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It is two months since Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as Liberal party leader and Canada’s prime minister. After a decade in power, Mr Trudeau had become increasingly unpopular. Two out of three Canadians thought he was doing a bad job. The opposition Conservatives led in almost every poll. With the Liberals staring a 2025 general election defeat in the face, Mr Trudeau’s ministers forced him out. His successor will be chosen this Sunday.
But then came Donald Trump. Mr Trump wants to strengthen the US at the expense of its neighbours. His hostility to Canada is thus visceral and deep. Without any justification, he promised illegal 25% tariffs on all Canadian and Mexican imports. As a fig leaf for his intentions, he falsely claimed that Canada’s 5,000-mile border with the US was an open door for migrants and drugs. He talked, repeatedly and deliberately, of annexing Canada and making it the 51st state. He mocked Mr Trudeau, referring to him as merely a state governor.
It is a malign strategy, at odds with the previous long alliance between the two nations. In Canada, Mr Trump’s aggression has backfired spectacularly. Unsurprisingly, Canadian national feeling has been turbocharged. Canadians are boycotting US goods and cancelling US holidays. The US national anthem has been booed at sports events. Mr Trudeau is quitting, but he has been giving as good as he gets in the fight against Mr Trump.
This week, Mr Trump finally brought in the tariffs, in flagrant breach of the North American free trade agreement. Then, following emergency talks with manufacturers that built their businesses around the cross-border terms of that agreement, he suspended those on cars for a month the next day. Stock markets tanked on day one, but rebounded a little on day two.
On Tuesday, addressing Congress, Mr Trump again told outright lies about the scale of migration, drug smuggling and trade imbalances with Canada. Yet the chaos continues, with global economic implications. Further tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium are scheduled next week. It amounts to a systematic and wholly unprovoked attack on the economy and sovereignty of a peaceful and prosperous neighbour, for which there is no excuse whatever.
Ironically, Mr Trump’s main political achievement is to have revived the Canadian Liberals, who have turned a large polling deficit around and are now closing the gap with Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. Whether that gap closes even further will depend partly on the choice of Mr Trudeau’s successor, which lies between the former finance minister Chrystia Freeland and the former Bank of England chief Mark Carney.
The Trump onslaught also poses a test of judgment and patriotism for all western Conservative parties, and certainly for Canada’s. An election contest that was previously about the incumbent Liberals’ record has been transformed into one about who is best placed to stand up for Canadian sovereignty. Mr Trump’s unpopularity is the central election issue. Mr Poilievre has been slow to adjust. This week he suggested, with all the sensitivity of Liz Truss, that the answer to the tariffs was to cut taxes.
Mr Trump has overturned Canadian politics as well as the international order. As a result, in the worldwide battle to protect a rules-based trading system, and to defend an international order based on respect for sovereignty, it is Canada that finds itself in the frontline.
