Bruce Dowbiggin
The Folding Lawn Chair: PMJT The Worst Negotiator in Canadian History

Stop us if you heard this before. Justin Trudeau talks tough but folds like a cheap lawn chair. His current spasmodic response to Donald Trump’s tariff threat should look familiar. He’s been here and backed down before.
The defining crisis of his time as prime minister– the 2022 Trucker Convoy in Ottawa– is the blue print for his handling of stress. For those with poor memories— or Liberals trying to forget—his arbitrary handling of the Covid vaccine crisis created a massive pushback among voters. Having forced everyday Canadians to take— under threat— an unproven vaccine he was faced with an unprecedented display of impertinence to his majesty.
In better times the pushback might have originated with a media offended by his high-handed ArriveCan fiasco and locking citizens into hotels against their will. By this time, however, PMJT had paid off large segments of Canadian media and was on his way to paying off many more. So it fell to independent truckers to expose Trudeau’s arbitrary undemocratic behaviour.
They came to Parliament Hill armed with truck horns and Bouncy Castles. There were no guns, no bombs, no assault vehicles. Just your garden-variety 18 wheelers who’d come from across the nation. This made Mr. Tough guy catatonic. As the truckers neared the capital he called them racists and Nazis intent on overthrowing the government. He baselessly claimed (in French) that their supporters were anti-science.
This faux-tough talk surprised many who recalled that, only months before, he’d blithely stood back, brows knit, as indigenous radicals blocked the main railway lines for months in protest of oil pipelines (more on this later). It was all soothing words and grovelling imprecations to understanding from Skippy. Maybe billions were lost, but at least he hadn’t upset Canada’s “first peoples”.
But when truckers protested in his home city, it was Code Red for our hero. Rather than meet protesters when the trucks arrived, hearing their grievances and agreeing to negotiate— as he’d done with the trainspotters— a cringing Trudeau hid, vilifying the invaders from inside his Covid cottage. It was all no quarter, no surrender, no show.

Canada’s media dutifully covered his flank, shopping numerous fake stories about Nazi/ Rebel flags and arson attempts. (For which they’ve never apologized.) In parliament he and his NDP service animals invented stories of huge donations from evil right-wing forces in the U.S.
Not surprisingly, giving Truckers the vaunted Trudeau middle finger did not send them scurrying back to their homes. Quite the opposite. Instead they hunkered down in an 18-wheel version of Woodstock. It was a rock n’ roll party that Ottawa police were dumbfounded how to stop. Noisy but non-violent.
This infuriated the burghers of Ottawa, those making their livings from government and the National Capital Commission. They were losing sleep in their cozy cribs. “Someone must pay!” A still-bunkered Trudeau then played the Dad card, sending in federal cops and suspending Canadians rights while seizing the financial livelihoods of the Convoy leaders.
His suspension of historic civil rights invited international censure. It would later be declared illegal in the courts. The use of the Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility,” Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley wrote. No matter. He’d proudly used a sledge hammer on a flea. People charged with mischief were off to jail for five years. Cosseted by the huzzahs of the purchased media he gave himself a W and went surfing.
Fast forward to 2024 when Justin was about as popular as scrofula in the polls . Entering 2025 he was trying desperately to hang onto power till the end of his term in the fall, when his handlers at the WEF would rescue him with sinecures and flattery. All domestic attempts to shame him into quitting failed. It seemed he had a clear path to make his own exit.
He never anticipated a re-elected, vindictive Donald Trump, never planned for the implications. Yes, this was the same Trump he’d casually ridiculed and insulted for most of the decade. Least of all, he was unready for a Trump armed with serious tariff threats unless the post-national PM shored up his defence and propped up the border. Oops.
Shades of the Truckers, the tariff skirmish could have been resolved by working with Trump on the border issue. But that’s not how PMJT rolls away. Trump invited him to Mar A Lago post-election, only to ridicule him as “governor” of a new 51st American state. A butt-hurt Trudeau then shut down Parliament and blamed Alberta’s energy cash cow, getting the other premiers to insist that the province block oil sales to the U.S.

Just like Dad in the old days there was no reciprocal ask of Ontario blocking its auto industry or Quebec its aluminum industry. Branch-plant Alberta would carry the burden. He coerced media and other parties to give him cover, vilifying anyone refusing to go along. He closed Parliament till March so his party could sort out its next move. This divide-and-retreat strategy has left the country on verge of dismemberment. But he acts like he had time.
Trump says Trudeau has till February 1 to cut a deal. Instead of negotiating Trudeau is threatening. The PM bravely supports “the principle of dollar-for-dollar matching tariffs” against the U.S. Conceding that this a terrible tactic he says the feds would be “there to support and compensate businesses”. Using public money to compensate for the negligence his progressive agenda has left behind. Can you say Covid.2?
What’s the difference from his Truckers Convoy dithering performance? Trudeau had simple truckers then, without power. In Trump, however, he has a freshly elected president with the hammer of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. Who can’t wait to crush Trudeau and his Liberal snobs as freeloaders on the American dime. “Exporters of terrorists, drugs and contraband into America”. Trump now has a unified front of social media billionaires while Trudeau has only a burned-out cabinet and Laurentian loyalists. What couldn’t go wrong?
If Trudeau lets this go past Feb. 1 without a deal or an election call it will be the worst constitutional catastrophe since conscription in WW I and II. Expect no mercy from down south. Every turn of the screw on Canada increases Trump’s polling. The Family Compact ain’t saving you, Skippy. And they won’t save the midwits who elected Trudeau PM three times.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Eau Canada! Join Us In An Inclusive New National Anthem

