Trump claims Canadians want to be the 51 US state. Canadian dopers any thoughts?

Politics & Elections
181

I don’t think so. If Trump was running in a true multiparty system, like Canada, he might still win, but he’d never get anywhere near 50%. It’s a two-party system that has allowed Trump to get where he is.

This puzzles our American friends. “Trudeau only got 35% of the vote. How can he be PM when 65% of Canadians didn’t vote for him?” Well, that’s what happens when you’ve got five serious parties vying for seats in Parliament, plus a few regional ones.

And that’s what will prevent a Trump from arising here. Every Prime Minister knows that he or she only has a plurality or a majority in the Commons, but not in the populace in general. So policies have to be created with that “most people don’t want you in power” thought in mind. Where Trump can say, “I won the popular vote and can do what I want,” Canadian politicians have to realize that they will never win the popular vote and thus they have to craft policies that will appeal, or will at least be tolerated by, the population at large.

ETA: This is addressing @survinga 's remarks.

182

The leader of the federal conservative party has hired Republican publicists and the premier of Alberta is visiting Trump at this moment so I’d say the odds are non-zero. I have less confidence in the Canadian electorate’s judgement every day.

183

Let’s do it now. Or in Smith’s case just leave her in Florida like a granny on an ice floe.

184

How fair an assessment is this?:

185

Seems reasonably accurate. PP is smart enough to know when’s full of shit, but he’s literally never cared about that. His entire political career has been about finding “gotchas” to toss ot the government, and his participation in 10 years of Harper as the government didn’t really do much to dissipate that reputation.

He really doesn’t have much in the way of policies, just slogans. this paragraph really sums it all up:

Poilievre attacks Trudeau’s policies as “authoritarian socialism”, calls him a “wacko”, and deploys tried and tested rightwing talking points on crime, immigration, and the Liberals’ carbon tax. After Trudeau’s resignation speech, he said that he would “cap spending, axe taxes, reward work, build homes, uphold family, stop crime, secure borders, rearm our forces, restore our freedom and put Canada First”.

JT has been PM for 9 years now, and Canada, while it has problems, isn’t a totalitarian state with a madman in charge. So “authoritarian socialism” and “wacko” are obviously derranged ways of describing JT, borrowed pretty much directly from the conspiracist fringe of the Freedom Convoy types. He’s saying that purely to appeal to the worst people in Canada, the types who would be MAGAs if they lived in the US.

The rest, “cap spending, axe taxes, reward work, build homes, uphold family, stop crime, secure borders, rearm our forces, restore our freedom and put Canada First” is just a bunch of slogans, and beyond the simplest, “cut taxes”, he has no idea how to do any of it. Capping spending and cutting taxes are just run of the mill conservative talking points, while “restoring freedom” and putting “Canada first” are again fringe notions, and no one really knows what they mean. Canadian freedom has not changes under JT, so what will be “restored”? And what does it mean to put Canada “First”? How will that affect PP’s actions? No one knows.

The rest, “reward work, build homes, uphold family, stop crime, secure borders, rearm our forces” are just a list of problems, that no one in Canadian politics knows how to solve. But I’m pretty sure any actual attempt to solve them will result in a head-on collision with the “cut spending and taxes” part of the plan. Again, Harper was PM for longer than JT, and also didn’t make any significant progress on any of these long-standing problems. Are we expected to believe that Harper’s less-talented understudy suddenly has all the answers?

186

I just saw Poilievre claim the federal government will raise gas taxes by 61 cents/litre. The correct answer is 3 cents/litre. I will assume everything else Poilievre says is just as accurate.

187

Furthermore in Canada the party governing is the party on the hook. None of this American division of House control vs Senate control vs Presidency. The government that governs owns policy successes and failures. There’s no way the blame the opposition party for a failed federal policy. At best blame gets directed vertically between the federal and provincial levels. In the US, however, you can smear accountability across all the parties.

188

Of course, that’s a two-edged sword. If a party can get a majority in the house, there’s nothing that anyone else can do to even slow down their program. See Doug Ford, for example. He lucked into a huge majority in the Ontario legislature on the basis of a very small percentage of the eligible voters, and can now do pretty much whatever he wants, no matter how unpopular it might be in the general population.

189

Which is true but you know exactly who to blame and who to vote out.

190

The whole Canada, Greenland, Panama thing seems contrived to take the heat off his ghastly choices for Cabinet and adjacent positions. These should have been the headlines so he succeeded in dictating the news cycle. He may yet address these absurd territorial quests through economic means but I think it was just a DISTRACT and DOMINATE the news “strategy”. I hesitate to use the term “strategy” in conjunction with the FELON…Its more of a “can’t keep his mouth shut / can’t stand to not be a headline” reflex reaction.

And the whole cabinet packing of cronies is to head off the 25th Amendment option of throwing him out of office. That was discussed during the end of his last term even among the idiots he had in place then.

191

I wonder if Hitler too had a similar idea of distracting people with talk of invading Poland and Austria and then realized maybe it was a great idea after all.

192

Unifying Austria in the Anschluß Österreichs under a pan-Germanic Reich was always in the cards (and also pissed off Mussolini, which I’m sure tickled *Der Führur * who never got over being snubbed by Il Duce earlier in his career as a burgeoning fascist). Divvying up Poland with the Soviet Union was more about eliminating a possible threat to the West.

Trump just wants Greenland because someone told him it was valuable, and it is an easy bauble to threaten to take. That it is serving as a distraction for his other misdeeds is certainly an advantage but I’d be reluctant to ascribe it the status of a ‘strategy’. Trump is not a planner or a deep thinker, and his ‘strategy’ for winning a game of chess is to sweep all of the pieces off the board while yelling about how unfair the other player is being to him.

Stranger

193

Hitler talked about the conquest of the East in Mein Kampf as part of his strategy to give the Geman people lebensraum (living space). Hitler had a well-planned and well-thought-out ideology & strategy to dominate Europe.

Trump is attacking Panama because he owes taxes and was sued. He’s attacking Canada because he doesn’t like Trudeau. He’s attacking Greenland because it looks big on a map…

Well, it’s slightly more involved that that. I think part of Trump’s thinking is to signal his disgust with NATO, and to signal to Putin that attacking sovereign nations is OK with him.

194

Nevermind.

195

CNN fact-checks Trump’s Canadian claims.

One of the most significant: the main reason for the US trade deficit with Canada is that the US imports a lot of Canadian heavy crude, which is cheaper than Texas sweet light crude, and used by many refinery industries.

If the US stopped buying the heavy crude due to Trump’s threatened tariffs, it will reduce the amount of gasoline produced by those U.S. refineries and gasoline prices in the US will go up. Those US refineries may go under if their feedstock dwindles.

196

Unfortunately, the far right is ascendant around the world. This hasn’t peaked yet, so I wouldn’t be so certain.

197

I saw a number of Americans who were interviewed on the Canada/51st state concept and seemed to be quite warm to the idea because “if we get Canada, then we’ll get health care”.

198

Talking to Americans tends to be simultaneously hilarious and frightening.

And deeply depressing

199

Ahh yes, harvested from the Great Healthcare Fields of Saskatchewan!

200

He doesn’t think they’re ghastly and they’ll all be confirmed anyway.