By: Andrew MacDougall
Prime Minister,
Canada’s name is once again up in lights after your decision to break off trade negotiations with Donald Trump. As with Davos, the world is noticing Canada and saluting its bravery in taking a bold stance against what they perceive to be Trump’s bullying behaviour.
The government’s position is also popular with Canadians, with three quarters in support of our decision to say “no deal.” The country is prepared to support a tougher approach, even if that means some economic hardship coming their way. That said, a plan is needed to now turn this goodwill — from home and abroad —into a strengthened negotiating position.
It won’t be easy. The President is already up to his usual tricks, “changing” the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America and posting images of a bald eagle attacking a Canada goose (spoiler alert: the goose wins in the end). The MAGA hordes online continue to row in behind their president, even as their lives are about to get more expensive.
That the president is willing to further increase the cost of living ahead of what are critical midterm elections is proof, as if more was needed, of his unorthodoxy. While there might be a method to Trump’s madness, that method is not tied to logic. With things going poorly elsewhere (see: Iran), we should expect Trump to lash out at Canada.
As you know, Trump’s superpower is setting the communications agenda. The platforms of the Attention Economy allow him to distribute content that would never pass editorial muster. He spews, the world responds (and the media cover). We can expect a steady stream of online invective from the White House and its proxies as they attempt to define and control the agenda.
We will not respond like-for-like. You and the cabinet should maintain a tone of regret, not anger. Your value proposition is sanity; a reminder of the time before politics got deeply weird and unpredictable. Lowering you to Trump’s level, tone-wise, won’t help Canada’s cause. You should continue to take the high road on more traditional media outlets while our outriders (including ordinary Canadian patriots) ply their trade on social media.
The following is an outline of a strategic communications approach to cover the period until the midterm elections. As we see it, our strategic objectives during this period are:
To put Canada’s relationship with the U.S. in the window in key states in this year’s midterm elections, to increase pressure where we can.
To keep Canadian and world opinion on Canada’s side.
Diminish and/or limit Trump’s superpower through platform reform.
The last objective is, by some distance, the most important. We can achieve the first two and still be back in the soup the moment the president has his next tantrum. We need to change the terrain on which Trump is forcing us to fight: the degraded information economy dominated by his anything-goes content on social media. The polluted information economy is an issue that impacts your colleagues around the G7 table; we believe there is a window to build a Davos-like consensus on limiting platform power before France gives up the chair at the end of the calendar year.
Objective One: Midterms and the Canada-U.S. relationship
President Trump is facing the loss of the House of Representatives and, with a fair wind, the loss of the Senate. His ability to act post-November will be constrained and possibly severely impacted should the Democrats gain control of both houses and begin investigating Trump’s personal enrichment (e.g. selling access to Truth Social, his crypto ties, insider trading, etc.).
Your activity
The U.S. mainstream national media, while familiar to you and useful with some audiences, won’t hit the Senate or Congressional races anything other than obliquely. We should instead prepare a steady cadence of media appearances with local news affiliates in key battlegrounds like Maine, Alaska, Michigan and Ohio. The key message: We’re sorry about the damage being inflicted upon you by your leadership, but Canada is still the friend and neighbour you’ve always known and loved and that this, too, shall pass. These appearances would be unorthodox, but it would allow us to present our position in the form of news — local — that is the most trusted in the U.S. It is also highly likely the national media would pick up on our activity and report on it second-hand, giving us needed amplification (while limiting our need to answer more process or personality-focused questions).
Our embassy in Washington will also work at pace to pull together a meeting of key lawmakers on Capitol Hill — offering up an exclusive Chatham House Rules Q&A with yourself and key members of the negotiating team. Our top-line message will be that Canada is willing to go to the wall and that they will have to take the hit alongside us because of the actions of their president. And while we should expect the contents of the meeting to leak, we don’t mind if President Trump knows we’re making the case in his backyard.
The visit should be capped off with a trip to Fox News for a long-form interview. Trump’s voters need to hear what their president is doing to them, in their name, for no good reason.
A supporting ‘on the record’ campaign
Your media activity will be supplemented by a traditional and respectful online and print advertising campaign in the same key markets, touting all of the benefits of the Canada-U.S. trade relationship, with content tailored to local issues (e.g. hydro power in the Northeast). The visuals will centre on you personally, to give Canada a “face” in the minds of voters and present our respectable face.
Titled “(Don’t) Blame Canada”, the campaign will also highlight the benefits of Canada’s oil, potash, uranium, critical mineral, energy, autos, machinery, and wood exports, tying each to an everyday outcome (e.g. wood = more homes built, auto parts = cheaper cars, potash = more crops grown, oil = cheaper gas).
To launch the campaign, we propose releasing a fireside chat video from you to the American people, clearly setting out Canada’s aims and objectives. This could combine the tonal and content approaches of Tom Brokaw’s famous tribute to Canada from the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (for evidence-led depth), Doug Ford’s Reagan tariff ad, and your address at Davos. The content would be economy-focused, laying out, in depth and in the clearest terms possible, the value of the Canada-U.S. relationship. The video will reinforce your brand attributes, while reducing the President to his role of algorithm-humping shitposting meme lord.
A supporting ‘below the line’ campaign
There is also room for a sharper online advertising campaign, one that can deliver more pointed messages without our fingerprints. The team is still working up options but they could feature reports of President Trump’s corruption and set them against what Canada has to offer.
An early sample text: “Canada doesn’t have a $400m plane for Trump’s personal use, but it does have cheaper gas for every American.” OR “Canada doesn’t have $500m to bung Eric and Donny Jr at World Liberty Financial, but it can turn off the power at Trump Tower.” As you can see, the messages clearly need some refinement, but the point would be to get under their skin in a hands-off way. (Come to think of it, we could prank the President by giving him RCAF 001.)