This past week has seen (some) Canadians celebrating their heritage— now that Mike Myers has officially reinterpreted Canadian culture as a hockey sweater and Mr. Dressup. This quick-change was so popular that Canadian voters even forgot an entire decade of Justin Trudeau.
In the United States, the people who elected Donald Trump– and not Andrew Coyne– to run their nation celebrated Independence Day with stirring renditions off The Star Spangled Banner, although few could surpass the brilliant performance of the song by the late Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl.
The CDN equivalent is some flavour of the month changing the words to O Canada at the Grey Cup game. Canada’s national anthem has always been open to interpretation by people who may or may not have Canada in their hearts. At the 2023 NBA All Star Game Canadian chanteuse Jully Black became the latest singer to attempt a manicure to the English lyrics of O Canada, penned for the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony ( Calixa Lavallée composed the music, after which words were written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The English lyrics have “evolved” over the years, just like the dress code for the CDN PM..)

Black amended the first line from “our home and native land” to our home ON native land”. Because something-something. But this creative license is nothing new. Unlike Chris Stapleton, Marvin Gaye or Whitney Houston with the Star Spangled Banner, interpreters of O Canada have seen fit to amend the lyrics to their sensibilities. Roger Doucet, famed anthem singer of the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970-80s, tried to add the words “we stand on guard for truth and liberty” in place of the first “we stand on guard for thee”.
In 1990, having nothing better to do, Toronto City Council voted 12 to 7 in favour of recommending that the phrase “our home and native land” be changed to “our home and cherished land” and that “in all thy sons command” be partly reverted to “in all of us command”. (The latter was officially adapted.)
While those attempts had mixed outcomes it appears it’s just a matter of time till Ms. Black’s class-conscious culling of the words is accepted. Being generous we here at IDLM thought we’d short-circuit piecemeal attempts to create a throughly Woke version of the anthem that would last till the latest fad come along. Herewith our 2023 definitive O Canada that even— maybe only— Justin Trudeau could love:
“O Canada” (Ignores the French fact in our culture) Change to “Eau Canada”
“Our home on native land” (ignores indigenous land claims) Change to “Get off our land, settlers”
“True patriot love in all of us commands” (Only true patriot love? There were officially 78 kinds of relationships in Trudeaupia. And commanding love?) Change to “Love the one you’re with”.
“With glowing hearts we see thee rise” (rise suggests triumph of white triumphalist dogma) Change to “Non judgementally we oppose the crushing impacts of Euro-based autocracy”
“The true north strong and free” (How can anyone be strong or free when we support America’s killing fields?) Change to “Heteronormative thinking must be stamped out at our borders. If we even have borders anymore.”
“From far and wide” (Body shaming) Change to “Obesity is a disease that is not helped by putting it in the national anthem.”
“O Canada” (biased against A, B, AB blood types) change to “Science Must Be Believed”
“We stand on guard for thee” (Spreads hate against the non ableist community) Change to “Please remain seated.”
“God keep our land” (God? God? What is this, the Reformation) “Change to “It’s your thing”
”Glorious and free” (Glorious harkens to the bourgeois subjugation of Indigenous thought processes by white Christian priests) Change to “A genocidal state if there ever was one”.
“O Canada we stand on guard for thee/
O Canada we stand on guard for thee” The denial of trans rights is used twice here to emphasize the intolerable burdens faced by people of the LGBTQ2R community as they seek respect and compensation for the evils of the founding oppressors.) Change to “Eau Canada, after 6.5 hours of intensive lectures on the gender, race and dissociative application of class war on your citizens you may someday come to understand that this song is a manifestation of your bigotry and exploitation of minorities— and why rhyming lines like “thee and free” is the work of the devil or J.K. Rowling, whomever comes to mind first.”

There. That wasn’t so tough, was it? Flows trippingly off the tongue like Mark Carney refusing a special inquiry into China buying the electoral process. Or perhaps we should simply accept a literal translation of the original French lyrics:
“O Canada!
Land of our ancestors
Glorious deeds circle your brow
For your arm knows how to wield the sword
Your arm knows how to carry the cross;
Your history is an epic
Of brilliant deeds
And your valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights.”
Yikes. That’s downright fascistic. But it’s Quebec, and we have to allow them their peccadilloes. So circle your brow with glorious deeds, grab a cross and a sword and valour steeped in faith. And remember we must be adaptable in the new era.
Unless it’s Alberta using the adapting to fuel its CO2-belching machines. In which case it’s man the battlements and follow Mike Myers into the fight.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Canada Day 2025: It’s Time For Boomers To Let The Kids Lead

