I am routing for Chrystia Freeland. I am imagining Claudia Sheinbaum to the south and Freeland to the north making a fool of Trump every step of the way.
Even if she wins the Liberal leadership race, she’d be prime minister for all of 5-6 weeks since an election is an inevitability once parliament sits again on March 24 and the Conservative Party of Canada is leading in the polls by at least 20 points. We’re looking at a collapse in the Liberal vote of historic proportions, maybe worse than their previous worst showing in 2011. She’s so closely tied to Trudeau that I don’t see how she would be able to move the needle with an electorate that has soured on him so much. She’s also an awful retail politician, despite her intelligence and abilities.
Unlike. Poilievre, who is a wonderful retail politician? Not. And wait till we hear his responses to Trump's 51st state. Canadians will just love losing their OAP, CPP, and health care, not to mention their sovereignty.
Poilievre objectively sucks, but he’s good at politics and is an excellent retail politician. Just because he’s detestable doesn’t mean he’s ineffective at what he does.
No, he's not good at politics, except to the extent that he's good at imitating Trump by spouting empty slogans that mean nothing and aren't tied to any reality. Also, no one likes him. He's Canada's answer to Ted Cruz. Also: I refuse to believe in the inevitability of his ascension. It's only inevitable if the rest of us fail to vote, and fail to vote for someone else. It might be a time for strategic voting. I still don't know how effective that is. But it is NOT a done deal unless we sit on our hands.
I think this likely plays into Trudeau's calculus. He knows his successor will preside over a crushing defeat. Not that the negative association attached to a Freeland or Carney will benefit him (Trudeau) or cleanse him from a lot of blame and ill-feeling. But it might at least tarnish the viability of one his rivals: How long will a Freeland or Carney be able to stay in the leadership post after leading the party to a massive defeat?
If he's anything like his dad, Justin Trudeau is already thinking about his political comeback.
If Canada were the 51st state, it would have the same clout as California in government (# of congressmen) and would be very much a democratic state. Trump should be careful of what he wishes for....
Another way of calculating: Canada's entire population is little more than California's so in Trumpland they'd get about the same number of House members, and the requisite 2 senators. All told, and with just enough magites, that might zero out California's influence at the national level (except of course that California pays more tax into the fed pot than any other state and Canada could not begin to match that.)
This all implies that the number of House Representatives increases which might not be the case and you still only have 435 in total just spread even more thinly than they are now at around 750K per representative.
The US has become the world superpower in part because of the safety afforded to us by having close economic and military allies as our only neighbors. Trampling on that now not only doesn't make any sense, it only makes us look extremely unreliable on the world stage
Trump is the pretend bully on the world’s playground. It’s his ONLY modus operandi. He knows nothing else and his act is old. The world is already laughing him (and the USA) off the stage this time around. It’s going to a long 4 years.
“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.
The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.
At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.
At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.
The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.
Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fuelled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.
Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.
We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”
Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.
All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.
All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”
Written by Andrew Coyne.
Andrew Coyne is a highly respected Canadian columnist with the Globe and Mail and a regular panelist on CBC's The National, who has previously worked with Macleans Magazine (Senior Editor) and the National Post.
Could we be in for a worldwide economic shock with the Trump-Republican trifecta of US Government? POTUS-Congress-SCOTUS. And what is to keep us from catastrophe? Given how compliant an apparent plurality of US voters is with their propaganda.
By rewriting history and ignoring facts for so long, the GOP may usher in conditions similar to those that caused our Great Depression. There is too much talk of deregulation, nonsense hot air investments like bitcoin (might as well be trading Pokemon cards), and also talk of eroding our safety net.
Pure laissez-faire tends to bubble and bust and run off the rails whenever allowed to do so, like with a lack of adequate regulation in the Financial Crisis and the S&L crisis, The tariffs may cause a global recession to start us off followed by policies that make conditions far worse at home causing a domino effect with "trickle down" style nonsense.
The rich are cutting off their noses to spite their faces for tax cuts, since all that they are proposing to get there will shrink the economy (and even their own wallets).
EXCELLENT! This post is friggin great on so many levels. First, I’m glad to read someone who knows FRED and the St Louis Fed. I’m also glad to read someone who knows what Bretton Woods is (trivia: it’s a noun, but what kind?)… Anyway, your analysis is so spot on. I’d like to hear a little more about what economic levers Canada has available to pull, because I don’t fully get how their central banking system works on its own. (That’s just me, though). Thank you very much for the enlightening post with the supporting data! Much appreciated.
