I have said for years the secret of Trump's appeal is that his followers worship him as The Golden Calf - because he has no philosophy of his own, he can just reflect his followers' own grandiose autocracy combined with racist superiority. And they love him for it.
Now I think Poilievre has decided to model his behaviour after what worked so well for Trump - lying, boasting, promising, pandering.Poilievre doesn't have Trump's projected charm and bombastic hail-fellow-well-met insouciance, but the rest of it he can do!
First, Poilievre is now lying about Carney all the time: And he is glibly promising to easily solve Canada's problems: I think such a strategy is based on the calculation that many Canadians are too busy to follow politics very well, so they don't know enough of the details to disbelieve him.
In their substack, Letter from a Maritimer also sees the pattern:
If you’ve been reading the Sun chain, the National Post, or watching certain panels on CTV, you’ve been getting a fairly consistent story about CUSMA. Canada isn’t “showing up.” Ottawa is “playing for time.” Carney is fearmongering while Washington waits patiently for serious partners. Pay the entry fee and the talks can begin.Next, here is Arlene Dickinson on Poilievre:
....That is Washington’s framing of the relationship, stated openly by their cabinet secretary. When Canadian conservative journalists present this position to readers as hard-nosed realism rather than as the American demand it actually is, the question worth asking is whose interest that framing serves. I don’t think it’s ours.
Line up the messaging and the pattern is hard to miss:
March 2025 (Lutnick): Negotiating with Washington is a Costco membership. Pay before you shop.
April 16 (Poilievre): Canada needs a tariff-free deal. Rupture with the US is wrong.
April 17 (Lutnick): CUSMA is a bad deal. Canada’s strategy is the worst he’s ever heard. Canada sucks.
April 20 (Poilievre): Carney is pushing fear. Protectionism doesn’t work. Get the deal done.
April 21 (Poilievre): Carney is losing, losing, losing. No real talks in five months.
April 22 (Radio-Canada sources): Washington wants an entry fee. Canada isn’t showing up.
April 22 (Poilievre): Carney has squandered Canada’s leverage.
April 23 (conservative columnists): Canada isn’t serious. Ottawa is playing for time.
April 23 (Poilievre): Carney has squandered all of our leverage.
April 24 (Poilievre): He could deliver a tariff-free deal. Minerals and oil are the leverage.
Four themes carry across every one of those bullet points. Canada isn’t negotiating seriously. Carney is fearmongering. Ottawa has squandered its leverage. A deal is sitting right there if we just stop resisting. That is Washington’s position, reflected back through Ottawa’s opposition benches and amplified in Canadian conservative opinion pages, in the same week.
...Canadians watching a trade partner tariff our steel, aluminum, autos and lumber, insult our Prime Minister in public, and walk away from talks over a television advertisement are entitled to expect that the official opposition will push back on the government’s strategy without adopting the framing of the country doing the tariffing. Poilievre can oppose Carney on the merits and still leave daylight between his position and Howard Lutnick’s. This week, that daylight has been hard to find.
...The Americans are not negotiating in good faith. Pretending otherwise, in print under a Canadian masthead or from the floor of the House of Commons, does not make it so.
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Next, some interesting analysis of America.
In The Globe and Mail, columnist Andrew Coyne keeps pounding on the truth that America is mad:
[gift link]... There is a critique which runs as follows: Mr. Trump is not going to be around forever. Most Americans do not wish us ill. The business community still wants to trade with us. The institutions of American government remain intact.Next, some discussion of how Trump's tariffs have backfired:
Once Mr. Trump leaves office, America will return to its senses. Let us not, then, make hasty and irreversible decisions, based on the delusions and predilections of one man.
This thesis – it will all blow over – treats Mr. Trump as essentially causa sui, as if he were an accident that just sort of happened to America. Somehow he became president. But in time he will be no longer. And it will be as if he never were.
