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John Ivison
Nashville Predators defenseman Ryan McDonagh (27) stick checks Vancouver Canucks forward Brock Boeser (6) during the third period in game two of the first round of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Rogers Arena.
For the past 31 years of hockey folly, Canadian fans have greeted the NHL playoffs by telling anyone who will listen that “this year is different.”
It was 1993 when the Stanley Cup was last brought north of the border – that time by the Montreal Canadiens. But there are genuine grounds for optimism this year, with four Canadian teams competing in the last 16 for the first time in seven years.
The Toronto Maple Leafs haven’t won the Cup since 1967 and are already behind 2-1 in their best-of-seven series with the Boston Bruins at the time of writing.
The Winnipeg Jets are tied with the Colorado Avalanche, but hopes are high at the Whiteout street party, where fans gather wearing white Jets jerseys in downtown Winnipeg, after their team finished the season with eight straight wins.
Vancouver Canucks are tied with the Nashville Predators, but the Canadian fans are quietly confident after winning their division.
Meanwhile, the Edmonton Oilers are tied in their series against the LA Kings after game one, in which the world’s best player, Connor McDavid, proved unstoppable, providing five assists in a 7-4 win. The bookmakers have the Oilers as the third favorite, behind the Carolina Hurricanes and Florida Panthers, both of whom are 2-0 up in their series against the New York Islanders and Tampa Bay Lightning respectively.
Despite the prospect of making history, there is no sense that the country is getting behind any one franchise as “Canada’s team.” This is for good reason: If Vancouver and Edmonton triumph, they will face off against each other in round two.
Tribal loyalties run deeper than national ones in a country like Canada, with more geography than history.
Workers assemble a vehicle as Honda announces plans to build electric vehicles and their parts in Ontario with financial support from the Canadian and provincial governments, at their automotive assembly plant in Alliston, Ontario, Canada, April 25, 2024.
Honda has announced an $11 billion plan to build electric vehicles in the Canadian province of Ontario, an investment Premier Doug Fordsays will be the largest ever for Canada.
The plan includes four separate plant as part of an electric vehicle supply chain, including Honda’s first EV assembly line at its existing Alliston, Ont., facility. The new investment will create 1,000 full-time jobs and produce 240,000 vehicles a year if all goes well.
That follows similar pledges by battery producers Northvolt, Volkswagen, and Stellantis-LGES that take Ontario’s EV investment to more than $30 billion in the past year or so.
Federal and provincial governments have injected billions in subsidies to compete with President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. But the recent cooling of enthusiasm for EVs in North America has some wondering if Canada has bought a very expensive lemon.
Deliveries in the US are flat, and in Europe, they have fallen 11% year on year. Tesla has just reported poor quarterly results and has seen its stock fall in recent months.
Others are calling for calm. “Honda does not make speculative term bets,” said Flavio Volpe, head of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association.
Bullish analysts point out that the market witnessed a post-pandemic spending spree that will come back, particularly if manufacturers close the 40-60% price gap between gas-powered cars and EVs.
In China, electric vehicles are now cheaper options on average, and producing for the mass market is the game plan for companies like GM and Honda.
If the price differential drops, the car makers are betting “the feel of the wheel will seal the deal.”
A protester chants slogans in support of Palestinians in Gaza, outside of Columbia University in New York City, U.S., April 24, 2024.
The disruption at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent days has been well-documented. Protesters have been arrested at New York University, Yale, and Columbia, where the administration has declared a hybrid (in-class and online) approach to the final week of classes.
Police have attempted to draw a line between free expression and maintaining safety on campuses. Jewish students claim that the intimidating chants and antisemitic incidents have crossed that line at times. Protesters at Columbia called for Hamas to blow away Tel Aviv and Israel, 19-year-old Nicholas Baumtold the Associated Press. “Jews are scared at Columbia. It’s as simple as that,” he said.
As usual, Canada has been a non-conductor of such radical currents.
Protests have occurred — there was a large anti-Israel rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa last weekend at which chants of “Long live October 7th” were heard.