"Although I believed that Brexit would hurt the UK economy (its actual consequences deserve at least one separate post), I never bought into scenarios of catastrophe. Why? Because I knew about another example of a country that neighbors a large customs union but isn’t part of that union and doesn’t have free movement of people across its border with that union."
What I have found about politics is that "this will make things slightly more sh**ty" is a very difficult argument to win people over with. Hell, it's a hard argument to get people to even MAKE.
Like, all considered, just as it was unlikely Brexit would cause a depression or reboot The Troubles, it's pretty unlikely that Trump is going to take any actions that destroy the US government or end democracy. (Not that I'm ruling it out.) But it's overwhelmingly likely that he's going to make bad policy decisions that are going to make people's pay a little lower, make things a little more expensive, make crime a little worse, etc.
People's inability to notice these small differences, or the direction they're moving, is f***ing us royally. A big part of the problem is that everybody thinks statistics are useless for describing reality, even though they're the place where these small differences show up. So people can just decide "how things are" with their own limited vision, unexamined biases and (in the case of ~80% of '20s Americans) relentless cynicism.
(And now that I'm thinking about it, I'm pretty furious at the press for spending the last three years telling people they were right to ignore statistics, and that those like Dr. Krugman, who were actually trying to figure out what was going on, were "ignoring people's pain.")
The legit press should have ignored Trump from the outset. No Trump quotes. No attending Trump “news conferences,” etc. Unfortunately, the press was making so much money from Trump coverage, it blinded them from the consequences of publicizing a blustering ignoramus.
Yes, Trump is a narcissist and narcissists simply want attention. His entire life has been about using his inheritance to seem like he is a big deal when other NYC real estate heirs that are less famous actually change the skyline.
Canada wpul do well to take in Dem systes like CS, MN, NY, IL (might have to accept WI or MI to maintain a contiguous map), PA (??), maybe the New England states, New Jersey.
Let Trump have the Taker States. Meanwhile. the Giver-States can put the money they save on bailing out the inheritors of the Confederacy to participating in the Canadian health care system.
Indeed. But most important are California, Oregon, and Washington. With California, Canada++ would be the world’s third largest economy, and the people of the annexed US states would receive the benefits of Canada’s political and legal systems. The sooner the better!
One of Canada’s minor parties leaders has already offered (jokingly) to add California, Oregon and Washington to its territory in response to the Felon. As a lifelong resident of the US West Coast, I wish she wasn’t just joking.
Frankly, I wish Elizabeth May would take one for the country and offer to run for leadership of the Liberal Party. She might just be the person to give PP a good shellacking in the polls! (For those of you who aren't familiar: she is the leader of the Green Party, which regularly gets between 1-2 seats in Parliament.)
Canada also suffers from a major real estate bubble where housing prices have become unaffordable for those who wish to live in the most desirable cities (Toronto and Vancouver come to mind). The observation about oil and gas is a good one, and slapping tariffs on Canadian exports of energy to the US will only hurt the US consumer. BTW, between oil, gas, and power Canada is intimately linked to the US and disentangling the power system would be unwise, as well as the natural gas E&P and pipeline systems. They work as one large machine already.
America is energy dominant thanks to Putin’s asinine invasion of Ukraine…which is also why Canada is now focusing on LNG export infrastructure instead of oil infrastructure. We are now in the Age of Natural Gas…the Age of Oil effectively ended in 2010 when fracking was proven economical and America became effectively energy independent even though people didn’t realize it at the time.
I am routing for Chrystia Freeland. I am imagining Claudia Sheinbaum to the south and Freeland to the north making a fool of Trump every step of the way.
Even if she wins the Liberal leadership race, she’d be prime minister for all of 5-6 weeks since an election is an inevitability once parliament sits again on March 24 and the Conservative Party of Canada is leading in the polls by at least 20 points. We’re looking at a collapse in the Liberal vote of historic proportions, maybe worse than their previous worst showing in 2011. She’s so closely tied to Trudeau that I don’t see how she would be able to move the needle with an electorate that has soured on him so much. She’s also an awful retail politician, despite her intelligence and abilities.
Unlike. Poilievre, who is a wonderful retail politician? Not. And wait till we hear his responses to Trump's 51st state. Canadians will just love losing their OAP, CPP, and health care, not to mention their sovereignty.
Poilievre objectively sucks, but he’s good at politics and is an excellent retail politician. Just because he’s detestable doesn’t mean he’s ineffective at what he does.
