Special Dispatch: Here comes the chaos

Who's jazzed for the next four (+) years!?

Well how about that for a rug pull!

There is a lot that we can say about Trump's first 24 hours back in office. Lord knows there's a ton of material to work with. We're going to mostly ignore the stuff that isn't directly relatable to Canada. There just isn't going to be any way to keep this manageable otherwise. Good luck, American media friends. We salute you.

Picking this up where it directly involves us, as we suspect our readers recall, President Donald Trump had said that he would tariff Canada and Mexico on his first day back in the White House. In the hours before his inauguration, though, it seemed as though there wouldn't be any immediate hit to Canada (or the Mexicans). Whatever relief Canadian officials may have felt was short lived, however. Later in the day, the president said that those tariffs would roll out on Feb. 1st. It wasn't clear if that means with immediate effect, or if the president will make the announcement on Feb. 1 and then the actual tariffs will bite later on.

A few points we'd make.

The first is that on Monday afternoon, just after Trump had taken the oath and given his second inaugural address, your Line editors gabbed by phone briefly and agreed to basically hold off writing or publishing anything until the first few chaotic hours were behind us. One of the reasons we explicitly discussed for that decision was that Trump in office is going to be wildly unpredictable. Some of this is, no doubt, calculated — flood the zone with conflicting messages in order to confuse and fluster the enemy (that's us, alas). This is all art-of-the-deal manoeuvring. But it's also clear to us, and we've said this to you all as often as we could in recent months, that the agenda of the second Trump term is going to be largely driven by the people around the president. And those people are going to be a constantly shifting blob.

The president is a very old man, and though we're going to avoid the temptation to diagnose him from afar, it's been clear to us watching him in recent months that he's not as sharp as he was in his first term. We aren't at Biden levels yet, but Trump is 78. That ain't young. He does not have a deep grasp of all policy issues. His positions on various issues aren't necessarily rooted in deeply held philosophical, ideological or political principles — Trump is, at his core, transactional.

We don't intend any of the above as criticisms, per se, so please calm yourselves, MAGAists. The above are just assessments of how the man will operate as president. Trump’s administration, as with any other president, will be shaped by his personality, and his weaknesses and strengths. Trump’s strength in business, in entertainment and in politics has always been in negotiating. We don't think anyone would really disagree with that.

And some of those negotiations are going to be internal. This is the critical point we want people to understand. Trump is going to negotiate hard with Canada, and the others, but what he wants and what he demands will also be determined by negotiations inside what we've been calling, and we aren’t joking (much) when we do, the Court of Mar-a-Lago.

This is going to mean that our lives are just going to be impossibly random for the next few years. Our information indicates that Trump was fully intending to hit Canada (and others) with tariffs on Day One, but was talked out of it at the last minute. He then apparently was lobbied to stick with the tariff plan, and settled on Feb. 1 as the date. Or he just changed his mind. Or forgot that he had agreed to put the decision off. The lobbying by both pro- and anti-tariff factions of his inner circle will continue. He will be sporadically interested and engaged.

The upshot of all of this is that while Trump is going to deliberately muddy the waters and sow confusion for his own direct bargaining advantage, sometimes, the White House's confused positions on important issues are going to reflect genuine internal disarray, probably in addition to deliberately misleading signals. Priorities will shift unpredictably. Long-term plans will be forgotten or ignored. Every single day of the next four years is going to be driven by a constant interplay of personal relationships and horsetrading.

It’ll be dangerous, and exhausting, and fascinating. We really don't know how the hell to deal with this. We don't envy those whose jobs it is to figure it all out. But this is our reality now. Becoming the best in the world at Trump-era Kreminology — Mar-a-Lagology? — is now a first-order national security imperative for Canada. It’s weird to type that, but weird is in. Get used to it.

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One thing really got our goat this morning at The Line: Canada's fatalism. None of This Could Have Been Foreseen, and if it had, Nothing Could Have Been Done. We expect to hear a lot of that in coming weeks, because learned helplessness has become something of a national pastime in this country.

And we also want to get ahead of it.

Bullshit.

What is happening right now was absolutely foreseeable. No one can claim with a straight face that U.S. tariffs could not have been foreseen on January 21, 2025, a full eight years to the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time. It's not 2016, anymore. Nobody was blindsided.

Your Line editors wrote plenty of columns over the past decade noting that even if Donald Trump the man were not re-elected, the protectionist and reactionary currents that pushed him to power were still ascendant in America. The Biden admin was a reprieve, an opportunity for Canada to make necessary internal changes to withstand those currents.

And what did this country do with that time?

Jack all.

We at The Line have been scratching our noggins trying to think of single meaningful Canadian reform or improvement to come out of Trump 1. We did nothing to strengthen ourselves internally by an iota. Not a single lesson was learned.

It's entirely possible that we were inevitably going to be dinged by some U.S. administration and, perhaps, this was not avoidable. No one can fully mitigate all risks. Granted.

