The US, from protector to threat: How Trump’s annexation talk and tariff threats upended Canada’s election and forced the nation to reimagine its future.
Americans see Canada as that friendly neighbor up north. Canadians now see America as their greatest threat. How did we get here, and what does it mean for both nations?
As veteran political analyst and Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne reveals in this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Trump’s talk of annexation and punitive tariffs has profoundly transformed Canada’s relationship with the US, creating a mixture of bewilderment, fear and, unexpectedly for Canadians, fierce national pride.
For Coyne, author of the upcoming book The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, the impact goes far beyond politics: It’s forcing Canadians to question basic assumptions about their sovereignty and security that have held firm since World War II. What was once unthinkable — the need to defend against US aggression — has become part of the national conversation.
Coyne explains how this has dramatically altered Canada’s election landscape. Where once Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre commanded a 25-point lead in the polls, everything changed after Trump’s threats.
The Liberals’ replacement of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with former central banker Mark Carney — whose technocratic gravitas stands in stark contrast to Poilievre’s more combative style — has transformed the election into a referendum on who can best protect Canada from the United States.
Drawing on his coverage of 12 Canadian elections, Coyne warns that this convergence of external threats and a weakened parliamentary democracy creates a perfect storm. As power increasingly concentrates in the prime minister’s office and Canada confronts a newly hostile southern neighbor, this election could reshape the country’s direction for generations to come.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Two nations bound by geography, history, and the world’s longest undefended border, now find themselves at a precarious crossroads. The election of Donald Trump has sent tremors through the continental bedrock of North American relations, forcing Canadians to confront a startling new reality. Their closest ally and trading partner may now represent an existential threat to their national interest.
From the booing of American teams at hockey games, to the sharp decline in cross-border tourism, from tariff threats to diplomatic discord, we’re witnessing nothing less than a seismic realignment of the Canadian-US relationship. As Trump declares that America will now charge for protection, and Canadians scramble to redefine its economic and security posture, we turn to one of Canada’s wisest political minds to make sense of this historic inflection point.
Andrew Coyne has spent decades scrutinizing the political architecture of both nations through his columns in The Globe and Mail, and his appearances on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s At Issue panel, as well as his contribution to multiple prestigious publications, and soon with his upcoming book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy. He recently wrote that the democratic world will have to get along without America. It may even have to defend itself from it. This represents the gravity with which he views the current moment.
As Canada prepares for its own existential election, and with Trump’s shadow looming large, fundamental questions emerge. Can Canada navigate this new terrain without compromising its sovereignty? Will Canadian politics resist, or succumb to the populist currents flowing north? And, perhaps most crucially, what becomes of a power when the international order that guarantees its security and prosperity begins to unravel? These are the questions that may lead to the most consequential chapter in Canadian-American relations since the War of 1812. It is my pleasure to welcome Andrew Coyne here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us.
Andrew Coyne: Thank you for having me.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. First, I want you to talk a little bit about what is the mood in Canada right now with respect to not your elections, because we’ll talk about them, but how they are seeing and responding to Trump, and what’s happening in America? We hear a lot about the politics of what’s going on, but in terms of the mood in Canada right now, the fear that seems to be there, how are people reacting to this?
Andrew: Well, you put it very well in your introduction to this segment. I think you’ve summarized things very well. It’s a mixture of bewilderment that the country that we’d always thought was our friend, and protector, and trading partner and ally, has suddenly, at least at the senior executive level of the government, has suddenly decided that we’re the enemy. That’s an odd feeling, to say the least. It’s disorienting, and there’s a certain amount of vertigo that all of your assumptions about your security have, among other things, been upended.
So, at the very least, we always thought, “Okay. We have this vast expansive land that would be very difficult for us to defend on our own, but we’ll be okay, because it’s in the Americans national interest to want to protect us in their own interest, because they don’t want a predator on their continent. And certainly, we don’t have to worry about the American’s themselves because that was settled,” as you mentioned the War of 1812.
And so, suddenly, none of that is true, or not necessarily true. So, that’s, as I say, disorienting. There’s a certain amount of fear because nobody knows exactly what Trump intends. It’s bad enough that he seems to have declared economic war on us for no discernible reason, but just suddenly, we’re dealing with these mega tariffs. But when he also starts talking about annexation, and talks about it over and over and over again. When at the very least, the premise seems to be that he’ll try and starve us into submission.