No, he's not good at politics, except to the extent that he's good at imitating Trump by spouting empty slogans that mean nothing and aren't tied to any reality. Also, no one likes him. He's Canada's answer to Ted Cruz. Also: I refuse to believe in the inevitability of his ascension. It's only inevitable if the rest of us fail to vote, and fail to vote for someone else. It might be a time for strategic voting. I still don't know how effective that is. But it is NOT a done deal unless we sit on our hands.
Can't understand that PP is good at politics, and thank you for that comment. He IS Ted Cruz.
Don't forget our recently-minted dental care, which will also go poof!
I think this likely plays into Trudeau's calculus. He knows his successor will preside over a crushing defeat. Not that the negative association attached to a Freeland or Carney will benefit him (Trudeau) or cleanse him from a lot of blame and ill-feeling. But it might at least tarnish the viability of one his rivals: How long will a Freeland or Carney be able to stay in the leadership post after leading the party to a massive defeat?
If he's anything like his dad, Justin Trudeau is already thinking about his political comeback.
Trudeau's problem is that he's not like his dad
20 points down and Conservatives are at the door. Sounds like Labor is going to suffer a shellacing. Sound familiar?
Would each of these dynamic women be chewing on one of his ankles? They may be smarter than Trump, but their economies are far smaller.
And in any case His MAGAsty is self-fooling – their contributions would be enablement and/or encouragement at best.
I was actually severely disappointed in AMLO on that front, though.
If Canada were the 51st state, it would have the same clout as California in government (# of congressmen) and would be very much a democratic state. Trump should be careful of what he wishes for....
Practically speaking, each Province would come in as a separate State and the Republican Party would be entirely done in by this.
Another way of calculating: Canada's entire population is little more than California's so in Trumpland they'd get about the same number of House members, and the requisite 2 senators. All told, and with just enough magites, that might zero out California's influence at the national level (except of course that California pays more tax into the fed pot than any other state and Canada could not begin to match that.)
This all implies that the number of House Representatives increases which might not be the case and you still only have 435 in total just spread even more thinly than they are now at around 750K per representative.
The ultimate poison pill.
Canadians would get no say in how they would be misruled. Just like Americans are finding out.
Forget it. Ain't gonna happen, so why even speculate about it?
The US has become the world superpower in part because of the safety afforded to us by having close economic and military allies as our only neighbors. Trampling on that now not only doesn't make any sense, it only makes us look extremely unreliable on the world stage
Trump is the pretend bully on the world’s playground. It’s his ONLY modus operandi. He knows nothing else and his act is old. The world is already laughing him (and the USA) off the stage this time around. It’s going to a long 4 years.
In Canada, a Loonie Bin is the box where you keep your spare change. In the U.S., it's the padded cell where Trump conspires with his cabinet choices.
Unlike the US, the Canadians have had about the world's most stable banking system. Much to learn from our neighbors to the north.
Singer songwriters yes, but Canada has punched above everyone’s weight in producing great comedians too.
A critical question now is how much of the wood products needed to rebuild LA will come from Canada and at what cost?
Interesting time to put a 25% tariff on soft wood lumbar. Maybe Canada should add an export tax.
Oh. We will. We are not going gentle into that good night. Our rumoured politeness is superficial at best.
Andrew Coyne in The Globe and Mail, Dec. 2024
“Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.
The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.
At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.
At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.
The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.
Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fuelled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.
Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.
We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”
Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.
All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.
All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.”
Written by Andrew Coyne.
Andrew Coyne is a highly respected Canadian columnist with the Globe and Mail and a regular panelist on CBC's The National, who has previously worked with Macleans Magazine (Senior Editor) and the National Post.
LC video is from his Austin City Limits amazing show.
Krugman is the best. The NY - “Times are a changin’” quickly for the worst without him.
Love this Madeline Peyroux’s version too.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n2m_3OQtFNc&pp=ygUtZGFuY2UgbWUgdG8gdGhlIGVuZCBvZiBsb3ZlIG1hZGVsZWluZSBwZXlyb3V4
Could we be in for a worldwide economic shock with the Trump-Republican trifecta of US Government? POTUS-Congress-SCOTUS. And what is to keep us from catastrophe? Given how compliant an apparent plurality of US voters is with their propaganda.
By rewriting history and ignoring facts for so long, the GOP may usher in conditions similar to those that caused our Great Depression. There is too much talk of deregulation, nonsense hot air investments like bitcoin (might as well be trading Pokemon cards), and also talk of eroding our safety net.
