Dispatch from The Front Lines: Are the knives out for Doug? And yet more reasons to never deal with Trump
Plus: a kick in the butt our friends in Europe needed, and hopefully won't waste.
Welcome! We hope your weekend is going great. If it isn’t, check out the latest episode of The Line Podcast — a very different format this week, but we think you’ll understand why once you watch it.
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We want to start this dispatch by welcoming all the new readers to The Line. Jen Gerson’s scoop last week about Elections Alberta’s failure to follow up on the tip she provided about a possibly dangerous data breach to separatist organizations has brought us a lot of attention, and we’re glad to see so many new people checking us out. These dispatches are usually kept behind the paywall, but we’ll leave it down this week so that our newbies can see what we’re all about.
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As for Alberta and Jen, she is still on the story, watching developments closely. We have more to say about it soon. But for now, all we really need to say is that we have been highly amused to watch Albertans act like there’s some kind of Olympic event for tossing people under the bus. The separatists are fighting online. Elections Alberta and the government are attempting to shuffle the blame off onto each other. Elections Alberta says that recent legislative changes set a bar for beginning an investigation that was simply too high. The government, for its part, insists that that is nonsense and is clearly unhappy at Elections Alberta’s performance.
We aren’t lawyers. Our reading of the law aligns more with the government’s view — this looks to us like a bar that is not impossible to clear. But we also have very little confidence that this provincial government has made legislative changes in good faith. But in any event, there has obviously been a breakdown in communication and understanding about something pretty fundamental in Alberta. That’s a problem.
Expect to see more on this as the story develops.
Pivoting from one province to another, The Line would like to note with interest developments in Ontario, our most populous province but normally, if we’re honest, one of the least interesting ones.
Our readers will likely recall the trouble Premier Doug Ford got himself into recently with the purchase of a private jet. Line editor Gurney already wrote a whole column about it, so you can go see what he had to say on the details. What interests us today is the bigger picture. A series of polls done in recent weeks have shown declines for the premier and his Progressive Conservative party. We’re not sure how much of this can be laid entirely at the feet of the jet fiasco; it’s also possible one of the reasons the Tories dropped the jet like a grenade sans pin was because they saw early signs of a major softening in their poll numbers. The Liberals, who do not even have a leader, are pulling even with the government.
We’re not going to overreact to this. Indeed, there’s something almost funny about this happening in May. Those who have been watching Ford since he was elected almost a decade ago are by now familiar with this pattern. Doug begins to struggle, his numbers tank, he disappears off the radar scope for a summer up at the cottage, and comes back in the fall with his political mojo restored. We don’t really know how to explain it, and we certainly don’t like it, but we’ve seen it often enough to have a suspicion we’re all about to see it again.
But there is an interesting signal this time that we did note. A recent report in the Toronto Star featured insiders telling reporter Robert Benzie that the jet fiasco, plus recent controversial changes to the province’s access-to-information laws, were both driven entirely by the premier. Doug wanted a plane, and Doug wanted fewer pesky questions about who he’s communicating with. So he rammed both those measures through.
To which our response was, well, yeah. We’d figured that out all by ourselves. But what struck us as interesting wasn’t the content of the leaks, but the existence of the leaks.
Under Ford, the Ontario PCs have generally been a pretty tight ship. These kinds of leaks aren’t unheard of, but they’re not common. And we’re starting to wonder if some of the people around Ford are starting to get a bit nervous about his remaining political longevity. If so, we could be looking at the very early phase of a quiet effort to begin arranging a post–Doug Ford era for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.
Like we said, it’s too soon to say. But we’ll be watching this. Our readers in Ontario should, too.
Now let’s leap all the way across an ocean, where NATO is trying to figure out what the hell Donald Trump meant this week when he announced that 5,000 U.S. troops would be withdrawn from their bases in Germany.
It doesn’t sound like a particularly complicated statement on the face of it. But the details matter a lot. Will these troops return to the United States? Will they be redeployed to a more cooperative European country, perhaps Poland? If so, that could actually be a net boost for continental security — eastern Europe could use the help. Until we know the plan, it’ll be impossible to say.