There’s a bit of fear, but I can tell you, pretty soon after that, there’s a pretty ornery, defiant, proud Canadian nationalism that’s emerged. As you know, we don’t tend to wear our flags on our sleeves, if you will, as much as you guys. But down below our placid exterior, there’s a pretty strong sense of Canadian nationhood, a pride in what we’ve achieved as a country, and don’t forget, we come out of that British tradition of Churchill, and standing alone and defiance. That’s in our DNA, that’s in our cultural memory. And so we’re not inclined to give in in a fight. I think Donald Trump’s going to find that he’s maybe bitten off more than he can chew.
Jeff: Is there a danger in that nationalism? Canada has not had, as you rightly said, the kind of jingoism, the kind of nationalism that we sometimes see in the US. What is the danger of that as you see it, as it begins to permeate Canada?
Andrew: The danger, I think, is muted. It’s not an aggressive nationalism. We’re not angry with Americans. We’re a little confounded because they could have elected this guy, but I don’t think people really have a negative, or nasty attitude towards Americans. It’s just this administration. And our nationalism has traditionally been pretty inclusive. It’s similar to American nationalism in a way, at least the good kind of American nationalism, which I’ve always admired, which is that it’s rooted in things like the Constitution and America’s special mission in the world, and these kind of idealistic ideas, which I think is a lovely form of nationalism.
The nationalism [that] says, “Let’s pull together, everybody, because we’ve got big things we want to do in the world.” That’s a lovely kind of nationalism. The nationalism that says, “We don’t like you, and we want you out of here.” That’s obviously a very negative kind, but I haven’t seen any sign of that in Canada.
Jeff: Is the bigger concern right now, the economics of what might happen as a result of tariffs, and we’re recording this on “liberation day,” and we’ve yet to see what’s going to come of all that? But is the concern about the economics of Canada, and how does that compare to the larger concerns about national security and alliances, and the kind of alliances that Canada may have to engage in, if in fact, its relationship with the US continues to break down?
Andrew: Yes. I mean, the immediate thing is the tariffs, of course, and that has a whole suite of issues that go with it in terms of not just the immediate short-term questions of how do we respond, is there something we can do to try to persuade Trump to back off whether in terms of retaliatory measures or emollience of various kinds, and so that’s a short-term tactical question.
There’s the question of, how do we help people through what may be a very difficult time. Just to put a pin in that, I mentioned that there’s this defiant streak. We have an advantage over, I’ll just say the United States for purposes of this argument, in this particular tangle, which is, we’re fighting for our lives here. We’ve got our backs to the wall. We’re defending our turf.
And there, I can tell you is utter unity in the country on this. There is no division about how tough we need to be, and what we need to go through. People are quite prepared to go through some pretty tough times to defend our sovereignty. Whereas, I don’t think more than a handful of Americans signed up for this. People who voted for Trump, didn’t vote for him because they wanted him to invade Canada.
And so, I don’t think there’s the same unity of purpose, and I think we’re seeing as people are quite rightly looking at the cost of these tariffs to consumers and to businesses. I think he’s going to have a hard time keeping the American people with him. I don’t think they’re with him even now on this issue, but I think even as time goes on, it’s going to be even harder, whereas my sense of the mood in this country is we’re hunkering down for a long painful fight, and we’ll do whatever we have to do. And that’s an unusual thing. We haven’t had to deal with that kind of hard times really since probably World War II, but that’s the mood.
Jeff: That really leads into the Canadian election that’s ongoing right now. And with that kind of national unity that you’re talking about, the sense of purpose that you’re talking about among Canadians, how that’s playing out in the election campaign, because it has certainly taken on a very different task than it did at the very beginning of the campaign?
Andrew: That’s right. So, there’s two ways to look at it, and one of these will bridge from that last question, which is, there’s a whole agenda of issues that we’re going to have to address beyond the short-term thing of what do we do with this immediate crisis of the tariffs. And that is, if we can no longer, and forgive me for saying it this way, but if we can no longer rely on the Americans, if we cannot assume either a responsible trading relationship, that even if we have a free trade treaty with them, we can’t assume that they’ll actually live up to the treaty, because Trump’s bringing all these tariffs that are in flagrant violation of the treaty that he negotiated and signed.