But it was not specifically a student protest and Canadian campuses have not seen the formation of encampments, such as the one that has taken over Columbia’s green.
McGill University in Montreal has witnessed a hunger strike by some students protesting the university’s investment in companies supporting the Israeli military. There was a brief sit-in at the main library.
But the tradition of radical student protest seems less ingrained in Canada.
Henry David Thoreau talked of disobedience being the true fountain of American liberty — sentiments that students took to heart during the civil rights and anti-Vietnam marches of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Canadian student protests are preoccupied with less holistic concerns — in the ‘70s in Toronto, they were concerned about equal representation on the university senate; in Quebec in 2012, students reacted against increased tuition fees.
It is a circumstance that vindicates the observation that while Canada is a live country, unlike the US, it is not kicking.
TikTok logo displayed on a phone screen is seen through the broken glass with American flag displayed on a screen in the background in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on April 24, 2024.
We appear to be at a curious “hinge moment” in history where great powers are engaged in intense rivalries but at the same time are finding ways to cooperate.
Congress and President Joe Biden have just told China to sell TikTok, the social video-sharing app, or it will be banned in the US. It has also just voted to send $8 billion in military aid to Taiwan, a move the Chinese have described as a “dangerous provocation.”
At the same time, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in China attempting to thaw relations. He follows on the heels of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and recent calls between US and Chinese defense chiefs to discuss their differences.
Similar dual-track diplomacy is happening in other Western countries. Germany is “derisking” its relations with China, yet Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Beijing earlier this month. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese undertook a state visit to China in November, the first since 2016.
Canada’s government ordered a national security review of TikTok last September and has already banned the app on government devices. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada is watching the debate in the US, and observers have little doubt that Canada will follow Washington’s lead, if the app is banned – just as it did when it blocked Huawei from its 5G network in 2022.
Sino-Canadian relations are likely to get cooler before they warm up. Interim findings of a Canadian public inquiry into foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections by China will be released later this spring – details that are unlikely to lead to calls for rapprochement.
At the same time, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is sending her senior diplomat, David Morrison, to China as a prelude to an official visit.
The general sense is that we all have to coexist in the same neighborhood, albeit, in the words of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, “in small yards with high fences.”
Comedian Bill Maher sees Canada as a cautionary tale for the United States, or perhaps more particularly for President Joe Biden.
“Yes, you can move too far left. When you do, you end up pushing the people in the middle to the right,” he said on a recent edition of his HBO show, “Real Time.”
Maher’s central contention was that the US doesn’t have much to learn from Canada on immigration, the economy, or “extreme wokeness.”
Biden most likely agrees.
Maher’s point speaks to an emerging divergence between the president and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, driven by their respective electoral imperatives.
Winning strategies?
The US presidential race is a coin toss, according to recent polls. To win, Biden needs to woo the one-third of American voters who consider themselves “moderates,” especially whites without college degrees, even at the risk of upsetting part of his progressive base. In 2020, he traded on his blue-collar roots and ran on a moderate message. That appears to be the game plan for 2024.
Trudeau, on the other hand, has decided to double down on his appeal to young, left-of-center voters, who first helped elect him in 2015 but who have since deserted him in favor of his Conservative rival. Pierre Poilievre now holds a 2:1 advantage with people born since 1980, according to a recent poll.
“Both candidates (Biden and Donald Trump) have their separate problems getting moderates to show up while playing to their base,” according to Jon Lieber, Eurasia’s head of research. “Biden has progressive Democrats who think he has not done enough on the climate, or student loans, or has done too much on Israel. It's not clear that it's a one-sided strategy,” he said.
Biden has just forgiven student loans and increased the top rate of income tax.
But he has also backed a $26 billion aid package to Israel, at the same time as Canada has halted arms shipments to Jerusalem.
On the border, Biden has shown a willingness to get tough. “Let’s shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” he said before House Republicans nixed a bipartisan deal.
In Canada, Trudeau’s government presided over a 1.3 million increase in the country’s population last year, as temporary workers and international students flooded the country and contributed toward sharply raising shelter costs. (As Maher noted, the median cost of a home in the US is $346,000; in Canada, it is $487,000).
