Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Attack On Canada Did Something SHOCKING

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

Ben Parker and journalist Justin Ling explore the election turnaround in Canada and the sharp decline in U.S.-Canada relations. They look at how Trudeau’s departure reshaped the race and why the relationship with America is hitting new lows.

Bettering your business takes working with the best. With the James Hardy Alliance, you gain access to leads, training, networking, and support from the number one brand of siding in North America. Achieve new levels of success by joining the James Hardy Alliance today. Hi everyone, thanks for watching The Bulwark. I am Ben Parker with The Bulwark, joined by our expert today in Canadian politics, Justin Ling, freelance journalist, author of Bug-Eyed and Shameless on Substack. And we're going to be talking about the Canadian elections. So they're coming up in just a couple of days here.

It's very exciting. It is not what anyone would have expected six months ago. Justin, why don't you start off telling us just where you are, what you've been doing and what you're seeing? Yeah. start off telling us just where you are, what you've been doing and what you're seeing? Yeah, so you can tell by this kind of like lovely exterior behind me. I'm in a kind of like an airport hotel, or I guess off the highway hotel in Toronto. I'm traveling with the Liberal bus, you can see it behind me. So I've been traveling with Liberal leader Mark Kearney for the last week or so as we ping ponged across the country, we spent the late last week in Atlantic Canada on our east coast. We flew to flew a drove to Quebec and Toronto and to the west coast, Vancouver.

We were in Winnipeg yesterday. I think we woke up this morning in Sault Ste. Marie, which is just across the border from Michigan, where a bunch of our steel industry is. And then we flew down here to Toronto, where we are for a couple days before we do some other kind of crazy jaunt in the sort of mad dash to election day, which is Monday. So you're with Mark Carney, who is the current Prime Minister of Canada, leader of the Liberal Party, which is roughly analogous to our Democratic Party. I'm going to ask you a little bit about him. but first I'm going to remind people, our viewers, that they might be familiar with Mark Carney because he was the one who said this. The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over. Powerful words from the Canadian prime minister.

Tell us a little bit about Carney. He came in after Justin Trudeau left. And he was supposed to be just sort of a placeholder, right? Well, placeholder is probably not quite the right language. I mean, so Mark Carney, I mean, he's a relatively well known guy here in Canada. He was the former governor of the Bank of Canada. He was a former official in the Department of Finance here. He ended up doing kind of the extraordinary thing and going across the pond to the UK and becoming governor of the Bank of Canada. He was a former official in the Department of Finance here. He ended up doing kind of the extraordinary thing and going across the pond to the UK and becoming governor of the Bank of England, which is like, you know, not a normal CV for anyone, particularly any Canadian. And then he spent some years in private finance before deciding to run for the leadership of the

Liberal Party of Canada, which at that point was in completely dire straits, right? Like, you know, I think I was on late last year talking about the complete kind of unraveling of Justin Trudeau, who had become just deeply, deeply unpopular and who quit just right around Christmas, I think early in the new year, just what feels like an eternity ago. And in the race to replace him, it was just a cakewalk. Mark Carney faced a couple of other competitors, but just ran away with it.

I think like 80% of the 75, 80% of the vote in kind of the Liberal Party primary leadership race. And within weeks, like literally weeks, his party's polling numbers just went completely in the opposite direction they went from you know low 20s maybe high teens all the way up to 35 40 percent in the polls and he's now kind of uh you know careening towards what is likely an election victory of pretty pretty epic proportions i mean we're talking about like north of 40 percent of the vote which is pretty unusual in canadian elections and if the polls have it right he's going to have a huge majority talking about like north of 40% of the vote, which is pretty unusual in Canadian elections. And if the polls have it right, he's going to have a huge majority government, which, you know, we've not had in quite some time in this country.

Yeah, we can put up maybe this graphic from the CBC News, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News, where they show the Liberals, yeah, as you said, with a pretty comfortable lead. And keep in mind, that's heading into a fourth consecutive Liberal victory in an election. That's really impressive. The Conservative Party often calls this the lost Liberal decade. That has been their running phrase. It's not worked all that well, clearly. But the fact that we've had one party governing this country for a decade is super unusual in Canadian history.

And the fact that it could be now, if it's a majority government, it'll be going on 15 years of this one party dominating Canadian politics. So I want to ask you about that crazy polling shift, because you can see it in this chart here, how the liberals are just underwater and all of a sudden, like a phoenix rise from the ashes as soon as Trudeau leaves and Carney comes in. What happened there? How does something that dramatic? Is it just the person of Pierre Trudeau? I'm sorry, of Justin Trudeau? Or is it something? Was there an event? Was it Trump? It was Trump. I mean, listen, there's a whole bunch of other factors, right?