If we can’t count on them for that, if we can’t count on them to defend us, and this is, of course, what everybody in NATO is now dealing with is, what do we do? Article 5 seems to be a dead letter now in NATO, at least, as far as the Americans are concerned. If we even have to worry about what happens in our North, and it’s always been a worry about what would happen if China or Russia, or somebody decided to set up shop in our North.
But now we’ve got to think, “Well, what would the Americans do? Would Trump want a piece of the action?” So, all these raise enormous questions about, do we need to be reorienting our trade away from the United States, even though we do 75 percent of our trade with the states now? Do we need to be much more aggressive about pursuing trade with other countries?
Do we need to be thinking about different types of military and defensive alliances, if NATO is effectively dead? Do we need some sort of alliance of the democracies excluding the United States?
So, those are huge issues that are hanging over the election. Now, elections being what they are, it’s not probably a good odds that they’ll be discussed in any really coherent or sustained way, but they’re certainly hanging over it. But then there’s just the political, or the capital P impact, which is, as your listeners may or may not know, going into this election, or up until the end of last year, the Conservative Party had built an enormous lead in the polls. They were 25 points ahead in the polls.
People were done with the liberal government, they were done with Justin Trudeau. They just wanted to change governments, and take a new tack. And then, this all blows up. Trump gets reelected. Trudeau is finally persuaded by his party to step down, because they can’t win with him. Trump starts talking about tariffs, and then starts talking about annexation.
The liberals hold a leadership race, and bring in Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada governor, former Bank of England governor as their leader, and everything has changed. The landscape has entirely changed, and suddenly, the liberals are now five to eight points ahead in the polls. We’ve never seen anything quite as sudden a shift. There’s a bunch of things that are going on there.
One is, some of that big conservative lead was just people parking their vote, because they couldn’t wait for Trudeau to go. And then when Trump comes in, people get very, very nervous, and people tend to rally around incumbents anyway in times of trial, I think in most countries. But add to that a nervousness and a doubt about the conservative, and the conservative leader in particular, Pierre Poilievre, who, while he’s not at all Trump-like – he’s not a threat to democracy, he’s a pretty normal politician, certainly by [the] American standard – there’s just enough of a Trumpian whiff to him.
He uses some of the same rhetoric. He addresses some of the same conspiratorial fears. He plays to some of the same galleries. I think because there’s a segment of the electorate in Canada that subscribes to that. Not a large one, but it’s enough of one that he wants to keep them in the tent.
There’s another party to his right called the People’s Party that is pretty openly sort of MAGA-like, and he wants to keep his vote from bleeding to them. So, doubts about Poilievre have added to it. And then in the initial going, there’s certainly has been a lot of interest in Carney, who is not a politician, has not ever been elected to anything, but in these very serious and strange times, I think there was an appetite, well, certainly amongst a section of electorate that said, “I’m not looking for a politician. I’m looking for a serious guy. I’m looking for a technocrat. I’m looking for somebody who’s unflappable and cool under fire, and can handle himself in a crisis.”
And Carney has gone through crises in his central banking career, both the financial crisis, and the Brexit crisis, when he was in England. So, you add all these things up, and there’s been this sudden rush, partly, of people abandoning the conservatives for the liberals, but also, I’m sorry to go into such detail, but there’s another party to the left of the liberals, the New Democratic Party.
And when New Democrats get frightened, and particularly when they’re frightened of conservatives, they tend to switch and vote for the liberals as the security blanket. And a lot of that is happening as well. So, it’s a bunch of things that have contributed to a remarkable overturning of what everybody expected going into this election. And if you had to bet at this moment, you would say the liberals would probably win, but a lot can happen between now and election day.
Jeff: How much of the success that Carney has had in the relatively short time that he’s been prime minister that Trudeau has been gone, how much of that is performative? How much of it comes from the fact that you can believe Mark Carney as a prime minister in a crisis in difficult times, as opposed to the way Poilievre has been received?