Defender of liberals
The Canadian prime minister was always much more of a kindred spirit with Biden’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. Trudeau was invited for a state visit to Washington in spring 2016, when Obama all but passed him the baton as defender of the liberal economic order.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said the moment was reminiscent of the scene in the movie “The Graduate,” where a young Benjamin Braddock is told the future is in plastics. The view was that Canada’s time had finally come.
Biden didn’t particularly buy into that mania, and Trudeau was never Robin to the president’s Batman the way he was with Obama.
Biden did follow Trudeau’s lead in appointing a gender-balanced cabinet.
When the president eventually visited Ottawa last spring, the two men made substantive agreements, particularly on the North American Aerospace Command and an integrated North American approach to clean energy, electric vehicles, and critical mineral development.
Still, there are perennial disagreements. Canada is plowing on with its plan to bring in a digital services tax that would hit US tech companies like Alphabet and Amazon. Washington opposes the move for singling out American firms.
There remains discontent about Canada’s military spending levels, even after last week’s budget announcement of increases that will see it spend 1.76% of GDP on defense by 2028, up from 1.4% now.
But any digressions are more political than policy-related.
The battle for moderates and independents
Biden’s path to reelection could hinge on his ability to win back blue-collar former Democratic voters in places like Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, which went with Donald Trump in 2020.
The president has touted an economic plan to use government investments to rebuild America’s manufacturing capacity, but many voters remain unconvinced after inflation touched 40-year highs.
Polling suggests widespread disappointment with Biden’s performance, even among strong supporters like Black and Hispanic voters. According to an AP-NORC poll last month, only 38% of voters approved of his performance, down from 61% three years ago. The numbers on the economy are worse.
In such an atmosphere, identifying too closely with the left in the culture wars when it comes to transgender policies, diversity, equity and inclusiveness, critical race theory, or on-campus anti-Israel protests would be toxic to Biden’s prospects. He has condemned the intimidation of Jewish students on college campuses. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” Biden said Monday.
Despite Biden’s falling approval ratings, Trump has even more problems attracting moderate voters. Of the one-third of voters who self-identified as moderates in 2020, 62% voted for Biden and 36% for Trump. There are indications that a significant share of moderate Republicans will not do so again this time.
Recognition that he was out of line with public opinion likely prompted Trump’s surprise announcement that he would not sign a national abortion ban as president, even though he has called the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade “an incredible thing.”
The battle for the moderate and independent vote is firmly engaged, which explains Biden’s tacit acknowledgment of Maher’s point that going too far left could drive the people in the middle into the arms of his Republican opponents.
The story for Trudeau is different, which is not surprising. As Lieber noted, the Canadian electorate is generally to the left of that in the US. Trudeau faces Canadian voters next year, and polling evidence suggests voters have tired of the idiosyncracies that once amused them.
He hopes he can reconnect with young voters and continue to be the standard-bearer of woke culture, prioritizing the interests of historically marginalized racial, gender, and sexual identity groups.
To those special interests, he has now added millennials.
The most recent federal budget focused on the issue of “generational fairness” for people born since 1980, who Trudeau says are not being rewarded like their parents or grandparents. “That’s not right. It’s not fair,” he said.
The problem, as many critics pointed out, was that the Liberals campaigned on a “fairness” agenda in 2015. At that time, “fairness” meant helping the middle class keep more of their income.
That definition shifted over time to appeal to people engaged in the culture wars – a shift from the aspirational left to the identity left.
Millennials may scoff at the Damascene nature of the Liberal conversion to generational fairness. The Trudeau government has recorded eight consecutive budget deficits and doubled the national debt since coming to power – a liability that will be passed on to the generation whose interests it says it is now trying to promote.
One veteran Canadian political observer said the Trudeau Liberals are like an aging rock band that realizes too late that people don’t want to hear the new songs, so they go back to playing their greatest hits.
It remains to be seen whether millennials will give the Godfather of Woke an encore.
Frustrated by the failure to get a $60 billion emergency aid package to Ukraine through Congress, Joe Biden is working on Plan B.
