the alternative was Pierre Poilievre, who would have been elected had Trudeau not stepped down
between Trudeau and Poilievre, at this point Poilievre was seen as the lesser of two evils
Carney has credibility as an extremely knowledgeable and competent pragmatist who acts like an actual adult and can probably manage Trump as well as anyone could
Disregard actual political parties and their labels in this case. And there are no weird conspiracies behind this; there’s no puppet-master cleverly and carefully orchestrating things. There’s no dark lord match-making between Ford and Carney. Carney would probably have to direct the same amount of attention to any premier of Ontario simply because of Ontario’s own strength and importance.
I think the idea that Doug Ford and Mark Carney would collude to have Ford antagonize Trump to enable Carney to portray himself as the reasonable one while Trump is screwing Canada for his own ego is absurd. It’s absurd for a whole host of reasons but we’ve all wasted our time engaging with it because you don’t seem willing to actually state unequivocally that you believe this.
The truth is much simpler. Trump is actually screwing Canada for his own ego. The liberal government under Carney was reelected because a lot of Canadians already viewed them as being the reasonable actor in the face of an insane, vindictive neighbor. They failed to win an outright majority for other reasons - likely the scandals and bad decisions that led to Trudeau stepping down and the party being underwater prior to Trump’s trade war and annexation threat salvaging their popularity.
A lot to hate about Ford. He’s overly combative; he grossly overreaches into municipal affairs for partisan gains/grievances; he’s generally a small, petty, and vindictive; he weekly proves that he’s either corrupt, incompetent, or both.
But I’d hang 10% of this on him. Trump is a mercurial, whiny baby. This is just 90 millionth example of his bad faith actions. Lashing out and screaming “You made me do this” is his entire shtick.
Carney might have been elected because Trudeau stepped down, and Canadians wanted something that looked steady and competent. Fair enough. But calling him a “Trump Whisperer” doesn’t fit the reality we’re seeing. If this is whispering, it sounds a lot more like shouting.
You don’t calm a volatile U.S. administration by declaring a Palestinian state unilaterally, pushing a digital services tax the White House has already warned against, or letting premiers call the U.S. president a dictator. Those aren’t smart moves — they’re provocations. Either Carney’s people genuinely don’t understand how to manage Trump, or they’re deliberately poking him for domestic political points.
If it’s the first, that’s incompetence; if it’s the second, it’s reckless. And neither option helps Canada. Poilievre’s numbers show he could have won if Trudeau had stayed — that’s not “Trumpism,” that’s frustration with policies that made us less competitive and left us exposed.
So sure, Carney might look like the adult in the room, but if the goal was to stabilize relations and protect Canadian industry, this approach is doing the opposite. Competence isn’t a résumé it’s results.
If your sole focus is on “Trump whisperer,” then whatever; I may have heard that reference once or twice but it’s not at all what I think. I just want someone who is actually smart and mature, unlike PP.
Regardless of who our PM is, Trump Whispering is simply not realistic nor possible. What we need, and I believe what we have, is someone who can spend the next four (or more) years mitigating the steady and appalling stream of damage that the idiot down south will inflict upon us.
My focus is on someone who promised, more than once, to fix this issue, even set deadlines for it. Yet here we are, and the tariffs are higher than ever. How exactly is that “mitigation”?
If this is what competence looks like, I’d hate to see what failure is. Every move so far from the digital tax to foreign-policy posturing has only made the situation worse.
Let’s hope all this supposed “adult-in-the-room” diplomacy doesn’t make Trump angry enough to cancel CUSMA entirely, because he’s already said he sees it as unnecessary.
So, seriously, what is Carney actually doing to prevent that? Other than projecting calm and being the adult, where’s the tangible strategy that protects Canadian jobs and industry? Notice, I said tangible, not more promises that he seems to have issues with keeping.
This. Ford sending out the Reagan video was going to irritate Trump, and Ford should be blamed for the inevitable response. Not Carney, who was probably as surprised as anyone.
Also, any time you push back against Trump it will piss him off. I don’t think anyone could escape some kind of reaction from The Great Pumpkin.
An important thing to realize is that there is no “Gandalf” in Canadian politics, or anywhere else for that matter. Carney is an extremely intelligent and competent person (I know someone who has worked for him) who is stuck having to dance to the insane, mercurial, and childish tunes of Trump. No reasonable person is expecting some sort of miracle.
Regardless, you still might get to see what failure is. At the end of the day, Trump and his admin are completely unpredictable. He has made it clear that, at the very least, he fantasizes about destroying Canada. So let’s pretend for a moment that it’s more than fantasy and that he (as a puppet of Steven Miller) wants to fulfill the US’s “manifest destiny”.
If something purely military happens, Canada will lose, but before the Canadian public blames the weakness of the CAF, bear in mind this from a LinkedIn post of mine:
“I spent a 30-year career in the RCN and for my entire career I’ve had to listen to “experts” and well-meaning but naïve ideologues suggest that the CAF is just some tax-funded employment agency for paranoid alarmists.
For that duration, and probably for much longer, my country has done far less than the bare minimum required to protect this wealth of riches and resources that history has given us. All the while our government and pundits have lectured the world on our higher moral ground, bragged about us being a “soft power” that “punches above our weight”, thinking that somehow that magically allowed us to evade our responsibilities to defend ourselves.
So here we are, two years into a full scale war in Eastern Europe, a wannabe dictator south of us mocking and threatening us, and an evermore accessible and undefended north.
The bill has arrived at the table and we can’t pay it.”
This is where we are. When we are conquered militarily in a conventional war, this will be on a succession and variety of governments and their respective political parties, most of the Canadian population over the last forty or fifty years. Because of some accidents of history, our relatively tiny population has a wealth of resources that is probably unfathomable to most nations, yet we couldn’t fucking be bothered to make a reasonable effort to defend it.
