Ahhh…. April in Canada.
The true spring has come. Both the “Third Winter” and the “Spring of Deception” have passed. Like many places that experience harsh winters, summers in Canada are a blast and Canadians know best how to exploit the season. May I recommend Jazz Fest in Montreal this July?
April also means the start of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Apologies to the NFL, MLB, and the rest but the NHL has the best postseason in all of sports. Especially with the tradition of “playoff beards.” The fact that what appears to be scruffy lumberjacks hoisting the greatest championship trophy in ice hockey in cities where the only ice is found in drinks (Vegas and Miami) during the month of June is besides the point.
I should also add that the greatest “Spring of Deception” was during the 1987 Cup Finals when it snowed in Edmonton on May 31.
The other big highlight for Canada this April? A national election!
First, a quick primer. We have a problem in the United States in that we believe “conservative” is a term that roughly translates as a concept across all Western countries. It does not, and not just because the past 20 years have shown “conservative” parties such as the CDU in Germany and Tories in the UK to be utter crap weasels given their stances on economics, personal liberty, and national sovereignty.
Canada is a left-of-center country and all of its parties are to the left of, say, Joe Manchin, so don’t let the party names fool you. The Conservative Party is sort of like a Josh Shapiro. Liberal Party? Gavin Newsom. New Democrats? Bernie. No heroes in this bunch; even Mitt Romney would be called “far right” in the “True North.”
Second, the theme that is ever present in Canadian politics is the United States. Part of that is a matter of geography. Canada shares a land border with only one country, and that just happens to be a country with 10x its population, that has more guns than people, and is perpetually in need (in Canada’s view) of a nursery school style time-out.
The other part of it, though, is cultural. Canada is primarily defined as a negative — that it is not the US. A quick and dirty way of looking at it is that Canada was the “14th Colony” that refused to join up with the rest of the continent in cocking a snook at George III. We also invaded it a few times and deported a whole bunch of Loyalists there after the Revolution. You cannot help but think that the line in the Canadian national anthem that states “O Canada, we stand on guard for thee” is about standing on guard against us. I cannot blame them.
It used to be that Canada’s identity was rooted in its relationship with the UK — that is, within the Empire and then the Commonwealth. Well, after 60 years of dissolving that identity into some sort of multicultural mush, the best Canada can say about itself is that it’s not the US (or at least is a kinder, gentler version of the US) and NATIONAL HEALTH CARE.
When people point to the Canadian health care system as a model they also fail to mention that 1) it takes six months or more to get treatment from a specialist, 2) There is a flourishing trade in the US of firms offering medical services to Canadians who don’t want to wait the better part of a year to find out if the tumor they have is cancerous and 3) It is often a shorter period of time to get MAID (medical-assisted suicide) than an MRI. (That’s one way to cut health care costs.)
So the best we can do as Americans to assist Canadian identity is to threaten to make Canada the 51st state — even though we find actually making it a state presumptuous. Why should Canada get statehood before Guam or Samoa? I would say territorial status would suit Canada just fine for a while. As Jonah Goldberg wrote, long, long ago (back when he was last interesting), we should just do Canada a favor and declare war on it in order to bolster its national unity.
Donald Trump with his three months of cracks about making Canada part of the US and threats about tariffs has done more for Canadian identity and unity than 10 years of Justin Trudeau as PM.
To be quite cruel about it, I have a nagging suspicion that Canada is becoming the Fredo of the English-speaking world.
So, as you can imagine, Donald Trump is a big issue in this month’s Canadian election.
The candidates?
Justin Trudeau, the Liberal PM for the past 10 years, is gone. He has been replaced by Mark Carney, a man who has never held elected office and is best known for not only holding three passports but also for having served at various times as Governor for the Bank of England. A central banker with the personality to match. A rootless technocrat from Davos central casting made for Canada’s nationalist moment against the Trump Evil Empire.
Seriously.
The person who was the saddest to see Trudeau go was Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who was cruising in the polls until Trudeau quit. Much like Canadian national identity, Poilievre had pinned his political identity on a negative – that he wasn’t Trudeau. His best political moment was when he ate an apple two years ago. With Trudeau gone, Poilievre lost his reason for being and is viewed as someone who cannot stand up to Trump.
Right now it looks like the Liberals will return to power with a majority government.
Who should we root for?
I don’t want Canada to be the 51st state. All Canadian provinces, even the “conservative heartland” around Alberta, are pretty lefty. I also like having Canada around.
Having said that….
Canada is slowly circling the drain. Its economy has underperformed for several decades and its most powerful province (Ontario) would rank among the 10 poorest US states in terms of per capita income. Could Poilievre reverse that trend? I doubt it. He’s for affordable housing and a tax cut, in other words he’s slightly less liberal than the Liberals and certainly not the guy to address a decades-long slide.
Liberals? Trudeau ran the country into the ground by strangling growth. Also he institutionalized a thugocracy with his crushing of the 2022 Trucker Convoy and mandatory gun confiscation. No wonder he’s so beloved by many in the US. Carney appears to be little different, a bland technocrat with no political experience LARPing as a national leader. Not a man capable of turning the tide.
An under-reported aspect of Canadian politics is regionalism. Americans are somewhat familiar with the various attempts at Quebec independence, but there is also a latent Western secession movement leveraged against the dominance of Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec), that could be rekindled by a Carney victory.