The president has said that he wants G7 countries to come up with a means of tapping the $282 billion in frozen Russian central bank assets by the time leaders meet in Italy in June.
Even though the meeting in Apulia is more than three months away, it might take at least that long to reach a consensus on how to pluck the goose to obtain the most feathers with the least amount of hissing.
Last week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said it is important to find a way to unlock the value of those assets and divert the proceeds to help Ukraine’s war effort. She said there is a “strong international law, economic and moral case” for doing so.
Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, DC, said this represents an “evolution” in Yellen’s thinking from a previous Treasury Department position that worried about the chilling effect on countries like China that might pull back their assets, in case they were confiscated in the future.
The Congressional gridlock that has held up the emergency aid package to Ukraine has clearly played its part. But Yellen said the monetization of frozen Russian assets is not a substitute for direct aid. “This is something that could help longer term,” she said of the frozen assets.
There is general agreement about the economics and morality of such a plan to monetize Russian assets, but there is considerable disquiet about the legality of seizing them outright.
Since Western countries claim they support Ukraine in defense of the international rule of law, they would be open to charges of hypocrisy if their actions were questionable from a legal standpoint.
Yellen said she did not have a preferred strategy but Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland was asked about the Treasury secretary’s comments the next day.
She said she spoke to Yellen the previous weekend, and that “She and I agree 100%.”
Canada was the first G7 country to pass legislation to forfeit Russian assets and sell the proceeds to help reconstruct Ukraine. The first cases involved individuals, but Freeland said she has been “centrally involved in the work being done to take the next steps and confiscate (central bank) assets.”
She said she has been working from the principles that aggressors should pay and that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be shown that Western support for Ukraine is not flagging.
The problem is that most of Russia’s central bank assets are being held in Belgium, and some European Union countries, including Germany and France, remain unconvinced that simply grabbing the assets and selling them off is a good idea. The EU wants Europe to be seen as a safe place for people to invest their assets, without fear of confiscation.
Clifford Sosnow, chair of international trade and investment at Canadian law firm Fasken, has been a critic of the original legislation introduced by Ottawa on the grounds of due process and compliance with international law when it comes to confiscation without compensation.
“Generally, international law takes a dim view of this. So, while the impulse is understandable, and I have no sympathy for the invasion of a sovereign country, itself a violation of international law, I question whether the house that Canada has built to prosecute and take assets is built on solid legal foundation,” he said.
France, Germany, and the European Central Bank have expressed concerns about legality, as well as fears about the prospect of Russian retaliation on European assets and the impact on the euro’s status as a reserve currency.
The Europeans are pushing a less ambitious project, using what European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen called “the windfall profits” from Russian assets that could be used to purchase military equipment for Ukraine. More than $200 billion is held in Belgium by Euroclear, a financial service company that holds for safekeeping. Euroclear earned $4.78 billion in 2023 from those assets.
There have been suggestions that the EU issue bonds based on the income from the Russian assets.
But Ziemba said the view in Washington is that this would not yield enough funds. She said Canada, the US, and the UK are coalescing around the idea that the assets be used as collateral and used to issue loans to Ukraine.
Under this plan, Ukraine’s claim for reparations from Russia would be syndicated to its allies in return for a loan. If Moscow refuses to pay damages, the allies could then use Russia’s frozen assets to pay off the loan.
While loan guarantees might also have to work their way through Congress, this proposal might have broad support: Donald Trump has spoken favorably about loans, rather than direct aid, as a means of supporting Ukraine.
However, questions remain about the legitimacy of grabbing someone else’s assets, even if you don’t auction them off.
Lenders would still have a contractual claim on the Kremlin’s reserves.
The World Bank has estimated the cost of rebuilding Ukraine at $486 billion, but the legality of Kyiv setting its own reparations invoice is dubious.
Given the hurdles, Biden will be lucky if he gets unanimity by mid-June.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Coastal Carolina University before the South Carolina Republican primary in Conway, South Carolina, on Feb. 10, 2024.