Pure laissez-faire tends to bubble and bust and run off the rails whenever allowed to do so, like with a lack of adequate regulation in the Financial Crisis and the S&L crisis, The tariffs may cause a global recession to start us off followed by policies that make conditions far worse at home causing a domino effect with "trickle down" style nonsense.
The rich are cutting off their noses to spite their faces for tax cuts, since all that they are proposing to get there will shrink the economy (and even their own wallets).
Again. Read to the very end. And for the musical coda. It doesn't get better than this.
EXCELLENT! This post is friggin great on so many levels. First, I’m glad to read someone who knows FRED and the St Louis Fed. I’m also glad to read someone who knows what Bretton Woods is (trivia: it’s a noun, but what kind?)… Anyway, your analysis is so spot on. I’d like to hear a little more about what economic levers Canada has available to pull, because I don’t fully get how their central banking system works on its own. (That’s just me, though). Thank you very much for the enlightening post with the supporting data! Much appreciated.
NY Times just had an article about how popular FRED is now.
"Although I believed that Brexit would hurt the UK economy (its actual consequences deserve at least one separate post), I never bought into scenarios of catastrophe. Why? Because I knew about another example of a country that neighbors a large customs union but isn’t part of that union and doesn’t have free movement of people across its border with that union."
What I have found about politics is that "this will make things slightly more sh**ty" is a very difficult argument to win people over with. Hell, it's a hard argument to get people to even MAKE.
Like, all considered, just as it was unlikely Brexit would cause a depression or reboot The Troubles, it's pretty unlikely that Trump is going to take any actions that destroy the US government or end democracy. (Not that I'm ruling it out.) But it's overwhelmingly likely that he's going to make bad policy decisions that are going to make people's pay a little lower, make things a little more expensive, make crime a little worse, etc.
People's inability to notice these small differences, or the direction they're moving, is f***ing us royally. A big part of the problem is that everybody thinks statistics are useless for describing reality, even though they're the place where these small differences show up. So people can just decide "how things are" with their own limited vision, unexamined biases and (in the case of ~80% of '20s Americans) relentless cynicism.
(And now that I'm thinking about it, I'm pretty furious at the press for spending the last three years telling people they were right to ignore statistics, and that those like Dr. Krugman, who were actually trying to figure out what was going on, were "ignoring people's pain.")
The legit press should have ignored Trump from the outset. No Trump quotes. No attending Trump “news conferences,” etc. Unfortunately, the press was making so much money from Trump coverage, it blinded them from the consequences of publicizing a blustering ignoramus.
Yes, Trump is a narcissist and narcissists simply want attention. His entire life has been about using his inheritance to seem like he is a big deal when other NYC real estate heirs that are less famous actually change the skyline.
Why would Canada be only 1 state?
Because our Dear Leader (elect) said so. LOL.
He said it. It is thus so.
Canada wpul do well to take in Dem systes like CS, MN, NY, IL (might have to accept WI or MI to maintain a contiguous map), PA (??), maybe the New England states, New Jersey.
Let Trump have the Taker States. Meanwhile. the Giver-States can put the money they save on bailing out the inheritors of the Confederacy to participating in the Canadian health care system.
Indeed. But most important are California, Oregon, and Washington. With California, Canada++ would be the world’s third largest economy, and the people of the annexed US states would receive the benefits of Canada’s political and legal systems. The sooner the better!
One of Canada’s minor parties leaders has already offered (jokingly) to add California, Oregon and Washington to its territory in response to the Felon. As a lifelong resident of the US West Coast, I wish she wasn’t just joking.
Frankly, I wish Elizabeth May would take one for the country and offer to run for leadership of the Liberal Party. She might just be the person to give PP a good shellacking in the polls! (For those of you who aren't familiar: she is the leader of the Green Party, which regularly gets between 1-2 seats in Parliament.)
Leonard Cohen was the best.
Canada also suffers from a major real estate bubble where housing prices have become unaffordable for those who wish to live in the most desirable cities (Toronto and Vancouver come to mind). The observation about oil and gas is a good one, and slapping tariffs on Canadian exports of energy to the US will only hurt the US consumer. BTW, between oil, gas, and power Canada is intimately linked to the US and disentangling the power system would be unwise, as well as the natural gas E&P and pipeline systems. They work as one large machine already.
America is energy dominant thanks to Putin’s asinine invasion of Ukraine…which is also why Canada is now focusing on LNG export infrastructure instead of oil infrastructure. We are now in the Age of Natural Gas…the Age of Oil effectively ended in 2010 when fracking was proven economical and America became effectively energy independent even though people didn’t realize it at the time.