Chretien used the DND budget as a giant bank for deficit reduction in the ‘90s and, believe me, that was bloody painful for members of the CAF. At the same time the RCN was to get a very sophisticated ASW helicopter, which Chretien cancelled, resulting in significant cancellation payments and a significant delay in fulfilling an operational requirement.
Harper, in a moment of vision and prescience, announced construction of a new naval station at Nanisivik, in 2007. It’s still not finished and has been somewhat downgraded.
We claim the arctic waters and the US challenges it, but again, we have done nothing to protect that arctic sovereignty.
So, @Uzi, stand by to see failure. It’s probably coming soon. And it won’t be Carney’s fault; the fault will belong as described above.
Given that the U.S. president has said his tariffs are intended to pressure Canada into becoming “the 51st state,” to blame anyone north of the border for current U.S.-Canada relations is truly to go through the looking glass.
Well Trump should still be blamed for it. The idea that one local or provincial politician in a country putting out an ad is a reason for a possible 10% tariff hike on the entire country is ridiculous. And the guy doing it is not even consistent enough about this that you could argue Ford must have known this would happen - Trump has done basically the same to counties that kissed his ass.
But it isn’t consistent to say that a politician shouldn’t get credit for projecting a levelheaded public image because that doesn’t mean anything while at the same time blaming that politician for another politician in his country for having an inflammatory response.
Well, since I have spent from the late 1983 to 2011 as a Canadian naval officer, and have experienced indifference at best from our government and public, and been told that I was exaggerating the threats out there, I kind of disagree.
First, thank you for your service - I know a few young folks who have just joined up.
I agree about your points about the indifference for decades about the Canadian Armed Forces. However I really doubt that this indifference has led to our current shitty US- Canada relations.
For that, you just have to look to one single deranged person.
On another note, I wonder if this current “10% increase in tariffs because I accuse you falsely about making and AI ad that tells the truth about tariffs” Is going to be used by the lawyers when they are arguing that the Trump tariffs are not legal because they are based on lies and not based on the tales of fentanyl or immigrants or other bullshit “emergency”.
I have, in fact, read about the obvious conclusion that this additional evidence of Trump’s derangement and focus on retribution is going to weaken his legal case on tariffs. I think this is very accurate and very important. This US Supreme Court case is going to be pivotal as it really addresses the wider issue of whether Trump can just run around like a dictatorial madman, or whether he should be bound by established laws, by the checks and balances necessary to a functional democracy, and by the Constitution itself.
I am not, however, confident that this particular Supreme Court, itself comprised of a few too many deranged and highly partisan individuals, will necessarily see it the same way.
What in particular is your definition of productivity and competitiveness here? And how does it get us out of the mess with Trump? Ten years ago, we were at the end of the Obama presidency where the alliance between Canada and the US was unquestionably solid and the economic ties were strong. No one knew Trump was going to burn it all down because of his absurd belief in the infinite money glitch that he calls tariffs. And I am sure we all wish we could go back in time and make better choices but we can’t.
But again, what is productivity and competitiveness as a counter to Trump? Can you show me an example? I can think of a couple. Colombia and Venezuela are very competitive in the market of cocaine, a product Americans absolutely love consuming. Trump’s response to their productivity and competitiveness is airstrikes. Completely illegal, war crime airstrikes while we are at it.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that you may be referring to Alberta’s under-developed oil sector. So let’s play what-if on that. Let’s say that ten years ago someone (not the government because they don’t know how to do this without it costing billions) built that mythical pipeline to the northern BC coast and sucked all the oil out of Alberta so we could sell it on the world markets, assuring us a “competitive” place as an energy exporter. Well, we still can’t compete with the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which accommodates VLCCs and ULCCs, the biggest tankers on the planet. And guess what? These tankers can’t service northwestern BC because they are too big. It isn’t just red tape holding them back (although there is legislation specifically banning them). It’s also rocks and tight passages and strong currents that can push a ship around even if it weighs 550,000 tons. So while Canada would need a conga line of small tankers doing a dangerous dance around our coastal waters, in the US, a ULCC can just pull up to LOOP and sail away with four to six times the amount of oil that the biggest ships here can haul. Oh, and it’s better oil too, not the stuff you have to pull a bunch of poisonous rocks out of before you can use it. So tell me more about how we are going to be competitive with this. And tell me again why it would matter. If we could get black gold that easily, Trump would say “it’s not fair!” and it would be all the more reason for him to take it from us by force because that is what bullies do.
There is no level of affordable defense spending that would allow Canada to defend itself from an American invasion. Absolutely, totally impossible, sorry. Indeed, had we been maintaining our NATO spending commitment, it wouldn’t really help much at all, because Canada’s defense spending wasn’t designed to defend ourselves from the USA. We spent our money on supporting NATO. More defense spending would have meant more ability to project combat power into Europe and the North Atlantic.
What’re you going to do? Spend billions on, say, having another army division? They’d get steamrolled. Doubling the number of combat aircraft we have? The Americans would eliminate our air force in two days.
The only realistic scenario for this event - because nuclear weapons simply are not an option - is investing in being prepared for a long, long guerilla resistance, both at home and in infiltration in the USA. Had the Mulroney, Chretien, etc. governments committed to more defense spending that’s NOT what they would have invested in. They would have invested in more conventional capabilities larely designed to fight in Europe.
Thanks for this whole explanation RickJay. Sometimes the blatantly obvious needs to be said.
I am really hoping at this point that we (the Canadian military) are preparing scenarios for just this - widely distributed forces and gear (drones) prepared for a long resistance.