But we can certainly do literally anything to address risks that are highly probable. Instead, we have absolutely degraded both our moral and financial capacity to be resilient in the face of economic threats; and that degradation is the direct result of almost ten years of Liberal party priorities, inactions, or choices ranging on files from crime, to market diversification, to being truly useful to our international allies, to failures on interprovincial trade.

This wasn't unforeseen. We were willfully blind. That's different.

We ignored the looming threat in part because our government was distracted by COVID. But also also because Canada's political culture is too immature to make hard decisions, or to have real debates about trade offs or priorities.

Justin Trudeau is the kind of prime minister who would rather run the kind of country that lets him spout off on Jake Tapper about compassion and $10-day-day daycare and dental programs than NATO spending.

What about the scads of taxpayer cash we've squandered on things like "superclusters"? What if we had prioritized strategically crucial projects like Northern Gateway or Energy East, instead of letting them die under the mantra of: "no business case."

Remember when Germany and Japan came asking after our natural gas supplies in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? What if we had spent oh, say, $13 billion, on fast tracking some kind of natural gas facility to supply our international allies because doing so served a strategic national interest rather than a pure economic one.

We didn't pull that number from the air, by the way: that's what Canada subsequently committed to subsidies for EV plants in southern Ontario — something for which there was a scant "business case" before, and virtually none now that Trump has decided to scrap EV subsidies. It’s looking not-great, Bob. Not great at all.

See, that's the problem with running a low-productivity, highly centralized griftocracy that is more invested in expanding entitlements, symbolic action and emotional gratification than actually doing anything. We are now severely limited in our capacity to respond in the face of serious economic threats. We can talk a good game. We can bluster. We can invest in more symbolic retaliatory action; but we have utterly squandered the internal resilience required to mount a real fight in even a trade war, much less a kinetic one.

And we at The Line can't help but note the deafening silence from our international allies as well. They think we've got it coming, too. Perhaps there's "no business case" for sticking their necks out on our behalf.

If this country MAIDs itself in the next 18 months, we at The Line know what slogan belongs on Canada’s epitaph.

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So here’s something: Quebec Premier François Legault has turned out to be a more clear-headed and forceful defender of Canada, in the face of both Trump’s tariff threats as well as his increasingly-menacing musings about turning Canada into the 51st state, than anything that has come out of the Trudeau Bunker in the past few weeks.

On the one hand, this seems remarkable, given that Legault has been the squeakiest possible wheel in Confederation in the six or so years he has been premier. While not explicitly separatist, his government has been more often than not barely federalist, habitually either overriding, rewriting, or simply ignoring the constitution as he sees fit.

But on the other hand, three years ago, Legault sent a substantial chunk of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) to Ottawa to help clear out the “Freedom Convoy” protesters that had been occupying the capital for the better part of a month. The SQ deployment was even put under the command of the OPP, which is remarkable.

But more generally, when push comes to shove, Quebecers, or as they were known in a prior age, French Canadians, have always been some of the most forceful defenders of Canada against American imperialism, realizing that the only real threat to the French identity here comes from America. As Taché said in 1846, the last cannon shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain would be fired by the hand of a French Canadian. Make the necessary changes, and you get the highly autonomist premier of Quebec coming out in defence of Canada against a predatory American president.

And so it shouldn’t really have surprised anyone to see Legault come out swinging. In an oped in the American political website The Hill that was published on January 15, Legault spoke to Trump businessmano a businessmano, saying essentially: Look I get where you are coming from. We all want better control over immigration and the border, we all want Canada to have a stronger military. But tariffs aren’t the way to do it, it’ll just hurt the both of us. And as for that 51st state stuff, forget it. Let’s get to work building a stronger North America for all of us.

The potential costs to Quebec are huge. Over 70 per cent of the province’s exports go to the United States, with as many as 100,000 jobs apparently at stake in everything from forestry to mining to aerospace.

But while hoping for the best from the volatile American president, Legault is clearly preparing for the worst. He has called for a “burly retaliation plan” by Canada in case the tariffs do come, suggesting that Quebec might look at export tariffs on Quebec energy and aluminum and even aircraft. And finally, if worst comes to worst, he has committed to treating a trade war like COVID, with the government providing broad-based support to affected individuals and businesses.

We at The Line have some other ideas for what Legault could do to support a unified Team Canada approach to Trump; we would start with the premier committing to putting his political support behind a restarted Energy East pipeline project. He could also make it clear that any talk of an embargo of Alberta oil and gas needs to be off the table.

But overall, we’re impressed with the leadership Legault has shown on this, especially compared to the Liberals in Ottawa, who, having done nothing for the past eight years to prepare for Trump, have decided to double down on that strategy.

In exchange for his backing of a unified Team Canada approach, Legault has demanded that Quebec have its own representative at the table when it comes to negotiating with the Americans. He should get it.

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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