Dispatch from the Front Line: Thud. It's here

Are you all figuring this out yet or nah?

Well. Okay, then.

What do we say? How do you even start this dispatch? We have some housekeeping to do and we guess we should just throw it at you. This week, of all weeks, is when we’re finally launching our On The Line podcast as a regular full-time feature. And good God do we have a lot to talk about. Stay tuned for that on Tuesday, and please sign up to our page at YouTube, or Apple, or Spotify, or via another podcast app of choice to never miss an episode. We really want to give On The Line a great start after all the hard work we’ve put into it, and we’re really excited about it. We really are. But celebrating and pumping it up just feels weird right now. So thanks for that, Donald.

In any case, that lands on Tuesday morning. And for now, of course, enjoy this week’s episode of The Line Podcast. You’ll continue to receive these episodes on Fridays.

We make our usual requests of you! Please like, subscribe and share widely. That means here at the main site, of course, but also on our distribution channels: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all the others. A nice review helps, too!

And now, Lord have mercy, on with the dispatch.

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Before we get into the main meat, we wanted to just share a thought that occurred to us on Saturday night. This weekend felt very familiar. It felt like five years ago: the moment when the official Canadian position on COVID-19 flipped, literally overnight, from: “The risk to Canadians is low and we’re better prepared than anyone because of our experience with SARS” to “Holy fucking shit, everyone go home, lock their doors and stay inside or else you’ll either die or kill someone else!”

What we mainly remember about that day, was how the broader public was just way ahead of understanding the mess we were in than the government. Canadians had been buying up every roll of toilet paper in their nearest Costco for weeks before the feds realized we were about to get hit (or that we had been hit).

This weekend felt something like that: after weeks and months of wondering if a bad thing was going to happen, this weekend … thud. It happened. Tariffs are here. The risk wasn’t low. And we aren’t particularly well prepared.

Your Line editors were pretty convinced this was going to happen from the day Donald Trump won re-election, so our emotional response is pretty muted. We did our grieving already and have been trying to sound the alarm since November. Our regular readers will know that. We have been immensely frustrated and, we admit, upset, by the outright denial among many of our political and civic leaders. Much like with COVID, a lot of smart people with power to make a difference clung onto hope that the bad thing wouldn’t happen far longer than could be justified.

Maybe it’s just human nature. Maybe you need to have a streak of optimism to do some of these jobs. We dunno. But what we do know is that for the last few months, many influential individuals had stretched their denial and bargaining efforts like an ever-tauter elastic band. And this weekend, it snapped. Some of what we’ve been hearing from friends and colleagues is truly pretty close to outright panic.

To all Canadians we say, calm down. Take a breath. This is going to be hard. It’s going to be painful. We have no illusions about that. But there are things we can do, if — if — we keep our heads and move quickly, calmly and rationally to identify our national interest, and act with all haste to make those things so. We don’t accept that we’ll be successful at this. We have doubts, to be honest. But it’s what has to happen.

Panic only serves itself. It doesn’t serve Canada. Stout hearts, cool heads and hard work will be our watchword. We hope that’s true for you, as well.

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As per the above, we at The Line are belatedly gratified to see our leaders finally seem to start to “get it” with regard to the strategic threat posed by America and her president. A lot of intellectual understanding of that threat seems to have finally and truly hit the gut this weekend and, well, as we said above, better late than never, we guess.

Further, we think that the response from all our leaders is, on the whole, pretty sound. The provinces released statements in tandem; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a solid address to the nation. Pierre Poilievre began to lay out a series of steps that — dare we note — reveals just a glimmer of the Asshole Nation that we at The Line have been calling for.

What we can't help but note is that all of their responses are fundamentally rooted in the tactical rather than the strategic. It's tit-for-tat tariffs, hitting high-impact industries and red states. All of our responses are calibrated to address the tariffs as if the tariffs exist in isolation.

While we don't think there's anything wrong, per se, in pursuing a tactical response to the economic threat at hand, none of our leaders are really, fully where they need to be just yet. To put this bluntly: we think they may have confused our response. We are responding tactically. We do not seem to be responding strategically.

