Whoever forms the next Canadian government, no matter how sympathetic they may be right now to next January’s MAGA Restoration south of the Medicine Line, the next four years at least are bound to be interesting ones for Canada.
Interesting, that is, in the sense of that famous folk curse.
This also goes for provincial governments like Alberta’s, whose leaders may think that with Donald J. Trump in the White House again it’ll be smooth sailing for oilsands bitumen all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Alas for all of us, the next president of the United States, just as when he was the next to last president of the United States, is a fellow who believes that every game must be a zero-sum game, with a clear winner and a clear loser. Every. Single. Time.
And so Canada, and Alberta too, are sure to be cast in the role of losers, even if Trump didn’t mean that stuff he said about bitumen on Super Tuesday last spring. “I call it tar. It’s not oil. It’s terrible. … So for all of the environmentalists, you ought to look at that because all of that tar is going right up into the atmosphere!”
Yes, Alberta may finally get its Keystone XL Pipeline, but we’ll have to pay for it. Again.
As for that billion and a half Loonies former Alberta premier Jason Kenney gave away to get it built almost five years ago, you can count on it to stay gone. Remember where you heard it first.
Anyway, as the author of The Art of the Deal no doubt understands better than most, fanboys and girls who just can’t walk away from a deal make lousy negotiators. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party are straining like greyhounds in the slips to prove that all over again.
We may have the longest undefended border on earth, but we can no longer assume for at least as long as Trump is president that the United States will automatically be our ally. Both our increasingly unpopular Liberal prime minister and his Conservative rival will try to persuade us that they have the secret sauce required to deal with Trump’s next administration. Neither is likely to have gotten that right.
We can probably blame former PM Brian Mulroney for tying our economy so closely to the United States 36 years ago, and we will now have to live with the consequences of a relationship gone bad that critics of the deal warned us about.
Oh well. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and, in truth, there might not have been much alternative even then. Why speak ill of the dead? Mulroney may have bought us some time. Too bad we didn’t use it very well.
Trump’s planned 10-per-cent tariff may not do much good for the U.S. economy either, but it’s bound to do more harm to ours. That may just be fine with Trump’s supporters Stateside, as long as someone else is hurt even more than they are. Indeed, understanding that is the key to understanding Trump’s unlikely and undeniable success.
Where there were once many guardrails to keep Trump from running off the road, now there will be none for the life of what numerous commentators are calling Trump 2.0.
So let’s just say Stephen Harper’s oft-reviled 2012 trade deal with China, despite the current brouhaha about foreign interference in Canadian elections and the former prime minister’s recent endorsement of Trump, may soon start to look wise and far-sighted!
I know, dear readers, that some of you don’t like it when I venture into geopolitics, but here are a few more hot-take predictions about the second Trump presidency in the aftermath of yesterday’s US presidential election.
First, there’s no need to do an Andrei Amalrik and wonder if the United States can survive another 15 years. It will certainly celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2026, despite the dire warnings made by Trump’s opponents in the leadup to Tuesday’s vote, and will likely last another half-century or so without changes to its borders. But there is no way Trump is going to make it great again. The U.S. is in an irreversible post-imperial slide, and we are living in a multi-polar world again.
If you doubt me, watch what happens under the next Trump presidency to the carefully curated international agreements and institutions that did make America great. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, sure feels like it’s done for. Now, a great bureaucracy like NATO will never just disappear – but it may have to turn its headquarters in Brussels into a tourist attraction to justify its existence. The Wittelsbach monarchy of Bavaria is long gone, too, but you can still visit their Residenz in Munich.
Letting the United States blow up the Nord Stream pipeline in 2022 is going to start to look like a hell of a mistake to Europe, and especially Germany, now that Old Unreliable is back in the White House. Will the Europeans take control of their own fate now that the U.S.A. is folding into itself, or will they fall to squabbling amongst one another like 1914? My crystal ball is cloudy, but change there will have to be over there if there is no change over here.
How long will it take for the AUKUS nuclear sub scheme to fall apart, by most accounts a spectacularly terrible deal for Australia, now that the Biden Presidency is fading into history? Trump is no friend of China, but in addition to the costs and loss of Australian sovereignty, one imagines that the Aussies will realize that in a crunch it may be more dangerous to be America’s friend than it is to be its enemy, just as Henry Kissinger famously pointed out. (Or didn’t. The provenance of almost all great lines is disputed.) We’ll soon realize we were lucky not to get caught in that expensive trap.
International courts? Currency trading deals? Your Visa card that works in Europe? All these things were designed in part to ensure the economic primacy of America and the status of the Greenback as the world’s reserve currency. Under Trump, all are likely to be at risk.
And in what form will Trumpism survive when the undeniably charismatic Trump fails from dementia or dyspepsia before the end of his second term? In that event – quite likely, it is said here – his automatic replacement is scheduled to be the utterly uncharismatic J.D. Vance. Or will Ivanka step forward to be America’s first electable female president?
One final prediction, hordes of disillusioned progressives are not likely to stream across the border to escape Trump, despite pre-election warnings, but enough well-heeled liberal Americans will buy a pied- à-terre in one of Canada’s nicer coastal cities to keep the housing and cost-of-living crisis here at a boil. They’ll come not just because the next president is an autocrat, or even a fascist, but because he’s an embarrassment.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