So how did you spend your first Canada Day under new PM Mark Carney? If you’re CBC, freed from the clutches of Pierre Poilievere, you do a fawning interview with ex-pat comedian Mike Myers, whose Elbows Up appearance on Saturday Night Live and whose partisan hockey sweater appearance with Carney were pivotal moments in the recent election. (Saving CBC from drastic budget cuts— not that they mentioned it.)
After Donald Trump’s bellicose 51st state comments, Myers’ nostalgic harkening to the days of Gordie Howe and Mr. Dressup pivoted Boomers’ voter preferences in Canada. Soft Quebec sovereigntists petrified by Trump abandoned the Bloc for the Liberals. Progressives ditched the NDP for the Grits. And some wobbly Conservatives moved to Carney’s side, too, after the charm offensive by Myers, who hasn’t lived in Canada since the 1980s.

The result? Liberals vaulted 20 points in the polls and barely missed a majority in their fourth consecutive election win. Boomers were exultant. Their subsidized media was joyous. And the rest of the world asked if Canada was a serious country after the Libs naked substitution of Carney for the loathed Justin Trudeau. After all, hadn’t the U.S. Democrats tried the same thing and been summarily spanked by voters?
More to the point, had Canadian voters missed a great opportunity by sticking their heads in the ground on Chinese gangs using Canada as a drug launch pad, Canadian banks being fined billons for money laundering, immigration flooding social services, cratering GDP and Palestinian protests clogging the streets?
This at a time when the under-50 generation has lost faith in its destiny within Canada. As we wrote in March why are 43 percent of 18-36 male CDNs telling pollsters they would accept U.S. citizenship if they were guaranteed full rights and financial protections? Where upper-class products of liberal education— the future professional class— have taken to wearing keffiyehs to the convocations and demonstrations. Where housing is an unattainable goal in most major Canadian urban centres.
It’s not hard to see them looking at the Mike Myers obsession with a long-gone Canada and saying let’s get out of here. The signs are there. Recently former TVOntario host Steve Pakin attended two convocations. The first at the former Ryerson University, which switched its name to Toronto Metropolitan University in a fit of settler colonizer guilt. The second at Queens University, traditionally one of the elite schools in the nation. Here’s what he saw.
“At the end of the (TMU) convocation, when Charles Falzon, on his final day as dean of TMU’s Creative School, asked students to stand and sing the national anthem, many refused. They remained seated. Then, when the singing began, it was abundantly noticeable that almost none of the students sang along. And it wasn’t because they didn’t know the words, which were projected on a big screen. The unhappy looks on their faces clearly indicated a different, more political, explanation.

“I asked some of the TMU staff about it after the ceremony was over, and they confirmed what I saw happens all the time at convocations. Then I texted the president of another Ontario university who agreed: this is a common phenomenon among this generation at post-secondary institutions.”
At Queens, where Canadian flags were almost non-existent, O Canada was sung, but the message of unrest was clear: “Convocation sends a message of social stability,” Queen’s principal Patrick Deane began in his speech. “It is a ceremony shaped in history. You should value your connection to the past, but question that inheritance. Focus on the kind of society you’d like to inhabit.”
You can bet Deane is not telling them to question climate change and trans rights. As Paikin observes, “if we fail to create a more perfect union, we shouldn’t be surprised when a vast swath of young people don’t sing our anthem the way so many of the rest of us do.” So why are the best and brightest so reluctant to see as future in becoming the new professional class that runs society?
In the Free Press River Page searched the source of their discontent. “If the Great Recession, Covid-19, and the spectre of an artificial intelligence-assisted ‘white collar bloodbath’ has taught the professional class anything, it is that their credentials cannot save them. This insecurity, compounded by the outrageous cost of living in many large cities, has pushed the PMC’s anxieties to the breaking point.
“Add that to the triumph of identity politics in professional class institutions like universities, corporate C-suites, non-governmental organizations, and media—itself a byproduct of inter-elite competition as many have observed—and what you have is the modern left.
“… they’ve already come to the baffling conclusion that there’s no difference between class struggle and child sex changes. More to the point, the socialist mantra “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has only ever stood the test of time in Anabaptist sects. It requires a religious devotion to self-sacrifice that is not characteristic of this anxious and hyper-competitive class—as many actual socialists have spent the last decade warning.”

As we wrote in March Boomer nostalgia is a dead end. “It’s time that Canada’s aging elite ceded a greater voice in the national debate to younger voices. They need an intervention of the type Trump is now performing on Canadians addicted to sitting in first class but paying economy. He brought them into a room with the chairs and levelled with them about getting the free stuff they assumed was their right. Defence, security, trade, medical access. He’s the first president to do this in half a century.
And like all people addicted, CDN Boomers don’t want the truth. They want performance theatre, T-shirts and hockey games. They blame Trump for their predicament, caught between grim realities. Will they take the 12 steps? Or will their kids have to tell them the facts as they escort them to the home?” Because we’re now seeing the likely answer to that question everywhere in Canadian society.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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