We're going to need to speed through a collective grieving process and come to terms — very quickly — with the fact that the assumptions upon which this country has operated for the past 60-odd years are now dead. Gone. Kaput. Rotting in the street. And applying a dollar of pain there for a dollar of pain inflicted here doesn’t really begin to get at the key problem. So long as we keep viewing and responding to all these moves in isolation, we will find ourselves behind the Americans constantly, reacting over and over to their moves. A smaller country cannot long compete with a much larger opponent if it allows that opponent to dictate the terms of the engagement.

So while we’re glad our leaders are starting to get it, we still need them to take that final step — stop seeing this as a tactical contest, of moves and countermoves, and start seeing the whole board.

We're going to need to change how we think about ourselves and our place in the world, and damn quickly.

And to that end, we at The Line would ask all of our leaders to ponder the following question.

What is Canada's Win Condition?

No, we're not asking what your hopes are, the best-case scenario. We're asking you to consider the country's win condition.

A lot of you are going to be tempted to say something sane like: "our win condition is the preservation of our auto-sector supply chains," or "maintaining the integrity of our shared energy infrastructure."

And that’s nice. We would love to still live in that world, too.

But we want you to ask yourselves: what if our win condition is something closer to: "the preservation of Canada as an independent and sovereign nation in the face of an increasingly lawless, autocratic, and autarkic America?"

How would we build a strategy — not just a series of tactical responses, but an actual strategy — backwards from that outcome?

We can't know whether or not Donald Trump is actually angling to annex us as the 51st state. But we, as a nation, can no longer rule that possibility out. It is, after all, what he has said he wants to do. He has repeatedly brought our surrender up in public and private conversations, and has mused about using “economic force” to accomplish it. This sure looks and feels like economic force, doesn’t it?

Hope for the best, but plan for the worst: yeah, we hope he’s still just negotiating when he says this stuff. But we now have to make plans assuming he is gunning for exactly what he's telling us he's gunning for, and that the things he is doing, he is doing in pursuit of that goal.

And if that is our strategic win condition, the suite of options available to us becomes fundamentally more radical. Existential threat has a beautiful way of clearing the mind and re-setting long-held assumptions and priorities.

That strategic assumption must go way, way beyond tit-for-tat retaliation. It means we're going to have to pull out the old Game Theory textbook. It means being way crazier than our opponents. We're going to have to consider approaches that would have sounded absolutely bananas only a few months ago — an approach that your Line Editors have settled on calling "Asshole Nation." Trashing American IP; booting up generics; bulldozering pipeline infrastructure through the country. Move quickly. Break things. Make the Americans think we’re nuts … because we are.

Hell, can we pull out of shared defence frameworks? Like, why would we maintain a facade of cooperation on any military matters with a nation that is actively threatening our sovereignty? Only the politest version of a Canada would consider it.

Asshole Nation is going to have to make a very public example of people like Shopify Executive Tobi Lutke, who very naively sided with Trump this weekend, saying: "These are not crazy demands, even if they came from an unpopular source. These tariffs are going to be devastating to so many people’s lives and small businesses.”

Not only is undermining the national resolve in such a moment dangerous on its face; but Lutke's comments have the added downside of being dumb.

We at The Line are entirely for playing kabuki theatre if warranted; we are pro beefing up border security. We're tough on crime. We've been calling for increases to NATO spending for years. We should be doing all of these things because they serve our own interests. Period. Further, we've been screaming at our own leaders to pull their heads out of their asses on the tariff file for weeks. We would reiterate, again, how absurdly irresponsible it is for the Liberals to prorogue parliament to hold a leadership race at this moment.

But we're also not naive about Trump or his motivations. Canada is simply not a major source of migrants or fentanyl to the U.S.

Trump is manufacturing excuses to engage in this trade war because he believes that tariffs are good for the United States. He believes reshaping continental trade serves his interests. Could we have handled this better? Certainly. Have the Liberals fucked us? You betcha. But the question of whether or not this war was preventable is now a moot point. It is upon us, whether we could have prevented it, or not.

We need whatever is left of Canada's pro-Trump faction to understand this: Trump's rationale for a trade war is bullshit. He's pursuing this course for his own reasons, and it's not clear that we could offer anything to him in order to secure concessions. The President will change course when his own personal metrics for success are met, and it's not clear that Canada has any control over what those metrics are at all. Hell, it’s not obvious that those metrics are even clear to Trump himself, right now.

It's possible that the only thing we could give to Trump that would encourage him to repeal tariffs is the country itself.

