By the time you read this, Doug Ford’s Ontario Progressive Conservatives will have been re-elected. Rumour has it that there were other parties in the race, but Mr. Ford made it about Donald Trump, ran against Donald Trump, and won, at least in part, because of Donald Trump.
It’s a similar story in the federal Liberal leadership race. After years deep in the doldrums, poll after poll says Liberal fortunes have abruptly turned. Once they name a new captain on March 9, a snap election is expected. As in Ontario, Mr. Trump will loom over the campaign, in a manner highly favourable to the incumbents.
Yet even as some political leaders get a domestic political payoff from rhetorically standing up to a foreign menace, they are not yet fully levelling with Canadians about how much pain may be in our future. Canada faces a threat not only to our prosperity, but to our existence. We must re-examine, and perhaps radically alter, our assumptions about our place in the world.
The good news is that everyone – the Liberals, the Conservative opposition, provincial governments, business – is at least talking, finally, about demolishing interprovincial trade barriers. The idea of allowing free movement of goods and people among the provinces is being embraced. The efficiency gains from turning Canada into a common economic and regulatory space would add several points to the country’s gross domestic product, delivering a boost to the economy as large as the drag of U.S. tariffs.
At the same time, political roadblocks on pipelines to the Pacific and Atlantic are coming down. Approving and building new pipelines will take years, and we’re still at the cheap and easy talking stage. But from British Columbia to Quebec to Nova Scotia to the federal Liberals, there’s a growing recognition that roadblocking oil and gas exports to Europe and Asia is, like interprovincial trade barriers, an economic own goal we can no longer afford.
Will the sudden outbreak of adult conversation on oil, gas and internal trade result in actual adult behaviour? That’s TBD. But it’s been a promising few weeks.
Beyond that, however, a lot of our politics is still on the old, pre-Trump operating system. Canadians can see the angry storm clouds, yet politicians continue promising to rain gumdrops from sunny skies.
Mr. Ford recently ran up Ontario’s deficit to send everyone $200 cheques, just because. He’s also repeatedly pledged to tunnel a new highway under Highway 401, whose costs would run into the tens of billions of dollars, and probably more. Soon-to-be-former-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just promised a future Toronto to Quebec City high-speed train, whose price tag could be similar.
And the man leading the Liberal leadership race, Mark Carney, is promising to axe the carbon tax, but keep something like the carbon rebates. He is also, of course, talking up a middle-class tax cut.
All this as we sit on the precipice of what could be the gravest threat we’ve faced since the Second World War. In the face of that earlier peril, we massively increased military spending, put a million people – a tenth of the population – into uniform, went deeply into debt and deficit, raised taxes (by a lot), imposed food rationing, and gifted the equivalent, relative to the current economy, of hundreds of billions of dollars of aid to Britain and the Soviet Union.
There was a great deal of asking Canadians what they could do for their country, and what we would all collectively sacrifice for the common good. I am not proposing the policies of 1939-45 as the answer to today’s very different danger. But can we at least admit that knocking a few cents off the gas tax, or a percentage point off a middle-class tax bracket, isn’t quite up to the challenge of preventing Mr. Trump from swallowing Canada?
The Liberal leadership race has included a bit of debate over when Canada will finally meet a (two-decade-old) NATO commitment, and spend 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence. Should we get there in a few years, say some Liberals, or a few more years, say others? At the same time, Mr. Trudeau has also pledged more money, and more of our tiny cupboard of weapons, to Ukraine.
But what if, in the Trump 2.0 era, NATO is history? What if the U.S., long the guarantor of Canada’s security, is now the primary threat? Our defence policy, our economy and our entire worldview are aligned and integrated with the U.S. What if all must be rethought and redesigned to no longer partner with the Americans, but to defend against them?
It’s the mid-1930s, and we’re Austria. That’s how Mr. Trump sees things. Do we?