Andrew: I think that is a big part of it. People might not know all the details of his biography, and they might not know all the specifics of what policies he is proposing, but they can read people, and they can read that Carney is an adult, that he is like an old-fashioned-looking politician. He looks like a politician from the early-’60s. At this moment in time, people are not looking for– They had their share of glamor with Trudeau Sr. and Trudeau Jr.
And at this moment, they are not looking for glamor. They are looking for somebody who has got substance to him. And, yes, when you look at Poilievre, he is not stupid. He is a smart guy. He is a good communicator. But everything about him is the sort of scrappy kid, rather than the grown-up in the room. He is the obnoxious brat that maybe you might want in a certain setting.
Maybe if we were still in late 2024, and people just wanted to vent their anger at Justin Trudeau, then maybe Pierre Poilievre looks good in that moment. But he has never really presented himself in a prime ministerial fashion. He always looks like a leader of the opposition. There is a saying here in Canada, “You get the job you auditioned for,” and I think that may be what is afflicting Poilievre.
So, there is a big debate going on now within the Conservative Party, and some people going public saying, they need to change their approach, change their strategy, they need to lay off anything Trump related, make Poilievre look more serious and substantive, and less boisterous and argumentative, and really focus on the threat from Trump, rather than refighting old battles with the liberals.
And that is very hard, I think, for the conservative leadership, and the strategists around them. It is hard for them to absorb that or swallow that, and they’re resisting. So, there is a big debate going on.
Jeff: Is it too late for that? Has Poilievre abandoned what he could have done, perhaps, a little bit earlier, which is more of a complete renunciation of Trump?
Andrew: Well, that’s very well put, and I would certainly be of that school that he needed to get out in front of this, that this was going to be a weakness for him, and he should have seen that. And maybe they were drunk on their own bathwater. They were so far ahead in the polls. I mean, the thing is, he got into that big lead, because he was ahead of the curve on issues to do with inflation, and housing affordability, and these kinds of things, which I know are big issues in the States as well.
And he picked up on that way before other leaders saw how important that was going to be in people’s voting. So, give him credit for that. He got out in front of that one. But then, when the tide turned, he didn’t seem to understand what a mortal threat Trump was to him, particularly, to his political chances, and was just slow off the mark. And so, he has always been a week or two behind the curve.
The things he is saying now are probably the things he should have said a month or two ago. But to go back to your point, for somebody, for whom that was likely to be a weakness, you have got to do everything you can to turn it into a strength. If he had been out in front about renouncing that, he might have looked statesmanlike. He might have looked like he might have resolved some of people’s doubts about him.
These lingering doubts about, is he too Trumpy? Is he too connected to, or is he at least too beholden to that section of his base to really put up a good fight against Trump? And he just didn’t realize what a mortal weakness that was going to be for him, and he is paying the price for it.
Jeff: The other thing that seems odd is the way Trump seems to be responding to Carney, as opposed to the way he treated Trudeau. The phone conversation, I guess that was reported that Trump had with Carney a week or so ago, reaffirms that. Talk about that.
Andrew: Well, he referred to [chuckles] him as Prime Minister Carney, rather than Governor Carney, although for a former central bank governor that might actually be less off-putting. But, yes, it was more of a normal-sounding, at least by Trump’s standards, communiqué. I guess I have a couple of responses. One is, stay tuned. I mean, we are about to get hit with some honking great tariffs, so it’s not like he’s suddenly decided to make nice with the country.
And he could sour on Carney in a minute, the way he sours on other people around him. So, I wouldn’t put too much on it, but to the extent that there was this impact, I have a couple of theories. One is, as you know, Trump likes people who look like they are from central casting. He is always measuring things by, “How would this look on TV?” Carney just looks like your standard-issue central banker, and he wears conservative suits, and maybe something like that impressed Trump.
Trump is strangely, easily impressed. He’s got this man crush on Putin. He’s very keen on English royalty, so who knows? He might have just struck his fancy that way. The other possible theory is, it may be that somebody has got to Trump and advised him and said, “Look, every time you ratchet up the tensions here, every time you talk about annexation or 51st state, you just add to the liberals’ support. You just drive support away from the conservatives who, presumably, you’d be more comfortable with [than] towards the liberals.” And maybe this was him trying to play some game of, if I dial down the tensions, if I talk nice about the liberals, maybe people will feel that it’s safe to go back to voting conservative, but that may be crediting him with too much acumen.