This is a possibility that a lot of people are going to struggle to come to terms with. We need you to hurry up.

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To that end, can we point out, once again, that it is absolutely outrageous that Parliament is prorogued, that the prime minister has effectively quit on the country (notwithstanding his halfway decent address to the nation on Saturday), and that the governing party is grinding its way through a leisurely leadership race?

It’s a sign of just how much everyone associated with the Liberal Party of Canada has simply internalized Justin Trudeau’s profound narcissism that this is happening. Because it isn’t just an unfortunate coincidence of events, and it’s not just a regrettable situation that we wish could have been otherwise. It is, to use the word in its most expansive sense, completely criminal.

Here is what should have happened: Justin Trudeau should have resigned a year and a half ago, when it was clear his act had worn out its welcome. Failing that, he should have been pushed out by caucus and cabinet in June after the disastrous by-election in St.Paul’s. He should never have been allowed to remain in power after Donald Trump won the election. And after he stood up on December 11 and called the defeat of Kamala Harris a “setback for women’s progress,” party leaders should have duct taped his mouth shut and stuffed him in a sack.

But again, Liberals have simply internalized their leader’s profound narcissism, so here we are. And here is what we think must happen:

Mark Carney needs to force the issue, with Trudeau and Freeland. Trudeau has to resign this week. Freeland needs to see that she is a large part of Canada’s Trump problem, drop out of the leadership race, and back Carney. The party needs to rewrite its rules on the fly, and install Carney this week as leader and as prime minister. Parliament has to be back by next Monday.

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On a final note, we at The Line want to pass to you, our dear paid subscribers, a memo written by a friend of The Line, who has been working in American politics in various roles for more than a decade. We know who this person is (very well). And we know he’s qualified to offer this assessment. Beyond that we won’t say more.

On November 27, alarmed by what he was hearing from Canadian officialdom, he wrote and sent around the following, in the hopes of getting this country to wake up to the risks facing it in the face of the incoming Trump administration. We know that this memo was widely circulated, in Conservative, Liberal, and general corporate circles.

To wit:

"What follows is an attempt to clarify the thinking of the incoming American administration for Canadian decision makers. I have spent more than a decade [working in this space]. I have never reached out this way before, but am doing so now because I think there is a basic misapprehension about the nature of our forthcoming relationship with the United States. For example, with respect to the experienced voices dismissing this week’s prospective tariff announcement as a negotiating gambit: yes - but also very much no.

The first thing to understand is that we are dealing with a political dominance play, not a trade negotiation. There is a trade negotiation taking place within that dominance play, but the economic goals are subservient to the primary aim, which is asserting superiority.

This stems from the structure of the incoming administration, which is effectively a feudal court wearing a representative democracy’s clothes. President-elect Trump is a restless, aging king with little interest in detail but a profound concern with image and status. The factions in his administration (court), which are still evolving but number at least six semi-coherent groups, have their own agendas and will work hard to take Trump's general statements and present him with outcomes or ideas in search of his favour or advancement. Each faction will have to compete with the other to find approval, and each will be incentivized to present more radical or innovative policy proposals.

What this means in practice is that we cannot assume that Trump will pursue an agenda that aligns with what we would consider to be America's rational economic best interest. Rather, this is an administration that is aiming to "win" according to its own emotive standards and metrics -- which usually include ensuring that someone else "loses." This is not about securing a better quality of life for Americans, it's about "Making America Great Again" with plays that assert dominance and control over both friends and allies, even at America's own material expense.

The incoming administration is broadly (though not universally) willing to accept economic pain in the USA to accomplish these goals, although there are already factional divisions on this point. Crucially, economic pain in the USA is politically useful to the President-elect, particularly where he can blame that pain on others; ie; 'evil foreigners hurting good working Americans to advance their own greedy agendas.'

Trump and many of the key members of the administration also understand their political capital will be at its peak over the next 12 months. As a result there are ambitious plans to act fast and dramatically. They feel they have a transformational mandate, and that the status quo is an existential threat to America.

Further to that point, our government and civil service are not well positioned vis a vis Trump’s court, or the new movers and shakers of the administration. Our diplomatic corps are simply not well integrated enough to grasp Trump Kremlinology. Lindsay Graham is not in the loop. Much of the administration's center of gravity is outside the beltway, wall street, and major institutions. We need to build capacity here, and quickly. This means building wider relationships with the Heritage and America First networks, The Mar-a-Lago club and its influential members, and Trump’s family and friends.

