Chris Selley: Trudeau made Canada too weak to handle Trump making America great

On the question of Donald Trump’s second term as nominal leader of the free world, the federal Liberals’ message boils down to “all is well.”

“I want to say with utter sincerity and conviction to Canadians that Canada will be fine,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland predicted on Wednesday, referring to a president-elect who, worryingly, calls himself a “tariff man.”

“We’re going to make sure that this extraordinary friendship and alliance … continues,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who called Trump to congratulate him on Wednesday afternoon.

Liberal MP Sean Casey, one of few so far to call publicly for Trudeau to step down, said managing Trump 2.0 was an opportunity for the prime minister to re-inspire confidence in Canadians. (For what it’s worth, an Angus Reid Institute poll released Monday found 38 per cent of respondents thought Pierre Poilievre would be better than Trudeau at managing the Canada-U.S. relationship under Trump. At 23 per cent, Trudeau was two points behind the answer that “neither are up to the job.”)

All this reassurance was passing funny, considering Liberals have been ever-more-shamelessly exploiting Trump and Trumpism as a bogeyman supposedly hiding within the Conservative movement. “What we’re seeing from these MAGA conservatives is an approach on going back on fundamental rights,” Trudeau told The Canadian Press in December.

On the repeal of Roe v. Wade, Trudeau told CP, “we may think to ourselves, ‘This will never happen in Canada and this is just the Liberals bringing up the usual fear that they do’” — perhaps the most self-aware thing Trudeau has ever said. “It wasn’t ever supposed to happen in the United States either, and yet it did because of MAGA conservatism. The threat is real.” (Needless to say, the Republican desire to overturn Roe far predated Trump’s arrival on the political scene.)

Trump 1.0 wasn’t disastrous for Canada, but past performance does not predict future results. It’s not absolutely certain that Trump 2.0 will do awful things, but instability is pretty much Trump’s stock in trade, and it’s Canada’s kryptonite. We don’t much plan for contingencies, whether they’re natural disasters, pandemics, wars or other forms of geopolitical upheaval. We don’t usually need to, thanks in large part to Washington.

Now, it may suddenly matter more than ever that we have little control over our borders and that we can’t do anything with people who cross the border illegally except laboriously adjudicate their claims for asylum. That changed somewhat in March last year, when the Biden White House agreed to an updated version of the Safe Third Country Agreement: “Irregular” border-crossers can now be returned to the country from which they crossed irregularly.

I suspect that deal wouldn’t make much sense to the dealmaker president-elect. Trump’s stated solution to such problems is mass deportations.

The Roxham Road border crossing has been officially “closed” since that policy came into effect, but it has never “closed” entirely. From January to June of this year, Canada agreed to hear asylum claims from 664 “irregular” border crossers. That’s a tiny fraction of the all-time high, but it demonstrates that nothing physical has happened at the border that would prevent crossings from ramping up again. And Canada’s capacity to adjudicate asylum claims in a reasonable length of time, without enormous backlogs piling up, remains a pipe dream.

Canada has been a leading voice on and per-capita contributor to Ukraine, with Ottawa repeatedly boasting of the aid we provide Kyiv and publicly displaying support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Canada’s support makes sense on every level, from political (Canada boasts the largest Ukrainian diaspora in the West) to moral (supporting modern Ukraine over modern Russia is one of the easiest moral choices there is nowadays).

Until now, though, no one has really paid much attention to how much Canada’s aid actually contributes to the war effort. It’s a fair bit: the equivalent of 7.4 billion euros, according to German think thank the Kiel Institute, which puts us in sixth place among nations (counting the European Union as one). But the U.S. has given the equivalent of 85 billion Euros, the EU 44 billion. Suddenly our support matters much more, because Kyiv might soon be getting a lot less from Washington. Trump reiterated his “stop the wars” message in his victory speech. No one heard that more clearly than Ukrainians did.

Obviously, Canada can’t make up the difference, if Trump really does abandon Ukraine or demand some kind of resolution that Zelenskyy wouldn’t want to agree to. But it’s also very difficult to imagine busted flushes like Trudeau, Freeland or Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly rallying the necessary support elsewhere on the world stage. Ask a Liberal about great Canadian feats of diplomacy and you’ll almost certainly hear first about the Suez Crisis, which was almost 70 years ago.

The Biden administration was fairly critical of Canada for its miserly contributions to NATO. Safe to say that won’t stop. Kelly Craft, who was ambassador to Canada during Trump’s first term, told CTV News on Wednesday that our “plan” to spend two per cent of GDP by 2032 isn’t fast enough. CTV’s Vassy Kapelos asked Joly if Canada would be willing to move quicker, which was at least good for a chuckle: The Liberals clearly have no intention of spending that much anyway — in politics, 2032 might as well be 2132 — and Pierre Poilievre, who’s warming up to be our next prime minister, hasn’t committed to it either.

An America “made great again” by Trump might cast this country in a very unflattering light. And it would be well deserved.

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