Our outreach team is also contacting prominent Canadian comedians and have them record online roasts of all of Trump’s past failures, i.e. Trump University, Trump casinos, the USFL, etc. In a pinch, we could even ask Justin Bieber to record a mocking version of “Macho Man.” The goal would be to reduce Trump to a walking joke and to provoke a personal reaction.
While higher risk, we can maintain plausible deniability (and point to our blander “on the record” campaign). What’s more, early polling in the United States is showing the President’s latest fight with us to be unpopular. We are approaching a tipping point and it is time to push his buttons and make him look even more ridiculous (see: his Oval Office “event” to rename Lake Ontario).
Objective Two: World opinion
To keep global opinion formers on side and consolidate the view of Canada as the noble nation standing up to Trump, we should also conduct a series of interviews with key broadsheet and business-focused titles like the Times (U.K.), Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times (we will aim for the ‘Lunch with the FT’ feature). There are several messages to put across here: 1) Fights between allies in the G7 produce only one winner: the autocracies destabilising geopolitics; 2) Canada is a sovereign nation and will never accept being suborned; 3) Canada will fulfill the promise of Davos and continue to unite the middle-powers, particularly economically.
We further recommend that you maintain your cadence of foreign visits — they will be helpful in maintaining Canada’s profile as a Trump-slayer and critical in building consensus for our third objective.
Objective Three: Destroying Trump’s social superpower
As mentioned, each G7 country is struggling with the impacts of President Trump’s foreign policy, including his use of tariffs. We have all borne the brunt of Trump’s impulsiveness and economic illiteracy. The President and his administration are also actively fomenting political opposition within our nations (see: Alberta separatism, AFD, Le Pen, etc).
Instead of responding tactically to each Trump attack, we must think strategically and deny him the tools that allow him to sow such chaos. As previously stated, Trump’s superpower is his understanding and use of the media, particularly social media. We must use this moment to push for serious reform of the major platforms of the attention economy, almost all of which are based in the United States.
President Trump will kick hard at any attempt to limit platform power, as evidenced by our climbdown on the Digital Services Tax. That is why we must hang together, and not separately.
There is a broad case to be made, as these platforms:
Give authoritarians an easy way to disrupt our information economy and, through it, our politics. Just last week X identified a Chinese bot farm of 200,000 accounts, a subset of which have been seeking to influence U.S. debate on data centres. As our own intelligence shows, influence operations are everywhere on social media (see: Alberta separatists, the Hogue report)
Stripmine attention, the free West’s most important resource, and decrease our mental health with heavy use, particularly in young children. And while the evidence here is still contested, the fact our children are now using social media for hours a day is not a sign of a properly functioning society.
Crush the accountability function provided by the Fourth Estate, sinking the expensive-to-produce scrutiny of journalism in an ocean of most attention-grabbing opinion-based content. That we allow platforms that make money off content that our eyes and ears cannot trust is an own-goal for the West.
The good news is that reform efforts are already under way. Like we are with Bill C-34, many of our traditional allies are examining the idea of social media bans for children. Further efforts at protecting children will be (more) difficult for President Trump to oppose.
There is also support from the U.S. courts. Recent trials in California and New Mexico have found the platforms liable for addictive design, with Meta choosing to settle claims brought by dozens of U.S. States’ Attorneys General for US$17.8 billion. More importantly, the settlements also mandated design changes for teen users, changes Meta is now trying to force others in its space to follow. The G7 should seek to leverage these U.S. rulings to complete our own social media reforms and encourage further reform on addictive platform design. Why shouldn’t adults be offered the same protections as their children?
President Macron, Prime Minister Meloni, Chancellor Merz, Prime Minister Burnham, and Prime Minister Takaichi should all be receptive to further action in the platform space. We will position this as protection of our citizens, and of our democratic canvases, not as an attempt to curtail President Trump.
President Macron is Chair of the G7 until the end of the calendar year; we will make him our first port of call. There won’t be time to get a result ahead of the U.S. midterms. Our goal should be a more modest one — to establish a working group at the ministerial level to examine these issues. Placing a marker ahead of the U.S. assuming chair responsibilities in 2027 will be critical.
As ever, the team is ready to discuss our recommendations and then to action the activities you authorize.
Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
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A predictably good piece of work on strategic communications. Thanks for this.
Some useful stuff. Hopefully the author will get contracts out of it.
One of the items not mentioned is the usefulness of the good cop-bad cop routine with Carney being the good cop and elbozo-in-chief Doug Ford being the bad cop. Taking off the barking chihuahua’s muzzle every now and then does make Carney appear reasonable.
I would be cautious in trying to turn Democrat Governors against the President though. The howls on the Canadian side when Alberta communicated with American advisors or when Chinese foreign interference with elections came to light will be matched tenfold on the US side especially if the interference is as overt as the author suggests in this article. Especially when you consider how Canadian patriotism which admittedly has surged recently is still probably only at IMO a quarter of that of the vast majority of Americans. No Democrat will be prepared to accept gains in electoral points from Canadian influence or put himself in a position of being accused of foreign influence.
I’m puzzled at the suggestion that social media should be controlled and supervised in the same way that children’s use of this media is - or is proposed to be - controlled by government. Who will decide? Bureaucrats with powers to fine and jail with no appeal as is now the case with so called “hate speech” legislation?
I personally don’t believe an agreement will be reached until the Quebec election results are known and the Federal government then decides on their position.