Jeff: I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that you’ve written about Trump, because one of the things that I would argue is different from what you’ve written about him, and some of your commentary about Trump, is that it doesn’t do what we see the American press do way too often, which is normalize some of Trump’s behavior. Talk about that, Andrew.
Andrew: It’s really difficult, frankly. I understand why people would fall into this, because the tendency is always to crave normalcy. The tendency is to price in things that have already happened. So, if Trump has done a hundred bad things in the past, it gets forgiven, because now we’re on to what’s the next thing. As you know, in politics, as in life, people are always measured against expectations.
And Trump has successfully educated everybody’s expectations down. We don’t expect him to do anything else, except crazy off-putting, offensive, impossible, lunatic things. And so, it becomes hard for people to keep focused on, “Wait a minute, that was truly crazy what just happened” because there’s this blur of things that are going on around it. So, I sympathize with people. It requires effort to comprehend the completeness of Trump, as I call it.
The mind always rebels against this, and wants to put him in a cubbyhole that’s more familiar. So, if he were just a crook, we could kind of figure that out, or if he was stupid, or if he was a bit crazy, or if he was ignorant. But when he is all these things, and every other thing beside, he embodies basically every conceivable vice, and no known virtue. And I wouldn’t say that about virtually anybody else on this planet, but after eight or 10 years of watching Trump, I don’t know how anybody can come to any other conclusion, but that this is a deeply damaged person who, unfortunately, also has a lot of money, and now has a big following.
Then, you have to keep reeducating yourself to focus on. It’s like looking at the sun, your eyes always want to look to one side of it, rather than staring at the enormity of it, and it requires a conscious effort. I’ve had to do this with myself. I’ve written several columns where I’ve tried to just wrestle with myself in this regard to force myself to look at this, and not to either excuse it, or to explain it away, or to give them a volume discount, if I can put it that way.
He does 12 things every day, any one of which would have ended any previous political figure’s career instantly, and without a shade of exaggeration. But because he does so many, as we just– It all becomes part of the wash. He has to do something extraordinarily crazier, stupid, even by his standards to generate this reaction, which unfortunately means, it drives him on to doing crazier and crazier things, because he needs that kind of perverse affirmation.
I really think that this is a big part of what explains Trump is his particular malignant narcissism manifests in a way that requires that he destroy things. Requires that he makes other people and institutions and things be smaller for him to feel larger. And the only way he can keep getting that high is by higher and higher doses. He has to do crazier and more offensive things that get people like me outraged at him for him to get his own personal kick out of it, let alone what his followers in the polls require.
So, I think there’s an unfortunate dynamic where, in order for him to shock and outrage people, and get the response that he needs, and that his followers need, he has to be pushed on to more and more lunatic adventures, which now include invading Greenland, and apparently, trying to starve Canada into submission at the very least. None of which, even I would not have predicted circa November 2024.
And I thought I had predicted everything about Trump. I thought I knew the completeness of him, and once again, I didn’t. And there’s something worse, something far worse lurking in the future that I think it’s inevitable.
Jeff: And you have the advantage of watching it somewhat from afar. And that’s got to be helpful.
Andrew: Well, among other things, I’m not worried about the legal consequences at this point, and I’m not worried about the consequences for my employer. Whereas I think, increasingly, people in the United States, as we’ve seen, the great weakness of these large corporations that own the media is that they’re large corporations with large financial and vulnerable financial interests that Trump is not shy about going after.
So, when you’ve got somebody who’s so outside the bounds of any previous known experience legally, and morally, and every other way, some of the things that you might have thought, “I’m fine because I’m working for CBS News.” Maybe you’re not, because you’re working for CBS News, not to pick on CBS. So, it’s having that distance, and having that distance, I guess, from social circles, et cetera.
I know Republicans and Conservatives in the States who are appalled by Trump, but who have– They face a real difficulty that it costs them friendships. It costs them career prospects. And so you’ve got to be prepared to pay the price, if you’re a dissenting Republican these days. And I admire the ones who have. I think, in many ways, it’s shown the worst of Republicans, the ones who’ve gone along and played along, and the ones who’ve subscribed to the demented philosophy, but the ones who have stood up against them and paid the price, I think should make people proud to be Americans, and proud to be Republicans, though they’re few and far between, unfortunately.
