For Sale or Disposal After Canada's Election: One Party Leader, Heavily Used, Poor Condition
Canada's election yesterday has dominated today's news in the US, mostly because it was such a stunning example of Donald Trump's reverse-Midas touch. Trump somehow managed to revive Canada's Liberal Party, turning this year's election from a near-certain rout of the incumbent party into a stunning victory by Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberals. Not only did the Conservatives lose, but party leader (and would-have-been PM) Pierre Poilievre even lost his own seat in Parliament. By 4.6 points. For a seat that he had held for twenty years. Yes, it was that bad.
Here, I will first offer a few thoughts about the election and Trump's weird obsession with Canada. Mostly, however, I want to reflect on Poilievre's downfall, because it was wonderfully delicious. Indeed, I wrote the headline for this column by paraphrasing the headline of my column after another overconfident bully lost his chance to lead a nation: "For Sale or Disposal: One Governor, Heavily Used, Poor Condition." The similarities between Poilievre and Florida's still-governor Ron DeSantis are quite striking and very interesting. But first, Trump and Canada.
Trump's obsession with tariffs is of course what motivated him to do many of the things he has done to destroy the US's reputation in the world, all but guaranteeing a recession in the US and most likely everywhere else. Trump, however, has a different set of talking points about why he is so intent on annexing Canada. After all, he thinks -- entirely incorrectly, but that is hardly a surprise -- that every country in the world has been taking advantage of the US, but he is only talking about outright takeovers of the Panama canal (but not even the whole country), Greenland (but not all of Denmark), and Canada (the whole enchilada -- er, poutine). Or maybe Gulf of America counts?
I cannot recall who said it, but it was probably Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC who pointed out a month or so ago that Trump's argument for annexing Canada contradicts his repeated claim that he is going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. As it stands, guys in Toledo or Flint who do not have the factory jobs that they used to have (or that their fathers had) might be told that "your" job was shipped to Canada, which is ripping us off. That means that those American workers are angry at the guys in Brampton or Hamilton (two industrial cities near Toronto) and want those guys to lose so that the American workers can win.
Trump's solution, however, is not to do that at all. Trump simply wants to say that the guys in Brampton and Hamilton are suddenly American! And Americans do not steal American jobs, right? Except that the guys in Toledo and Flint still would not have "their" jobs. They are apparently supposed to be happy for their newly adopted brothers, and all will be well. Trump has never told a consistent story about how his ideas are supposed to work, because he skips over making arguments and simply announces that good things will happen (prices will come down, the Ukraine-Russia war will end, and on and on). But this Canadian annexation idea is next-level nonsense.
And the things Trump says about Canada's "rightful" place being within the US are equally puzzling. He trolled Canadians with this yesterday: "No more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this land mass would be." He apparently has this strange idea that only the US-Canada border is arbitrary, but that is what borders are. In fact, that is what they have to be, even when they are based on natural features like rivers. After all, the Mississippi does not even separate East Louisiana from West Louisiana, much less the sovereign nation of Western America from its arch rival Eastern America. Some rivers are borders, some are not. Some lines are borders, some are not.
That same social media post also included this advice for Canadians: "Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st." Again, how is that stopping Canadians from ripping "us" off? He is supposedly angry that Canada's defense spending is lower than the NATO targets, so his solution is to give them American defense protection? Tax-free?
Trump's fixation on Canada, however, did result in PM Carney's election and Poilievre's losses (both his party's and his own). Trump was going to be a problem for Poilievre in any case, because the Canadian Conservatives have been notably Trump-loving for quite some time. The heart of Conservative country on this side of the border is Alberta (sometimes called "the Texas of Canada"), with its neighbor Saskathchewan also in the mix (making the latter Oklahoma, I guess?).
Danielle Smith, Alberta's Premier, is thus the equivalent of Governor Greg Abbott, and she has been a huge Trump fan, even flying to Washington for the inauguration to cheer him on. She was humiliatingly left out of the select group of invitees when the weather moved the event indoors, but the love affair continues.