Pierre Polyev, the leader of our conservative party, has become deeply unpopular. His comparisons to Donald Trump have, even if it's not quite that simple, have nevertheless totally hurt his political brand over the last couple of months. There is the fact that the cost of living crisis is still here, but it's kind of ebbing a little bit. There is the fact that Mark Carney is just not Justin Trudeau and he's somewhat more popular. He's seen as capable. He's seen as more pragmatic.

He's seen as more centrist than the sort of, let's say the airy-fairy sort of, you know, virtue-signaling progressive of Justin Trudeau. But fundamentally, it's Donald Trump, right?

It is the single biggest factor in this election. Going into the election, we had the 51st state threat. We had the sort of chaotic yesterday or the day before was again openly saying, you know, we want to basically end automotive imports from Canada. I mean, it's told Time Magazine last week, just published today, you know, that the only real way to kind of equalize the trade deficit with Canada is to assume them as,

subsume them as the 51st state. Like it has freaked everyone in this country out. Like, how could it not? Right. Not only is this the, you know, raising the possibility of economic ruin, not only is it raising the possibility of shuttering automotive plants and steel plants, you know, hitting the forestry sector, you know, ravaging the oil and gas sector, not only is it all of that economic ruin, but also it is a matter of kind of national pride. It's a matter of genuine anxiety. Like I talk to people now who are genuinely saying,

I'm worried about being invaded. Like I genuinely have never thought that I would ever have to be anxious about the prospect of tanks rolling across the Canadian border. But that's where people's mind are going right now. And Donald Trump just keeps adding to it. There has been this kind of really almost unbelievable outpouring of patriotism that

I've not seen in this country for a long time. Probably the last time you can really point to it was after Canada declined to go into the 2003 war in Iraq. But it's that kind of times 10. People have started making hats that say they look like mega hats, but they say Canada is not for sale. People have started, you know, coining the phrase elbows up, which is like a bit of a hockey reference to basically say like, you know,

come take it if you want it. We're ready for it. Like, you know, Mark Carney last night in Winnipeg at a rally was joking, you know, that if the Americans, you know, had to invade, they're going to have to go through this crowd first. Right. This is the language we're talking about now. Like this is I'm not sure that most Americans fully appreciate the degree to which the past few months have hit the Canadian psyche a massive way. And that basically everyone in the country is responding in more or less the same way, which is basically, you know, like, go screw yourselves. So is it a rally around the flag effect for the current prime minister?

And that's the reason he happens to be ahead? Or is it that he gave this speech and the economists called him Captain Canada? Or is it something not poorly of his opponent that people think that's how the right guy to deal with Trump? Yeah, it's a little bit of all of those things, right? Like, the reality is, yes, the Liberal Party kind of manages to claim that that centrist space in the political spectrum that tend to be viewed as kind of more, you know, the phrase that gets used occasionally is that they're the natural governing party, that they're kind of just the default option for a lot of Canadians. So yeah, there's an element of that. There's an element of just who Mark Carney is, like his whole shtick is, I know how to manage economic crises, right? He managed the 2008 financial crisis here

in Canada, when he was the Bank of Canada governor, he managed Brexit, when he was the Bank of England governor. I mean, these are the lines he's using constantly. And his line now is, you know, I know how to manage this as well. So there's all of that. But yeah, you're right. It is also the fact that Pierre Polyev came into this race not wanting to talk about Trump. Like Trump is not a good issue for him, given that a lot of people think of him as Trump-like. He did an interview in French a few weeks ago where he got asked point blank, like, are you a mini Trump?

And he didn't quite know how to answer it. And his campaign has really not figured out how to talk about this threat effectively. Like, he was asked about it just today. And it was basically, you know, day one, you're dealing with Trump, what's the plan? And he just sort of pivoted to the regular lines about, oh, well, we need more oil and gas development here in Canada. And I think the average Canadian hears that and goes, drill, baby, drill is an odd way of saying, you know, I'm not like Trump. So there's an element of that. And they've just not been able to pivot. Like they've just not been able to talk about the economic threat posed by Trump in any kind of coherent or convincing way.