Jeff: Are there any politicians, or any groups in Canada that are analogous to the MAGA movement, albeit smaller?
Andrew: Yes. So, there’s this group I mentioned called the People’s Party that was started up by a former Conservative cabinet minister, a guy named Maxime Bernier. Who in his previous life was more in the nature of a kind of a free market libertarian, maybe a Tea Partier, small government, and that kind of thing. But since he started up, this party has morphed into much more of a anti-immigration, culture wars, and full MAGA, including, for example, questioning whether we should be supporting Ukraine.
So, he’s gone on this unfortunate journey [and] it’s too bad. I think there was a place in the spectrum for a more consistently free-market party than the traditional conservatives have been. The Conservative Party has typically been [a] very cautious, centrist type of party. And I think just as the New Democrats serve as a spine for the liberals, that they’re a little more aggressively left of center, would have been a nice balance to have somebody on the right that way. But instead, they’ve turned into this populist, fear-mongering conspiracy theory. Basically, a pretty close equivalent to MAGA.
But I will say, even they have had to wrestle with Trump as having become the predator, and the enemy of Canada. So, even they have had to say, “No”, to Donald Trump, and, “We will stand against this.” So, he’s having that effect on Canadian politics that he’s having across the democratic world, where the populist right that were on the march previously, are now on their back heel, because nobody wants to be associated with Trump. So, [chuckles] he’s performing a perverse service to the cause of democracy just by being so splendidly awful that even the populist right now has to distance themselves from him.
Jeff: I want to talk a little bit beyond Trump as it relates to Canada. I mentioned earlier your upcoming book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy. You have written and been very critical of the state of Canadian democracy, particularly, the way that the process has operated over the past several years. Talk a little bit about that.
Andrew: So, we have a parliamentary democracy like Britain’s, where the government has to hold the confidence of the parliament at all times. Theoretically, a government could fall at any time in Canada if the parliament decided that they no longer held confidence. So, there isn’t that fixed term that you have for a president. So, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, as it’s evolved, all of our institutions have, I think, degraded into a poor approximation of how the system is supposed to work.
Poor compared to the other parliamentary democracies. So, our parliamentary system does not work as well as Britain’s or New Zealand’s or Australia’s, or other countries that have a parliamentary system. Our members of parliament have almost no independence whatsoever. They are so locked in, they can only vote as the party that tells them to vote. They can only speak when the party tells them to speak. They have to say the lines that are written for them by the party. Our parliament, as a whole, has very little ability to actually hold the government to account.
A government can push through an omnibus bill, as it’s called. That’s basically their entire legislative agenda in one bill that everyone has to vote up or down. I know you have some equivalents of that in the States, but add to that, that the government can then cut off debate whenever it feels like on that monstrous bill. Our committees in the parliament have very little actual power to call witnesses, and force [the] government to hand over documents, even though they’re supposed to have an unvarnished power to that.
So, those parliamentary institutions are not functioning in the way they really should. We have real problems with our electoral system which is producing wild anomalies, where parties that get twice as many votes, get half as many seats as another party. These are the familiar problems with First Past the Post. So, the book is an attempt to try to draw all these things together.
The people have written about each of them separately, but when you put it all together, you shake your head, and you say, “We’re a long way from really a fully functioning parliamentary democracy.” And I’m just trying to give people’s heads a shake on that. I will say, however, one thing, which is, and one is certainly aware of this watching what’s going on south of the border is, we do still have, I think, a healthy political culture.
And what I may have come around to the view of is, that may be even more important than the institutional setting. You guys have got all those splendid, wonderful checks and balances, and the separation of powers, and all these things that are, and I always thought, would prevent a dictator from ever getting into the United States, and prevent the crazy people from taking over.
But it turns out, you can have all the institutions and checks and balances you want, but if the culture isn’t there, if the public isn’t paying attention, and if the public is so polarized and so venomous towards each other, that they’re prepared to countenance this kind of nonsense, and if the people in the Senate and the House of Representatives aren’t doing their jobs, and aren’t performing their constitutional roles, then it doesn’t matter how good your institutions are, you’ve got a problem.
