With his rhetoric of wanting to make Canada a US state, Donald Trump upended the country's election and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory for Canada's Conservatives.
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Donald Trump likes to claim that his endorsement alone can decide who wins or loses an election. That certainly appears to be the case in Canada, where voters are heading to the polls Monday and are poised to deliver an improbable victory to the Liberal Party and current Prime Minister Mark Carney.
For much of 2024, the Conservatives were comfortably ahead and surged to a lead of more than 20 points in December when Canadians felt that putting a party in charge that is more politically aligned with the GOP would benefit their country the most.
And then Trump started talking about making Canada a state and threatened the country with a trade war.
That rhetoric immediately changed the entire trajectory of the race, which the ruling Liberal Party is now expected to win solely on the strength of its promise to fight back against Trump.
In other words, the US president was the most effective weapon for the more progressive party in this race.
Conversely, the Conservatives probably just wanted him to shut up, which is why they likely cringed when Trump waded into Canada’s affairs one more time on Election Day and fired off yet another social media post talking about making the country a US state.
“Good luck to the Great people of Canada,” he wrote in a post that possibly had Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre banging his head against a wall.
“Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America,” he added (as a note to Canadian readers, we usually leave Trump’s prose unaltered, hence the odd capitalization and punctuation).
The US president then appealed directly to Canadians’ sense of beauty (but not patriotism).
“No more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this land mass would be. Free access with NO BORDER. ALL POSITIVES WITH NO NEGATIVES. IT WAS MEANT TO BE!” he noted. “America can no longer subsidize Canada with the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year that we have been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a State!”
It seems highly unlikely that Canadians see things the same way, and the anticipated election result will be more of a rebuke of Trump and his imperialistic fantasies than Poilievre and his Conservatives.
What remains to be seen is what the US president will do and say when it becomes apparent that his endorsement backfired in a spectacular way.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