And, you know, there's still things about his message that are resonating with people. There are people who care way more about cost of living issues and rising affordability problems than they do about Trump, because one of those issues feels very sort of now and the other feels quite hypothetical. But the polls show basically the vast majority of the country is singularly focused on the threat posed by Trump. And that's kind of where the dollars over the past few weeks because of these steel tariffs, which have been at 25% for basically almost since the start of Trump's administration. And that symbolism, that image of him there standing on the floor of the steel mill, I think is the kind of thing that is resonating with people and really forcing them to go like,

you know, I'm tired of the Liberal Party. I've not been enthused with the record for the past 10 years. I might normally vote for another party. But, you know, given the extent of this existential crisis, you know, this is the guy. Yeah, I want to show this poll real quick. This is by Ipsos, the polling organization. They asked people around the world if they thought America would have a good influence or a bad influence on the world. Only six months ago, they say 52% of Canadians saw the US as a positive influencer. Now only 19% feel the same. This 33 point fall is the largest recorded for any country. So I want to ask you, is that Canadians reflecting on the American government? Or is that Canadians thinking about their friends, in some cases, their family members, across the border, Americans as people?

I think it's both. I think the average Canadian will tell you it's not both. I think the average Canadian, and you even hear Mark Carney and Pierre Polyev say this, you know, they'll say, you know, our issue is with the American government, not the American people, which, you know, it feels like something America says before they invade a country. But nevertheless, you know, that line sort of does come into conflict with the fact that it's Americans who voted for this. And it's Americans who still support this, at least in some measure. And it's not like this was a great surprise, right? Donald Trump spent the entire

election. I mean, he spent his first administration putting tariffs on Canada. And then he spent his election campaign saying, I'm going to launch a trade war with Canada and all of our allies. And then he won, you know, not only the electoral college, but the popular vote. And I think a lot of Canadians look at that and say and say like you voted for this this was a choice you made and i think a lot of canadians will now say you have the power to go hit the streets to make your voices heard to show up to those town halls and i think canadians are also very much enjoying the videos of those town halls of americans taking their their elected representatives to task for enabling this. But I think for a lot of Canadians, there's this sort of feeling of, you know, your government is the one who's done this.

Your president is the one who's doing this. I don't think there's necessarily the one to one animosity. But nevertheless, I, you know, I, I think this is a really emotional and irrational response. And it's not going to be undone easily. There's this line that Mark Carney keeps using, which is basically, you know, we're not going to forget this, right? Like the relationship is never going to go back to the way it was. Canadians are already talking about selling their properties in Florida. You know, Canadians are already not vacationing like they used to.

Canadians are already refusing to buy American goods. And I think it's very much the strategic effort to say, you know, you can stop this and we're going to hold you to account until you do. from AP that now fewer and fewer Americans see Canada as a friend and close ally, not just Republicans, though, yes, definitely Republicans following Trump's lead, but also Democrats. And I think the only way to read that is that they the pollster asked them, do you think Canada is a close ally of the United States? Democrats look at what our government is doing and they say, no, factually, it's hard to defend the idea that it is um and you know if carney's understandably saying the old relationship is never coming back and americans are saying canada isn't a close ally i mean i don't i don't it's gonna take generations at least to repair that kind of relationship um and it's you know if with canadians voluntarily as

you said abstaining from buying american goods, abstaining from vacation to America. You're really talking about sort of a popular level divorce of what had been one of the closest relationships in the world. That's right. And I mean, there's kind of just no limit to how much this could change things. Right. And I realize a lot of Canadians or a lot of Americans might be inclined to say, oh, you know, I won't be able to buy Canadian rye anymore. Or, you know, I'm going to I'm going to miss doing, you know, my my my bachelorette party in Montreal or whatever. But I think there's a lot of really kind of formative changes that America may yet not be thinking about. So I'll give you a couple examples. Mark Carney has ordered a review of the F-35 procurement process.

And I think Canada may yet be one of the first dominoes to fall in terms of the unplugging from the American defense apparatus. That's going to mean billions of dollars in trade not done, right? Like that is going to mean jobs in the U.S. they're going to stop existing, because the defense procurement process is going to, you know, pivot away from the from the US, and this will be Canada, I think it'll be the UK, I think you could see France, Germany, and many other NATO countries, reorienting away from Pentagon led,-led procurement programs towards Europe, towards Canada, towards Australia.