And conversely, we still seem to have an intact democratic culture, notwithstanding the fact that our institutions are so weak. And maybe that should be grounds for optimism that now maybe as part of this rethink that we’re going on generally, because Trump has upset all of our assumptions. Maybe I hope that part of that is, we’ll say, “You know what? We need to tackle the way that we get decisions done,” because part of the reason we haven’t faced some of the issues, and haven’t made decisions in the past that we need to make tough decisions about defense and the economy and so on, maybe part of that is that our process isn’t a very good one for gathering democratic consensus. And maybe as part of our big rethink, we need to think about some serious democratic reforms.
Jeff: How did the parliamentary system in Canada degrade to the point that you’re talking about?
Andrew: Well, I think it’s a function of a couple of things. One is we’re living next door to a presidential system, and a lot of the problem with our system is that it’s become very presidentialized. We’ve amassed a lot of power in the prime minister’s office with none of the checks and balances. So, sometimes, our system has been described as a presidential system without the Congress.
And so the prime minister in the Canadian system is far more powerful within our sphere, than a president is within the United States, although Trump is trying to upset that. So, I think it’s partly that. I think a big part of it also is, we’ve had such a prolonged period of one-party dominance, that the liberal government, the Liberal Party, I should say, for the past 120 years has won, basically, two out of every three elections. And [they’re] sometimes mockingly referred to as the natural governing party.
And I think two things come out of that. It affects the psyche of both the liberals and the conservatives. It breeds a kind of arrogance and complacency in the liberals that they always think, “Oh, even if we lose this election, we’ll win the next one.” And it breeds a certain resentment and chippiness among the conservatives. And when it comes to things like parliamentary conventions, which is the really important part of our system, a lot of it’s not written down.
It’s just conventions that are only as powerful so far as people obey them. I think it’s meant that the liberals have tended to allow these conventions to fall by the wayside, because they can, because they’re in power, they’re inevitable, who’s going to prevent them, that kind of thing. And then the conservatives get in, and the conservatives have the attitude of, “Well, everything’s stacked against us. The media is against us, the bureaucracy is against us, the legal profession is against us. We’re such underdogs that we have to cut corners, and let conventions fall by the board, and govern in a slightly undemocratic way, because we have to, because we have to even the scales, [chuckles] or to level the playing field.”
And so between those two dynamics, I think it’s been this one-way ratchet, where things just constantly get more and more centralized, less and less power for MPs and for parliament, generally, more and more power in the prime minister’s office, and it just seems to have this inevitable momentum. And the funny part is, every government comes in, every party gets elected, gets elected on the platform of, “We’re going to fix this mess. We’re going to clean up. We’re going to give MPs more autonomy and we’re going to bring in more checks and balances,” and then they never do once they’re in power.
So, they’re aware that there’s a problem, that the public at least is aware there’s a problem, but they only pay lip service to it. And then as soon as they’re in power, nothing really changes, or in fact, it gets worse.
Jeff: And arguably, to the extent that the problems with the US, and dealing with Trump becomes front and center in the new government, that could exacerbate the situation of greater power in the hands of the prime minister.
Andrew: I think that’s a very good point. So, one of the off-putting things about this election is that, because we’re so focused on this one issue, a lot of other issues that we need to address are going to get ignored. It’s all going to be subsumed in this. And the nature of the issue, as we were discussing earlier, places a lot of focus even more than usual on the party leaders.
People are so focused on who’s got Canada’s back, who’s going to be our protector, that it will, I think, take even further the presidentialization, the concentration of power in the prime minister’s office. So, I think that’s a fair point that may accentuate that process. Now, the problem is, if we’re also faced with these enormous policy changes that we have to face up to, in terms of our defense, in terms of our economy, et cetera, there’s a real danger that, if they just try to make those major changes all from the center, that you create huge divisions, and protests within society. And in Canada, that inevitably means it gets done on regional ones.
And so we’re already seeing, for example, the Premier of Alberta, shaking her saber and saying, “If you do X or Y, then it’s going to be bad for national unity,” which is code for, maybe people in Alberta will threaten to separate. I don’t think there’ll ever be a serious separation movement, but it’s the thing you throw out there. And of course, there’s always potential for trouble in Quebec.