Donald Trump can make his own claims to transforming the world beyond America’s borders – though whether it is by design, only he knows.
The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination made news last month when he said he would not necessarily protect NATO countries that did not hit spending targets.
He said he was asked by the leader of a “delinquent” nation whether he would protect them from Russian invasion, even if they did not meet NATO’s spending target of 2% of GDP. He said he replied: “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them (the Russians) to do whatever the hell they want.”
The comments sent a chill through “delinquent” nations like Canada, which spends just 1.3% of GDP on defense and which, while it has said it aims to reach the 2% target someday, has taken no concrete steps to do so.
Now, the public is taking note. A new poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that slightly more than half of Canadians believe Canada should increase defense spending to 2% of GDP or more – a number that has remained constant since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
However, a follow-up question mentioned Trump’s comments and asked again if spending should reach 2%. In that instance, support rose to 65% from 53%. There was a two-fold increase among younger women, who tend to recoil from all things Trump in most Canadian polls.
The survey said more than half of Canadians think Canada is falling behind with respect to its military power and diplomatic influence.
Increased pressure for more defense spending will put the Trudeau Liberal government on the horns of a dilemma. It has increased spending since coming to power in 2015 to fund new F35 fighter jets and 15 new frigates. But enthusiasm for the military has been lukewarm and in a recent “refocusing” of government spending, it announced it would cut expenditure on defense by more than $2 billion over the next three years. Hitting the 2% target could cost an extra $13 billion - money the Liberals do not have to spare.
Ian Bremmer, founder and president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, told Canada’s National Post earlier this month that the lack of concern about defense issues by politicians in Canada illustrates “short-termism and selfishness.”
“Canada has been allowed a free ride by dint of its geo-strategic position but also because there’s no consequences. It’s not as if the US has told Canada, ‘you’re going to be suspended from NATO if you don’t spend’, or ‘you’re not going to have access to US intelligence’ … None of that has happened (but), you know, maybe it should.”
Trump would likely concur.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testifies to the Senate Banking Committee in Washington, DC.
The millions of homeowners who have seen their mortgage payments double in recent years would no doubt concur with Mark Twain in his assessment of bankers – as the type of people who lend you an umbrella when the sun is shining and want it back as soon as it starts to rain.
Hopes for a break in the monetary policy clouds were frustrated this week as two North American central bankers said that interest rate cuts remain some way off.
Tiff Macklem, governor of the Bank of Canada, said yesterday that the bank’s governing council decided that rates will stay at 5%, at least until it meets again in April, as inflation of close to 3% means underlying pressures persist.
“We need to give higher interest rates more time to do their work,” he said.
The same day, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, told members of the House Financial Services Committee that the Fed is on a “good path” to achieving the desired “soft landing” of a growing economy with inflation back to its 2% target but that further progress is not assured.
The notes of caution come despite both US and Canadian economies avoiding recession. The US economy grew at an annualized rate of 3.2% last quarter. Even Canada’s anemic 1% growth rate suggests monetary policy is working to relieve price pressures, without choking demand.
Macklem said he is confident rates are high enough and that the discussion has now shifted to whether they need to stay at their current level.
Both central bankers characterized future progress as gradual and uneven, as wage growth remains in the 4-5% range.
But the unspoken pressure is political. A Liberal government in Canada will hand down a federal budget on April 16, less than a week after the next governing council decision. The budget date all but rules out the central bank's April meeting as a possibility for a rate cut, given the prospect of inflationary federal government spending.
In the US, it is an election year, which puts inevitable pressure on the Fed from politicians who will have to face angry voters. Powell said he acknowledged the risks of waiting too long to ease monetary policy and the damage that might cause the economy. But he said he did not want to ease credit conditions too soon and see inflation re-accelerate.
Investors expect an initial rate cut in June. Fed officials last year projected three quarter-point cuts this year, but Powell said the Fed would like to see more data to increase confidence that inflation is moving down to 2% before reducing the policy rate.
The benchmark rate has been held in the 5.25-5.5% rate since July.
For cash-strapped homeowners and consumers, the post-inflation rainbow can’t come quickly enough.