Canada has reached an inflection point in terms of its future. If the Liberals win, Canada will have bought the ticket to take the ride. Let’s see what they find.
In the past I’ve remarked that if you take an elite American university and give it the political powers and population of a nation you get Canada.
I also like having Canada around.
I don’t.
Canada is presently ruled by WEF bureaucrats who hate America and want to end Western concepts of freedom. They have worked hard to import enough foreigners to demographically swamp the native Canuckistanis which has also produced an electorate even less favorable to the United States than they were. The Canadian regime has also allowed the Chinese military to train in Canada and refuses to do anything about Chinese drug-smuggling from Canada into the US.
Canada is not our friend. It was not our friend before Trump. It will not be our friend after Trump.
I know Canada is such a poverty-stricken irrelevant joke that few Americans can take the place seriously, but they seem quite inclined to work their way into being a serious threat to American national interests.
Trump should squeeze Canada until it disintegrates into little shards, then incorporate the best of them into the United States.
Rupa Subramanya at The Free Press is going to write a regular newsletter re: Canada. You can read it here, https://www.thefp.com/p/welcome-to-this-week-in-canada-poilievre-mcgill
I first came across Ms.Subramanya a few years ago re: her reporting from the Trucker Convoy protest in Ottawa where she painted a very different picture of the protesters than that provided by Trudeau
Why do I want to keep Canada around? Because I don’t want it here. Back to a later post re: diversity, there has to be a common sense of community for people to share a geographic space and there’s just too many differences. Most “Conservative” voters in Canada would vote Democrat.
Best keep them up there all by their lonesome and check in on them from time to time.
What we can do is what we have been doing which is take their best and brightest people. Canada’s biggest geographical problem isn’t that the US might wake up cranky and hungover on a Saturday morning and decide to invade but that something like 80% of the country used to be within TV range of the US. Of course technology has changed but the point remains the same, Canadians as individuals can fit into American society quite easily and that great sucking sound is talent being drawn south of the border
Because I don’t want it here.
I don’t want Canada here either. I want Alberta here. I want Alberta to become so prosperous that Americans will move there to help Albertans better develop their natural resources. I want this to be a win-win such that Albertans are happy to become part of the United States, and the Americans who move there are glad to help Alberta assimilate into the American union.
I love Alberta. It has lots of oil. And great people.
In fact, I love Canada too. I love Canada so much that I wish there were nine more Canadas, along with a couple proto-Canadian territories. Those filled with the best people could perhaps become American states, or territories, soon. The Canadas filled with bad people could continue to stew in their own wretched misery and paint maple leaves on their shanties.
But one thing the Canadas absolutely could not do would be to conspire with foreign adversaries of the United States- the EU, China, India, etc- to undermine American sovereignty or prosperity.
Like the one lonely Canada is doing now.
once up a time, the Progressive Conservatives under Mulroney meant something, but then they stopped standing for anything, and there was the wipeout with Kim Campbell that brought the Liberals to power, for a generation, a time after that was the first Reform attempt under Stockwell Day, and eventually there was a transtion to Stephen Harper who held power for a while, through the early years of the war on terror, until he was unseated by this fatuous dolphin, Trudeau, at a certain point, the Reform party seemed to stop competing against the Liberals, and the PCs only turned in a token effort,
the Liberals, doubled down on their third world orientation that had been been active under Martin and then Chretien, with the Human rights tribunals that had snared the likes of Mark Steyn, they rapidly signaled their intentions, by bringing the teenage terrorist, of the Kadr clan back from Gitmo, with full honors, even giving him an apartment as well as an apology
did the infiltration of Chinese state proxies notably through Vancouver have something to do with this as well as the turn against India for reasons, was miss Freedland nee chodorov the WEFer brain trust, the main driver or was Trudeau fils instinctive third world orientation, that he inherited from his father, and mother
of course with Mark Carney, they are trying to put forth a Mandarin regime, of Deep State Bankers, a creature of Threadneedle Street, as a Central Banker, whose own financial involvements are far from squeaky clean, one of those who designed the bailouts after the 2008 social experiment,
https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2025/04/18/is-canada-brain-dead-n4939030
once up a time, the Progressive Conservatives under Mulroney meant something, but then they stopped standing for anything,
What I recall about the PCs under Mulroney is that they enacted a bitterly unpopular VAT that completely destroyed the party, as it should have. Subsequently, Canadians have had the choice between one set of globalists or another, which has led them into oblivion.
Actual Canadians are well on the way into becoming an irrelevant minority in the country named after them, which is why I’m approaching this topic as a military problem for the United States.
The Canadian government is very close to being nothing more than a puppet regime for some overseas power. With Mark Carney, that power is the EU. In the future, who knows.
This no more acceptable to the United States than was the presence of a Mexican government that was effectively controlled by France circa 1865, or the NATO controlled Ukrainian government has been acceptable to Russia.
Canada is toast. Frozen toast perhaps, but still toast.
I had forgotten how bad Mulroney’s government was hurt by VAT.
What really killed the Conservatives was the failure of Meech Lake which led to that Frankenstein party splitting into its 3 constituent parts: western conservatives, central Canada, and Quebec nationalists. They went in the 1993 election from 150+ seats to 2
I read further that the reform party was absorbed into the conservative to the disadvantage of both in 2003