Now, the interesting thing is, in the present moment, there’s been a big, huge surge of national unity. So, Quebecers are among those who have deserted the separatist party. There’s a federal separatist party for the federal liberals. So, even Quebecers understand that when Canada is under attack and under threat, that they need to rally around, because actually they’ve got a pretty good thing going in Canada, and they’d be far worse off, if God forbid, we were ever swallowed up by the States, or if Canada broke apart, then Quebec really would be alone as the only French-speaking community in North America.
So, there’s been a sudden rediscovery in Quebec that it’s actually, all things considered, not too bad living with the rest of Canada, because the rest of Canada gives them a lot more latitude and leeway and understanding than they’d ever get, again, forgive me for saying, from the United States.
Jeff: One of the other problems from the United States that you write about, and it really goes to the heart, I suppose, of all of these issues, is that the US has helped degrade the political discourse in Canada.
Andrew: Yes. There’s an inevitable impact, isn’t there, that when these norms get discarded, when people start attacking each other in just unprecedented venomous terms, when lying becomes just an absolute wholesale. We always get upset because politicians lie, but this is on another scale altogether. There’s an inevitable, coarsening of debate generally, that there is a MAGAfication across all the democracies to some extent.
So far, as I say, it’s relatively small. So, the capital C Conservatives have gone some way down the populist road, particularly under the current leader, but also to some extent under Stephen Harper, their old prime minister in the early 2010s, but only to an extent. And they’re still bound by certain norms, whether that’s partly because, again, our political culture, partly because the institutional setting doesn’t permit the same sustained departure from norms.
Maybe only because you’ve got to stand up in parliament every day and answer questions. So, maybe parliament still has some lingering use in that sense, that it creates some boundaries of discourse. But that’s an interesting question, but so far the out-and-out MAGAfication is limited to, I would say, maybe 10 percent of the population.
But there’s a larger percentage of the conservative base. At one point, you might have said it was even 40 percent or 50 percent that was quite sympathetic to Trump. They weren’t all the way down the MAGA rabbit hole, but they liked the sound of him. That’s diminished significantly. It’s now maybe 15 percent or 20 percent of the conservatives now, who would say they support, or like Donald Trump. So, again, he’s gone so far over the line, that he’s dispelled whatever goodwill he had in this country.
Jeff: And finally, I read somewhere, this is the 12th election that you’re covering in Canada. Is this one of the more interesting ones?
Andrew: It’s shaping up to be. The televised leaders’ debates are going to be fascinating, partly, because Carney is so untested in these particular waters, partly because Poilievre is in the throes, perhaps, of having to rethink how he approaches things. So, it’s going to be very interesting what kind of personas they present.
And because this race is so focused on the leaders, it is in some ways has parallels to the 1988 election, which was the great election in Canada, where we decided whether or not we were going to sign the original free trade deal with the United States, which had been an issue for a 100 years prior to that in Canada. And it was something that nobody dared touch. It was too close to the Americans, and raised too many atavistic fears of domination or absorption.
But at that time, we had a huge knockdown, drag-out fight about it, and some people predicted the end of Canada, and some people said, “No, this is the best thing we could possibly do for ourselves.” And in the end, we just screwed up our nerve and our courage, and took the plunge. And, by and large, I think there’d be a large consensus that it worked out very well for us.
But now, suddenly, we’re presented with the worst of all nightmares, where all those scary stories people used to tell people just to scare the children in the past about America, suddenly, look a little more true. [chuckles] So, it’s no longer fear-mongering or anti-American. You actually have a president who behaves like anybody’s worst cartoon of a malevolent American president.
And so it’s a little different from 1988, in that, there’s no longer a debate about is there a threat. Everybody agrees there’s a threat. The question is, what do we do about it, and who do we want to be doing it? And so it’s similar, but different to that ’88 election, but it’s shaping up to be of enormous importance, depending on, of course, what happens after it.
But if the threat is as large as it appears to be, and if the challenges and the changes we’re going to have to make as a result are as significant as they would seem at this point, then this is going to be, possibly, a very decisive election that shapes the next 10 or 20 years.
Jeff: Andrew Coyne, his upcoming book is The Crisis of Canadian Democracy. Andrew, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Andrew: Thank you. I enjoyed myself very much.
Jeff: Thank you. Thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