We need to discard previous expectations about “appropriate” escalation in forthcoming disputes and negotiations with the incoming American government. Appeals to the past or current standards will backfire. We need to expect a wide array of potential actions, including but not limited; to escalating tariffs, visa requirements for Canadians entering the United States, cancellation of the Nexus program, restrictions or a total ban on energy imports, US ownership requirements for importing businesses, US Law Enforcement access to Canadians/Canada - even a total border closure.

Of course, there is no way for anyone, including myself, to know whether or not the incoming administration will actually follow through on any of these threats at this point in time. There will be a dizzying process of ‘flooding the zone’ and moving the goalposts in coming months. Clarity of aim and a solid read on the President’s shifting win conditions at any given moment will be essential. Success in this environment will require that we always understand the game being played within the game. But to provide a few examples of where things are heading: Jamieson Greer’s appointment as U.S. trade representative is a clear signal that tariffs are coming. Sebastian Gorka, the president-elect’s choice as senior director for counterterrorism, is deeply hostile to Canada and his remit includes elements of border security. ”Border Czar” Tom Homan is committed to across-the-board changes in American border policy, and to mass deportation - both of which will impact Canada.

In this environment, attempting to debate minute policy points in public, by, for example, fact checking Trump's claims on border security or drugs, is not only an utter waste of time, but will be regarded as provocative. Trump et al. will accuse Canada of a long list of sins in coming months, some of which will be correct, and some of which will be fabricated or exaggerated. No one we’re dealing with cares which is which. This is bait. The purpose will be the same regardless of the merits of the allegations: the assertion of dominance.

Strategically we have chosen to separate ourselves from Mexico. For Canadian purposes, the apparent decision by the Mexican government to take a hard line position in negotiations can be turned to Canada’s advantage. This gives Canada the opportunity to play helpful neighbour and be the first mover. It opens the prospect of a Trump Administration dissipating its political capital and energy on a political (and, perhaps, kinetic) fight with Mexico, giving Canada the ability to stay under the radar.

In a perfect world Canada’s Liberal government, Conservative opposition, and Premiers can engage in a kabuki play over the next 6-8 months. The government negotiates, talks a lot about the importance of Canadian interests, tut-tuts about threats. The opposition pushes on necessary reforms to border security, immigration reform, and moving to a 2% of GDP defence spend in short order. If the two parties coordinate, we can get some real reforms done under American pressure, while giving the Trump team the image of strained compliance they are seeking for emotional reasons - while doing things we already need to do for our own reasons.

Any strategy will require everyone to stay on the “working to maintain and deepen our most important strategic and economic relationship” talking point. Everyone else can network like crazy in private, but the administration is only going to negotiate with the federal government and anything else said in public will be used as leverage for its domestic base. If we don’t hang together we fall together.

As a political note, the Liberal temptation to try to run against Trump and pretend Poilievre is MAGA north is a bad plan for Canada, in addition to being ineffective electorally for the LPC. Even if the LPC can make Trump the bad guy they still wear the economic dislocation on top of their already massive negatives. They need to weigh the national cost of that political gambit carefully.

Canada is not in a position to refuse the Americans. Nor are we in a position to seriously retaliate. We are too deeply intertwined economically, and our diplomatic and international standing too weak, to “win” a confrontation. The Trump administration understands this; further, they know that we understand it.

We are facing an administration intent on forcing a confrontation, in which positive policy outcomes are a secondary consideration. No one of significance in Trump’s orbit cares about the details of their policy files with Canada - being “right” or “having the facts on our side” isn’t relevant. Our strategic imperatives need to be focused on damage mitigation, evasion, and rapid capacity building to improve our position vis a vis the United States for future negotiations. The next 8 months are a critical window."

Again, we note that this note was set around on Nov. 27. In the past two months, this country has… dicked around. Our only attempt at a real strategy amounts to allowing the provinces to go off half cocked in the absence of any federal leadership and shrugging. "Oh, but Trump couldn't possibly."

Oops.

Our critical window has since narrowed from eight months, to six.

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Thanks, everyone. Talk to you this week.

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The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com