But Mr. Trump didn’t just happen to America. He was elected, twice – the second time after attempting a coup. That alone should tell us that something fundamental has changed in American society, that it is so broken that one half of it could knowingly put a degenerate lunatic in the White House just to spite the other half.
He has used his time in office, what is more, to change America further – especially the second time around. The Republican Party has been utterly transformed, at every level. There is nothing left of the democratic, free-market, world-leading Republicanism of old.
Mr. Trump and his officials have not only broken every law, subverted every institution, assaulted every critic and betrayed every ally. They have normalized attitudes and behaviour that were previously beyond the pale. It will not be easy to un-normalize them.
And he is barely a year into his term! What further damage he might wreak in the 33 months he has left is too awful even to guess at. Certainly we can have no assurance that Mr. Trump will leave office in 2028 – not willingly, at any rate. Even if he does, will his successor (JD Vance? Don Jr.? Laura Loomer?) mark any serious change in direction?
And should the Democrats be elected, how much would really change? It would take time to rebuild the institutions and rewrite the laws. Four years later, America would be as divided as ever. All it would take is a couple of hundred thousand votes in a few swing states to tip the U.S., and the world, back into the abyss.
So yes, it is a kind of “rupture.” It may not be permanent, but it’s enduring enough that we really can’t treat it as temporary. The risk is great enough that we do have to mitigate our exposure: not by closing our doors to trade with the U.S., but by opening them to the rest of the world.
In their substack, I Fucking Love Australia (aka IFLOZ) has gathered up a detailed summary of how the rest of the world has been happily and eagerly moving on without America. They conclude:View on Threads
....Here’s what nobody in the White House has quite worked out yet.Finally, I saw some interesting articles this week regarding Canada's defense issues.
America’s value to the world was never really about hard power. It was about being the indispensable convenor. The guy who hosted the party. The guy who wrote the standards, sat at the centre of the alliance web, anchored the global reserve currency, and made being inside the American system more attractive than being outside it. Soft power. Network effects. The thing Joseph Nye wrote books about.
The spray-tanned bankruptcy warning in a tie has spent eighteen months systematically demolishing that.
Every tariff threat against an ally. Every withdrawn security guarantee. Every unhinged Truth Social post about invading a NATO member. Every time Pete Hegseth face-planted a Pentagon press conference while Iranian missiles were landing on ships in the Strait. Every time JD Vance flew somewhere to boost an autocrat and ate shit. Every time Donald himself demanded a Nobel Peace Prize while civilian body counts were updating in real time.
The rest of the world made notes. Hedged. Diversified. Signed the next deal with the next country that wasn’t America.
Sheinbaum flew to Barcelona. Modi flew to nobody, because the Europeans came to him. Carney flew to Canberra, Delhi and Beijing in eleven days. Lula held court in Brazil and hosted the EU’s biggest trade deal ever. Ursula von der Leyen is probably the single most consequential diplomatic operator on the planet right now, and Americans couldn’t tell you her fucking name.
Meanwhile the orange-hued sack of rendered dictator fat is in Washington raging about transgender bathrooms and Venezuelan fishing boats, while the Bretton Woods system, the NATO alliance and the post-1945 American-led order all quietly reshape themselves without waiting for him to catch up.
The world didn’t collapse when America went mental. It rebuilt, without the noisy drunk at the head of the table. That’s genuinely, structurally extraordinary. Historians will write books about this moment. The entire postwar order was supposed to be unthinkable without American leadership. Turns out when the leadership’s rancid, there’s a whole bench waiting to step up...