Beyond that, you're going to see an attempt to rewire the grid, like literally the electric grid. Currently, Canada exports a massive amount of energy, mostly down through Quebec, but also to some degree through the Prairie Provinces into the US. There's already talk, Mark Carney talks about it constantly, as does Pierre Polio and the others, about basically forging an east-to-west energy grid. That means more of that energy stays in Canada, does not go south. Ditto for oil and gas.

We're talking about moving more pipelines to get oil and gas, LNG, and petroleum to mostly the West Coast to ship it to Japan, China, Korea, whoever really wants it. These things are going to have a real kind of substantial difference. And Donald Trump, to some degree, says that this is what he wants, right? Like he was openly proclaiming in the Oval Office in this time interview that he doesn't want to see Canadian energy or electricity come down south anymore. OK, well, good luck with that, because your energy is about to get a lot more expensive.

Like that is going to be the practical result of this. It's also going to mean that Canada is going to actually have to build up those trade relationships with new countries. Currently, Canada's top two trading partners are the US and China. And on both instances, we're talking about decoupling and for and forging new links with with Europe, with Australia, potentially with emerging economies in Africa, potentially with, you know, emerging countries in East Asia. And and America is going to feel the difference of that, like America is isolating itself in a spectacular way. And and I think Canada is really kind of on the on the cusp on the on the cutting edge of what that's going to look like in real terms.

I think one other example of this, that maybe for now is more symbolic than anything but for decades the united states and canada have defended our joint airspace as if it were one country right that's what norad is we think of all the guys in cheyenne mountain i don't think they're actually in cheyenne mountain anymore i think they like mothballed that facility a bunch of them actually are in the mountain, yeah. Oh, they are in the mountain. Okay, they are still in the mountain. They're sitting there monitoring any questionable thing that could be flying

at either country as if it's one place. That's how close the relationship is. I haven't heard anyone mention that yet, but that's the logical extension is that, okay, well,

like we're actually going to, you know, observe the border. Then like our airspace is our airspace and yours is yours. I kind of think that there is no limit to how different this relationship could be in the near future. But I actually think NORAD is the one thing we don't touch. NORAD is the one win-win that is just so economical.

It's so useful. And Canada is, to some degree, and this is always worth underlining, to some degree, Donald Trump is right, right? Like, to some degree, Canada has been a laggard, has been miserly when it comes to defense spending, when it comes to territorial defense, when it comes to foreign aid, when it comes to whatever, contributions to Ukraine, for example. He's right about a bunch of that stuff. Like, we have been too slow for a long time.

Now, we have been trying to fix this over the last few years, because he was it we heard it during his first term, and there has been a kind of concerted effort to say, okay, how do we kind of reconcile that genuine criticism with kind of what our what our defense and security priorities actually are. And that ball's been rolling, like we are on track to finally hit our 2% spending target by about 2030. And really, there's no way to make that go any faster. That's about as good as we could possibly do. We also have been talking about stepping up in NORAD and doing more of our own territorial defense and doing more of our Arctic defense, which is a whole other interesting can of worms that Donald Trump does not understand even remotely. But nevertheless, we have been stepping up.

But here's something really interesting. Just a few weeks ago, we've been talking about building a new, buying a new over-the-horizon radar for the Arctic that basically will allow us to better surveil and be alerted to enemy aircraft or foreign aircraft entering our airspace. Everybody thought we were going to buy that multi-billion dollar radar from the US. Turns out, last minute, a couple weeks ago, one of Mark Carney's first things he does as prime minister before he hits the election campaign

is to announce that he's buying it from Australia. Basically, yank this deal out from the Americans and turn to another Commonwealth-friendly country for that multi-billion dollar deal. So you're going to see a lot more stuff like that. Things that would normally lead to a kind of big economic partnership, security defense partnership with the US reorient elsewhere. And I think you're going to see that when it comes time to buy new submarines, when

it comes time to announce our sixth generation fighter jet program, new warships, icebreakers, you name it. It's going to be more and more French, German, Canadian, Australian companies and much fewer American ones. I think you're right. I think NORAD will be the last domino to fall. I would only disagree and say that I think you may still be underestimating how drastic and foolish this administration can be. But your lips to God's ears. Justin Ling, thank you so much for joining me. I hope this all turns around real soon. You know, if it can happen to the Labour Party over the last three months, maybe it can

happen to the rest of us too. And good luck covering the rest of the elections. Thanks for having me. Thanks, everyone, for watching. Make sure to leave a comment, like the video, subscribe to the channel. And hey, if you really like what we're doing, go over to the bulwark.com become a bulwark plus member. And we'll see you around here next time. Thanks.