Indeed, there are Canadian Conservatives -- officeholders, not just random dudes -- who wear MAGA hats in public and talk about how Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. They have been borrowing from the US conservative movement's playbook to plot their own takeover of Canadian politics. Smith did try to get Trump to stop saying positive things about her party, in the most revealing and clumsy way possible: "So I would hope that we could put things on pause is what I've told administration officials. Let's just put things on pause so we can get through an election."
Moreover, as Politico put it when describing Poilievre's attempt to pivot away from Trump:
The attacks, however, haven’t entirely been convincing because Poilievre still sounds like Trump — his firebrand rhetoric closely resembles the messaging that propelled Trump to the White House. And it’s making it hard for Canadian voters to not see Trump’s shadow as Poilievre speaks.
His use of the “Canada First” slogan is reminiscent of “America First,” the signature Trump phrase that serves as a rallying cry for his MAGA movement. His strongman posturing also bears a stylistic resemblance to Trump.
As I noted at the top of this column, however, Poilievre's problem is even deeper than all of that, because he is more of a DeSantis than a Trump -- a wannabe tough guy who just cannot pull it off. Indeed, when I first arrived in Canada and watched some clips of Poilievre in action, I remember thinking: "This guy is just DeSantis, but with a neck. Yet somehow even oilier." Because I had moved here directly from Florida, that was a bit dispiriting, to say the least.
Poilievre, like DeSantis, is constantly talking about "woke," in an identically content-free way. Woke is whatever Poilievre wants people to hate. Woke is bad, and thus everyone who is not for Poilievre is woke. Poilievre does not give long interviews to real journalists, but he sat for a long interview with rightwing provocateur Jordan Peterson. (For those who are blissfully ignorant of Peterson, he is the guy who said that he "would rather die" than stop dead-naming the actor Elliot Page.) So yes, Poilievre is That Guy. DeSantis without the GoGo boots.
And the attempts at DeSantis-like smarm are also striking. DeSantis's failed attempt to turn Winston Churchill's "we will fight them on the beaches" by replacing "them" with "woke" are nothing compared to Poilievre's video in which he tried to sound like a visionary. No white boots, but some strange choices nonetheless, including wearing a white cowboy hat and a white T-shirt while standing behind a podium with the words "Common Sense" emblazoned on it. (Actually, he might have been in white from head to toe, for all we know.) He likes those short slogans, too. He was a big critic of Canada's carbon tax (of course), so "Axe the Tax" was one of his most overused slogans. One observer described Poilievre's sloganeering as an endless series of posters saying "Verb the Noun."
The Poilievre team is so inept that they took down that all-white video after it turned out that the stock imagery meant to show Canada's greatness included photos from Ukraine, Slovenia, and even the US. A shot of the Rocky Mountains was in fact from Indonesia. Are the Canadian Rockies not good enough? Even the American scene was ridiculously lazy, because it was a scene of cattle grazing. Again, we are talking about a political party that is strongest in Alberta and the other "prairie provinces." I am fairly certain that there are cows in western Canada.
The hits kept coming. Poilievre insisted that it was meaningful that the Nazis called themselves the "National Socialist Party," even though that bit of red-baiting propaganda is as old and weak as it can get. Easily the thing that most made Poilievre a doppelganger for DeSantis, however, was the way that both men sneer at reporters and think that bullying people whose job forbids them from arguing back is great fun. The videos of DeSantis yelling at a reporter about the Don't Say Gay law should have been embarrassing, but DeSantis's crack staff used it and similar snarling performances in their official campaign material. Poilievre is somehow even more toxic, as these lamentable videos show. It is difficult to say which of the two political clones is happier when attacking a reporter, but for both it borders on sadism.
And now, Poilievre is out of a job. Like DeSantis, a man who has spent nearly his entire life in politics crashed and burned before even hitting his 46th birthday. And in both cases, the downfall happened because of the man they most wanted to emulate. Maybe each of them will have another political act in life, but for now, karma is smirking.
-- Neil H. Buchanan