First, Black Cloud Six explains why the Canadian armed forces still feel so closely allied with the American military:
...Canada’s military has been pro-American because we wanted it to be. Beginning in the late 1950s, Canada made strategic policy decisions that deliberately placed us firmly in the US orbit and made us militarily dependent on the United States. ...Canada became incredibly dependent on and integrated with the US after about 1965. We eliminated huge swaths of our defence industrial capability with the assumption that we could simply purchase what we needed from the United States. The North American Air Defence (later Aerospace) Command (NORAD) came into being in 1958 and completely integrated continental air defence, with operations commanded from Colorado Springs, Colorado.Next, at Debating Canadian Defense, Phillipe Lagassé provides a detailed explanation of Canada's upcoming submarine choices between South Korea and Germany:
Thus, Canada deliberately decided to abandon some elements of sovereignty in the defence realm. In return, we received security and the ability to spend the bare minimum on defence. And it worked as long as the relationship was benign. It is this assumption — that our defence relationship with the United States will always be benign — that drives many of the CAF’s attitudes towards the US, and these attitudes reflect the policies set by the political leadership.
The result is that, at any given time, there are some 700 Canadians serving in the United States, most with NORAD. Canada is one of the very few countries that the Americans have permitted to command US forces....
Canadian generals serve in senior leadership roles with the US Army; Canada has a slot on the much-vaunted US Army Ranger course. Even when Canadians aren’t permanently assigned to duty in the United States itself, the working relationship is — as I can attest — very close. I know from experience that there are Canadians working in highly sensitive parts of the US military system, including alongside US Special Forces. More are assigned to US CENTCOM HQ in Qatar, flying with US Air Force squadrons, and Canadian ships routinely sail as part of US Navy task forces. They do all of this because that is what the Government of Canada wants them to do....
If you’re looking for a sea change in the CAF’s stance towards the US, it will not come from the people in uniform. Instead, it has to come from our elected officials, and those officials are attempting to walk a tightrope wherein they maintain a viable continental defence relationship with the US (because we have to) while pivoting our relationship to reduce our dependence and increase sovereignty. These are political decisions, and in a democracy, militaries respond to political direction. My gut feeling is that the CAF writ large gets it, despite memories of good times in Colorado Springs.
A South Korean submarine is making its way to Canada. The KSS-III from the Republic of Korea Navy is headed to British Columbia as part of South Korea’s and Hanwha Ocean’s bid for the Canadian Patrol Submarine Project (CPSP).Shankar Narayan writes two good articles on defense issues.
The Canadian government is planning to make a decision on CPSP this spring or summer. Interestingly, the two competitors for CPSP, Hanwha and Germany’s TKMS, were recently invited to update their bids, ostensibly to better align them with the Defence Industry Strategy and make other ‘improvements’. I take that to mean that the Defence Investment Agency wants to squeeze more economic benefits out of both bidders, without being too crass about it.
Although a decision is expected soon, CPSP remains a lively competition and both companies are still showcasing their goods. Hence, the KSS-III’s visit to the west coast...
First, a Concis article about American defense contractors
...For decades, American weapons did not merely sell on performance. They sold inside a system of trust, access, training, logistics, political alignment and assumed permanence. Buy American, and you were not just buying a missile, a fighter jet or an air-defense battery. You were buying into the center of the Western defense architecture. That center is now starting to lose gravity....Next, a Consis Canada article about building strategic European alliances:
...American defense contractors are moving from automatically occupying the center of every room they enter to the middle row. First they lose automatic priority. Then they lose automatic trust. Then, slowly, they disappear into the crowd. Not gone. Not irrelevant. Just no longer the controller.
Just another participant.
That is a very different world for the U.S. weapons business...
...Canada is doing things the United Kingdom should already be doing for its own national interest. It is moving into the spaces Britain should be occupying. It is building the relationships Britain should be building. It is reducing the dependencies Britain should be cutting.And on a side note, Montreal won in overtime! Hooray!
So ask the obvious question: who is locking itself faster into the world’s core democratic alliance?
That alliance is the prize. The Kremlin wants to break it. The oligarch class hopes, prays, and assists every day that Putin gets it done. One side is driven by fear. The other is driven by greed. If both forces converge on the same target, then that target is not symbolic. It is strategically valuable.
And right now, Canada is locking itself deeper and stronger into that alliance while Britain is still thinking....
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