The clear intention of the announcement is punitive. The president has been musing about further troop reductions, not only in Germany but in Italy and Spain. All of this is in response to criticism of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, and what Trump views as a lack of sufficiently enthusiastic NATO/European support. Indeed, the note about the troop drawdown was paired with an announcement by the U.S. that it would suspend plans to deploy a battalion of troops armed with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to the continent — missiles that had been pledged by former president Joe Biden to bolster European security while the continent rearms itself.
A quick couple of points from us. First, we don’t necessarily view this as a bad thing. It’s sad. And it’s worrying. We liked it more when everyone was getting along. It’s nice to be nice, right? But all the signs have been pointing here for a while. The Europeans are belatedly beginning the process of a long-overdue remilitarization. This includes building out not only their armed forces but also the domestic industries that could sustain them in a time of war — indeed, given the Tomahawk deployment cancellation, it’s worth noting that the Europeans are looking at a domestic Tomahawk alternative already.
Trump’s announcement could give our European friends another good kick in the rear in the right direction, and that would be a good thing. But we cannot help but shake our heads at the absurdity of the damage the U.S. is doing to its own long-term security interests. The large American military presence in Europe is, of course, part of an American commitment to European security. But those bases and facilities are also vital components of America’s network of global power projection. The notion that the U.S. has kept up a military presence in Germany entirely as an act of charity is simply absurd. Those German bases are critical nodes of U.S. military power, and the Germans have indeed allowed the U.S. to use those facilities during the current conflict in the Persian Gulf.
These announcements by Trump broadly fit a pattern we have written about here more than once. It seems like America is currently being run by a group of people who view the entire post–Second World War global order as some kind of rip-off foisted upon gullible American leaders going back as far as Harry Truman. In reality, the Americans themselves have benefited enormously from the world order they so deliberately built, and now seem hell-bent on rapidly disassembling.
Oh well. This is a choice the Americans have a right to make for themselves. But we have a hunch that once this latest current of isolationism and bitterness works its way through the American body politic, a next generation of leaders may find themselves shocked to see how much American influence in the world has been diminished. And that diminishment can look like something as simple as redeploying 5,000 troops out of a country that will accordingly have less invested in keeping Washington happy, and all the more reason to rediscover how to stand on their own.
Finally, a note further to the above. Prime Minister Mark Carney has landed in Yerevan, Armenia, for a meeting with European leadership. Canada becomes the first non-European country to join the European Political Community proceedings. We don’t really have much to say about that, except that we hope the meetings are productive and that real results are achieved for the Canadian people and economy.
We mention it here because it makes an interesting addendum to what we just wrote above, and one with particular meaning for Canadian policymakers and commentators. Just a few days ago, in one of his typical fits of online pique, President Trump threatened the Europeans with another round of tariffs. In the process, the president blew up the trade deal that the European Union had reached with the United States — a deal that was supposed to avoid exactly this kind of spontaneous tariff levelling.
We leave it to the Americans and the Europeans to sort out their own problems. But this is yet another reminder of a point we’ve been making often lately: as long as Donald Trump is president, there really isn’t much point worrying too much about reaching a deal with the United States. No deal with the country, even one hammered out in good faith by experienced and seasoned negotiators on both sides, will have any meaning or value so long as it can all be undone by a presidential tweet.
We have a hunch Carney and his advisors have concluded this for themselves. And we find it kind of baffling when we see Canadians, including some in the official opposition, acting as though the difficulty here is Canadian intransigence or the Liberals being blinded by self-interest. There’s no shortage of those problems in our history and our Liberals do indeed have a nasty habit of conflating national interest and their own immediate short-term political self-interest.
But to focus on that while ignoring the day-to-day reality of life under Donald Trump, to us, goes beyond bizarre all the way into the delusional.
The time will come when we can cut a deal with the Americans again, and we hope it will be a mutually beneficial one. But good Lord, that time ain’t yet.
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After reading this article I suggest people read your article from the Halifax Security conference .
I would love to be fly on the wall at next years conference
After watching seven decades of Canadian government I no longer care about who leads and everything about how they will lead. Campaign after campaign has promised that all proposed legislation, policy and projects will be presented to the public with a detailed budget, the specifics on the source of funding and a clearly articulated measurement of success once implemented. Of course once elected, parliament and the public are presented with endless smoke and mirrors. Every party is guilty. No party in power provides honest, straightforward answers and the MSM act like deer in the headlights when questions go unanswered. And then the MSM write endless articles wondering why the citizens have lost faith in Canadian government. Bah, humbug.