Imagine the relief they’re feeling. Photo from the voluminous PW files

Paul Wells

Hold it now and watch the hoodwink/ As I make you stop, think

Maybe the Americans assume we’re already part of their country because our leaders won’t get off their TV shows. Politico reports that Justin Trudeau’s office called Jen Psaki on Thursday morning and asked whether she’d interview Canada’s prime minister pro tem for her Sunday MSNBC political show. The PMO’s timing was excellent: Psaki was dropping a kid off at school, so she had excess childcare capacity at precisely the moment she was being offered quality time with somebody high-maintenance.

Trudeau had a message to deliver about Canada-US relations, and he was eager to deliver it to the seventh highest-rated show on MSNBC. He also paid his regards to Jake Tapper, who gets fully one-fifth the viewers of his Fox competitors.

Trudeau’s message to his tiny bespoke audiences was straightforward: that Donald Trump wants to talk about annexing Canada because he doesn’t want to talk about the economic costs of his own tariff policy. Trump’s advisors were said to be working this week on ways to limit those costs. Talk of costs isn’t guaranteed to change Trump’s mind, but nothing is. I don’t have a secret smarter policy I’m keeping in my back pocket; the situation is what it is. Danielle Smith went to Mar-a-Lago — a gambit as legitimate as Trudeau’s visit or anybody else’s — but didn’t come away sounding confident that she’d had better results than anyone else.

Even Stephen Harper — also appearing on a U.S. podcast — sounded worried and perplexed by Trump’s thinking. Still, Canada’s last Conservative prime minister delivered a rebuttal of Trump that was orders of magnitude more on-topic and specific than anything we’ve yet heard from the next Conservative prime minister. There’s playing tough, and then there’s being tough.

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Trudeau will do what he does until the Liberals select his successor. His itinerary for Tuesday says “No public events scheduled,” yet again. If he has any particular message for Canadians at T2 Minus Six Days, he is in no hurry to deliver it. I think something in him broke after the Toronto—St. Paul’s by-election defeat at the end of June. Sure, he’s talked to Mark Critch and the hot-sauce guy in Quebec. But the fight was out of him long before he made it official. The impulse in almost any politician to tell you exactly what they’re up to — the yearning François-Philippe Champagne has at triple strength — it’s all but vanished from Trudeau for months now. I don’t think it’s because he’s decided to resign. I think if he had managed to stare down his Liberal critics over the holidays, if he still had one more campaign ahead of him, he’d still basically be waiting. In that alternate universe, waiting for the voters to deliver their verdict.

Instead Trudeau let his party’s late-blooming internal opposition win, and now the Liberals are having a bad time of it. I have to assume that in some corner of his psyche, he enjoys seeing them squirm. All he wanted to do was receive the voters’ judgment. There would have been grim realism in letting him. But the Liberal caucus, docile in October, panicked and bolted in December after Chrystia Freeland quit. So now they get to come up with a better idea.

By 2021 or so, the people who’d left the Trudeau government started to look like a better cabinet than the ones who’d stayed. Similarly, a lot of the talent in the emerging Liberal leadership race is in the people who are sitting it out: Dominic LeBlanc, Anita Anand, Champagne, Mélanie Joly if you like. Steve MacKinnon would have been interesting to watch as an underdog. He speaks both official languages better than most MPs speak either, and after an early defeat in 2011, he reacted in the old-fashioned way: by figuring out how to get better at politics. Oh well.

Does anybody doubt the crew who aren’t running for the leadership will have a more pleasant 2025 than Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland, Christy Clark, Karina Gould, Chandra Arya and That Other Guy? Frenzied parallel campaigns to raise money and recruit supporters. Gigantic questions they’d rather avoid. Party horse-race polls that have exited the realm of arithmetic and turned into Escher drawings. And waiting just over the horizon, cracking their knuckles: the voters of Canada.

Realistically it’ll come down to Freeland and Carney, if they both run. A study in contrasts: she’s from Alberta but couldn’t save her former chief of staff who ran in the riding next to Freeland’s last June. He’s from Alberta but has been flirting with electoral politics since the Obama presidency. “I’ve just started thinking about it,” Carney told Jon Stewart, whose return has driven The Daily Show to fully 40% of Colbert’s ratings. Just started thinking about it? Where’s he been all his life?

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I wasn’t kidding, not one tiny bit, when I wrote last week that the least Carney can do is cough up the task force report on the economy that his party’s current leader commissioned from him four months ago. This should not seem like a clever gotcha from one of our nation’s premier snarky pundits. It should be obvious that serious people finish a job, and that the best measure of Carney’s insight and instincts is the work he was theoretically already doing when things got weird.

An obvious question for Freeland is why the Nanos polling spread between Liberals and Conservatives is seven points wider than it was the day before she left the cabinet. Another is whether the “costly political gimmicks” in the Fall Economic Statement she declined to deliver were the first she’d seen.

They’ve both done great things. Carney was appointed to run two central banks by two Conservative prime ministers, neither of whom ever had a word of criticism for his work. He delivered the smoothest possible Brexit even though he hated the idea. Freeland basically picked the Trudeau government up from the wrong side of relations with Russia and dropped it on the right side. Neither needs my permission to march into the history books. But if you think either is a natural political talent, you’ll find the next couple of months hard to watch.

Maybe one of the Liberal candidates will develop the habit of answering questions when asked. It would have the virtue of novelty. It worked well for Harper on that American podcast. Pierre Poilievre is still pivoting to message. Last week he was asked why Elon Musk seems to like him. “If I ever get a chance to meet Musk, I would say, how do we make this an economy where we bring home hundreds of billions of dollars of investment to Canada?” Smooth. Except Musk makes no secret of his answer: ban union labour. Which fits poorly with some of Poilievre’s pro-union marketing.

Two years ago three of Poilievre’s MPs met with Christine Anderson, a German eurodeputy from the AfD party. Poilievre called her views “vile” and said they “have no place in Canada.” Musk has been campaigning nearly full-time for Anderson’s party in German legislative elections.

I’m not trying to pin AfD’s politics on Poilievre. I’m just pointing out that once he no longer has Trudeau to kick around, the internal contradictions in Poilievre’s positions will become harder to ignore.

This week Jenni Byrne, Poilievre’s lead gatekeeper, came in for criticism when she criticized Erin O’Toole  for saying nice things about Anita Anand. “For anyone unsure why Erin is no longer leader of the Conservative Party…. [Anand] supported DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] policies like name, rank and pronouns. Tampons in men’s rooms, etc.” Much of the criticism amounts to dismay that Byrne could be so mean. I could hardly care less. But I do wonder where Byrne expects Canadian soldiers to fight, and alongside whom. Here’s a story on pronoun use in the U.S. Navy and Marines. Here’s one on the UK’s Ministry of Defence offering pronoun guidance while Boris Johnson was prime minister. Here’s NATO’s gender-inclusive language manual. When congratulating oneself on preferring a warrior culture to woke culture, it’s handy to have the first clue what’s going on in other warrior cultures.

Mostly I wonder how anyone could look at a Navy [UPDATE: That should read “Air Force” — pw] veteran congratulating a former Minister of Defence and think, before anything else, “But the tampons!” Poland, and Elon Musk’s friend Donald Trump, want member states in the woke NATO alliance to spend five percent of GDP on national defence. All of the Liberals and all of the Conservatives in all of Canada’s little schoolyard arguments have never come up with a plan to get to two. I know we all get excited about our little feuds, but after an election comes, whoever wins will have to provide real government for a real country in a real world. That’s harder than tweeting.