that allowed Canada to shut the irregular crossing at Roxham Road. The Inflation Reduction Act remains a worry for northern policymakers, since it may draw jobs and capital south, but in Ottawa, Biden spoke cheerfully about the opportunities for both countries. Trump, in contrast, created huge headaches for Trudeau when he was president with his confrontational approach to trade.
“The last time Trump was elected, it forced Canada to waste three years renegotiating its most important trade agreement,” says vice chairman of Eurasia Group Gerald Butts, who helped Trudeau negotiate that deal as his principal secretary. “And that's just one of many things that cause problems for Canada. In the context of a live shooting match with Russia, the prospect of a Trump presidency is existential for NATO. This ain't dairy policy.”
But could Trump help Trudeau win votes? Since the American election will likely happen before the next Canadian one, there might be an electoral upside for Trudeau. If he can link his Conservative opponent, Pierre Poilievre, to Trump, it could benefit the prime minister at the polls.
But politics isn’t everything.
“Elections are short term, and governments are long,” says Butts. “And it's not good for whoever is the government of Canada if Donald Trump is in the White House.”
It is not just Liberals who fret about Trump, says Janice Stein, founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
“He’s a flamethrower. And that’s obvious now to everybody. So even people in Canada who like the message, and there are more than we think, there has to be some hesitation because he’s so erratic.”
Would Trump put the USMCA at risk? Experts say he’s unlikely to rip up the trade deal he negotiated as it would require him to undermine his own work.
“USMCA is up for review in 2025-2026,” says Stein. “I think it’s unlikely that he would tear it up a second time. And the Inflation Reduction Act is more protectionist than what Trump did.”
But that doesn’t mean the two men would get along. Christopher Sands, director of the Wilson Center's Canada Institute, imagines it would be a difficult relationship and one defined by “a cascade of negative vibrations.”
If things get too heated, it is even possible Trump could turn on Trudeau. “Trump would have no reason not to make him a foil and just say, ‘Well, yeah, look at Justin Trudeau. He thinks he's so smart. But what he did was he tried to pick our pockets, and we're gonna show him. We're gonna get rid of the USMCA, and we're gonna do this and do that,’” says Sands.
Whatever might happen between Trudeau and Trump, there are powerful forces in both countries that would act to protect the vital trade relationship. The US is Canada’s best customer, and vice versa. If that is threatened, business and labor would put pressure on governments to sort it out, no matter who is running either country.
Kennedy said our countries are friends, which makes us all feel good, but Henry Kissinger was likely closer to the truth when he said that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”
The good news for Canada is that it is in America’s interest to get on with its neighbor.
Tucker Carlson wants to invade Canada
When Pierre Trudeau (Justin’s father) was prime minister, he famously said living next to the United States was like sleeping with an elephant: “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
So Canadians should expect a restless night on May 1, because that’s when Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson releases his latest project: a special film called “O, Canada.” The program argues that the US should “liberate” Canada … with military force.
Carlson, known for sharing white nationalist conspiracy theories with 2.5 million Americans five nights a week, just dropped two trailers that portray Canada as an authoritarian hellhole where citizens are jailed for protesting against the government. They highlight interviews with a constellation of figures featured on Rebel News, a far-right Canadian outlet that depicted anti-lockdown protesters as victims of Liberal stormtroopers.
The scenes include two pastors who were locked up for violating COVID public health laws. Populist leader Maxime Bernier, who was arrested for attending a rally that violated pandemic gathering restrictions, and Rebel News broadcasters Alexandra Lavoie and David Menzies all claim to have been roughly treated by police.
But the star of the film appears to be Lauren Southern, a telegenic 27-year-old documentary filmmaker from Surrey, B.C., with a long track record as a white-nationalist provocateur. Southern is shown shooting in the wilderness, lamenting Canadian gun laws (we have bears in trees, she points out). In a sit-down interview at Fox’s California studio, she tells Carlson that the situation is “absolutely maddening.”
“We’ve just found out our elections were almost entirely rigged by the Chinese government,” she says, referring to the recent scandal over Beijing’s alleged election meddling. “Canadians are living in a state of absolute fear of our government, and we’re not even sure if our government is controlled in Canada or overseas.”
“Whether your democracy is real or not, of course, that’s a familiar feeling to Americans,” says Carlson.
The trailers feature unflattering images of Trudeau – including a Hitler-esque rendering of his face – and clips of American leaders announcing military strikes in Iraq and Libya. The implication? That the US should consider a shock and awe campaign in Ottawa.
The premise, of course, is laughable, and about as absurd as Fox’s attacks on Dominion Voting Systems, or Carlson’s 2022 special, which promoted testicle tanning. Canada’s lifesaving COVID restrictions were imposed by democratically elected governments and backed by a majority of voters.
The Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear an anti-lockdown protest in Ottawa, but a public inquiry found that the government acted properly. The manager of the 2021 Conservative campaign has written that while the Chinese did interfere, the election outcome “was not influenced by any external meddling.”
Carlson is going to foist a farrago of lies and nonsense on his viewers, giving them a fundamentally wrong impression of their neighbor. But few Canadians think that gun ownership is necessary as a hedge against tyranny. And polling from Maru Public Opinion for GZERO Media shows that only a small minority of Canadians consider themselves to be oppressed by an authoritarian government.
“It's not representative of Canada,” says John Wright, executive vice president of Maru. “It's propaganda. It's falsehoods. To suggest that this is a country on the verge of revolution ... You're gonna get somewhere between 9 and 17% of the public, depending upon what avenue you want to go down, that feels that way.”
The special may be premised on falsehoods, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have an impact on the relationship between Canada and the US. Greg Elmer, director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, points out that Fox viewers know little about Canadian politics and will believe what Carlson tells them, which could lead to political friction over trade.
“I do think, unfortunately, that we do need to take it seriously just because of the size of the platform,” Elmer says.
If Carlson convinces voters that Canada is an authoritarian dystopia, politicians may act on that impression. Wright points out that a small number of MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives can exercise disproportionate influence because GOP leadership needs every vote, as we saw in the many rounds to select a Speaker.
“It doesn't take much when you have a split House like this to have consequences if they decide that this is part of the rhetoric,” Wright adds.
Carlson’s inane special will also give an enormous boost to Rebel News personalities who are typically on the margins of Canadian public life. Research shows that American outlets, especially Fox, supercharged “Freedom convoy” content in 2022, helping turn a niche protest into a mass movement that paralyzed Ottawa and blocked border crossings.
Pandemic restrictions are gone, and the leadership of the movement is divided and dispirited, but Carlson is about to give them a huge jolt of energy.
And the rest of Canada? It will need to sleep with one eye open until this elephant leaves the room.
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But if the US did invade and take over Canada – which we think is preposterous – what would the new names be for the Montreal Canadiens and the Vancouver Canucks? Send us your greatest names here.