Good morning. Canada’s party leaders have hit the campaign trail talking taxes and Trump – more on that below, along with a major U.S. security blunder and 23andMe’s bankruptcy. But first:
Today’s headlines
- CSIS alleges that India organized support for Poilievre’s 2022 Conservative leadership bid
- Danielle Smith defends her plea for the U.S. to pause tariffs as the ‘opposite’ of meddling
- Trump expects to announce tariffs on vehicles and pharmaceuticals in the near future
A rally outside the U.S. consulate in Toronto yesterday.Andres Valenzuela/The Globe and Mail
Election 2025
Gloves off, elbows way up
Yesterday marked the federal leaders’ first full day of campaigning in this five-week sprint to the polls. At moments, it felt very much like a standard election run-up: The two front-runners talked about competing tax-cut plans, with Liberal Leader Mark Carney vowing to bring down the rate on the lowest income bracket from 15 per cent to 14 per cent, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pledging a drop to 12.75 per cent. Other parties swiftly dismissed the proposals. Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet questioned where the cash for these cuts would come from. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called them “a tax plan that gives more to millionaires,” then tried to shift the focus to housing policy.
But those nods to affordability were a rare exception to the Donald Trump rule. This election campaign is being waged in the colossal shadow of the U.S. President – not only his trade war, which could cost Canada 100,000 jobs this year, but his repeated threats of honest-to-goodness annexation. The candidates can’t just sidestep Trump’s attacks, and it gave their official campaign kickoffs on Sunday a pretty surreal quality.
Poilievre told the crowd he would insist that the President recognize Canada’s independence. Green Party co-leader Jonathan Pedneault urged Canadians to “vote as though our country depends on it, because more than ever before, it does.” Carney warned that “President Trump wants to break us, so America can own us.” I probably don’t need to say it, but: These aren’t normal stump speeches! The whole issue of Canada’s sovereignty doesn’t usually come up.
Mark Carney and Mike Myers in the closing shot of a recent campaign ad.Supplied
And yet we’re now at a place where a simple bit of existential reassurance can cause an ad to go viral. Over the weekend, the Carney campaign released a video with Mike Myers, whose recent “elbows up” appeal on Saturday Night Live became a national rallying cry. In it, Carney quizzes the comedian and long-time U.S. resident on his red-and-white credentials. After Myers rattles off the capital of Saskatchewan, the names of Mr. Dressup’s puppet pals, and Toronto’s two seasons (winter and construction), Carney pronounces him a proper Canadian. “But let me ask you, Mr. Prime Minister: Will there always be a Canada?” Myers wonders. “There will always be a Canada,” Carney confirms. Big smiles all around; they both raise their elbows. The clip has racked up more than 12 million views on X alone.
But maybe not by Donald Trump, who doesn’t seem to have received the message about territorial integrity, and yesterday went back to musing about taking over Greenland. The White House is already sending a high-powered – and apparently uninvited – delegation to the island this week, including National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Vice-President JD Vance’s wife, Usha. (She’s meant to attend Greenland’s Super Bowl of dogsled races, though the race organizers don’t seem keen.) Múte Egede, Greenland’s outgoing Prime Minister, denounced the visit as both a “provocation” and “foreign interference,” since the country’s parties are still in coalition talks after this month’s election.
“What is the national security adviser doing in Greenland?” Egede asked. “The only purpose is to demonstrate power over us.” It’s a fair warning to Canadian politicians: Democratic elections aren’t proving much of a bulwark against Trump’s expansionist threats. We better make sure those elbows are razor-sharp.
The Shot
A massive group-chat blunder
A woman walks through the debris of a U.S. strike in Sanaa, Yemen, yesterday.Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
In an extraordinary security breach, senior members of Donald Trump’s cabinet accidentally texted top-secret war plans for military strikes in Yemen to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief. Over the commercial messaging app Signal, Vice-President JD Vance, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and others discussed operational details about attacks on the Houthi militia hours before the bombs dropped last week. Read more about the text chain here.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: A Vancouver Island author wrote a kids’ book about a puppy at a Pride parade. It’s now at the centre of a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.
Abroad: Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was arrested by the Israeli military after being attacked by masked settlers in the West Bank.
On the books: Canada’s federal party leaders will meet in Montreal on April 16 for their French-language debate and on April 17 to face off in English.
On the market: 23andMe, one of the biggest direct-to-consumer genetic testers in the world, has filed for bankruptcy, putting the DNA data of 15 million people up for sale.
Between the pages: He didn’t mean to, but Canadian writer Chip Zdarsky has become the comic-book world’s very own Nostradamus.