So much for that reprieve. The pro-appeasement Postmedia pundits and Conservative politicians in Canada hadn’t even completed their victory lap over the apparent postponement of Donald Trump’s promised tariffs when Trump himself announced that he’d changed his mind. “We’re thinking in terms of 25 per cent on Mexico and Canada,” he told reporters on Monday. “I think we’ll do it February 1.”
This comes as a particularly big blow to Alberta premier Danielle Smith, who has been an enthusiastic and vocal proponent of surrendering to the incoming administration and its wildly incoherent whims. She has repeatedly broken with her provincial peers and the federal government, trying over and over to flatter Trump and his proxies into exempting Alberta’s oil and gas industry — a decision that would, it’s worth reiterating, inflict even more pain on its agriculture, forestry, and manufacturing sectors, not to mention the rest of the country’s economy.
She seems to believe there’s a win-win outcome available here, all evidence to the contrary. Never mind that Trump’s energy policies, which include his day-one decision to declare a “national energy emergency” aimed at boosting U.S. oil and gas production and reducing oil prices, are directly contrary to Alberta’s economic interests. “Americans want to have energy dominance globally, and I believe the best way for them to achieve that is for Canada to be a partner in that,” she said recently. “If their asks are reasonable, then let’s meet them halfway.”
But their asks aren’t even remotely reasonable, and meeting halfway is not their style. Trump has repeatedly framed his country’s trade deficit with Canada — one that’s entirely the result of our oil and gas exports — as a form of subsidy or even theft, and suggested that tariffs offer a risk-free way to remedy that. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” he said in his inaugural address.
In fairness to Smith, she’s not the only Conservative politician in Canada desperately trying to find new and innovative ways to surrender. BC Conservative leader John Rustad released a video blaming David Eby for the threats to his province’s prosperity and suggesting he ought to accept Trump’s false premises around border security that the federal government has already addressed. “David Eby is putting at risk the people in this province by threatening a trade war instead of actually figuring out how you work with the Americans. Ontario, Saskatchewan, and even Alberta are looking at how they work with the Americans, not ramping up the trade rhetoric,” Rustad said.
Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, declined to take a position on whether he’d support retaliatory tariffs against the Americans. Instead, he hopped in his imaginary time machine in order to duck the question and talk instead about how he would have approved pipelines like Northern Gateway and Energy East. Liberal leadership candidates Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland weren’t nearly as shy, with both calling for “dollar-for-dollar” retaliatory measures. "If you force our hand,” Freeland said at her Sunday campaign launch, “we'll inflict the biggest trade blow that the United States has ever endured."
And yet, for all of her failed attempts to placate and appease Trump, Smith still seems to think that more appeasement is the way to go — and that the real threat is somehow coming from Ottawa, not Washington. "It hurt me that they felt they could make that argument that Alberta should sacrifice our interests in order to try and advance some kind of trade war,” she told reporters on Monday. "I take a different approach. Let's stop fighting with each other and let's maybe try to remove some of the internal trade barriers and maybe my fellow premiers can stop blocking pipelines when we propose them."
The whole point here is to stop a trade war, not advance it. All the new pipelines in the world won’t help Canada or Alberta in the here and now, given how long it would take to build them. And there’s no universe where we can simultaneously increase our energy exports to the United States, as Smith has suggested repeatedly, and eliminate America’s trade deficit with Canada, as Trump has demanded. As UBC economist Kevin Milligan argued on Bluesky, there are no easy ways out here. “We're not weighing our pain vs their pain. We're trying to inflict pain on them to get the tariff removed, and taking some own-pain now is better than submitting.”
This is the point that surrender-curious Conservatives keep missing. Pitching Trump on some kind of win-win outcome, as Smith keeps trying to, is an affront to the way he sees the world. As Canadian writer Dan Gardner argued in a recent (and excellent) Substack, Trump’s position is that “mutually beneficial relationships are a tale believed by suckers. This is why Trump is so contemptuous of international trade and why his thinking about trade and trade deficits resembles the mercantilism that dominated the 18th century before economists in the 19th century showed that trade can make both parties better off.”
Canadian negotiators must heed the lessons of history — specifically the historical example of the Siege of Melos during the Peloponnesian War, Gardner writes. Appeals to justice and fairness on the part of the Athenians failed the Melosians, while their allies in Sparta disappeared when they were needed most. They learned too late, the only way to survive is to fight. “We need to make the bastard bleed,” Gardner writes. “We either threaten savage reprisals that hurt Trump and devastate us or we slowly get beaten into submission and penury.”
You’d think a political movement that worships at the altar of Winston Churchill — Smith’s government installed a new statue of him on the grounds of their government offices in downtown Calgary last summer — would understand this. As Churchill knew only too well, bullies don’t believe in things like diplomacy or decency, and demonstrations of weakness only invite more shows of strength on their part. Perhaps someone can commission a statue of Neville Chamberlain after this is over to help people remember that acquiescence isn’t the path to victory.
Pierre Poilievre won’t get his carbon tax election after all
You can almost see it dawning on him now. After years of attacking the carbon tax, and months of begging for a “carbon tax election,” Pierre Poilievre will have to find a new argument to make to voters. With both Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney signaling their intention to eliminate the consumer portion of the federal carbon tax, its days as a Conservative whipping post are almost at an end.
Not that Poilievre is about to let it go, mind you. He’s taken to attaching the “carbon tax” prefix to all of his political opponents, whether it’s “Carbon Tax Chrystia” or “Carbon Tax Carney,” which is why some of us on social media (myself included) have done the same to our own names. At some point, he’s going to have to accept that childish name-calling isn’t nearly as effective when the insult in question no longer matters to voters.
Even so, this is no victory for anyone who cares about trifling matters like good policy and evidence-based decision making. The defeat of the carbon tax is clear proof that political vandalism works, and it will invite more of the same in the future. Large industries or organizations that want to oppose ambitious policy of any sort, especially the kind that tries to make down payments on longer-term political debts, now have a playbook to work from.
Then again, so do those of us who still believe in trying to tackle those kinds of problems. We should expect this sort of vandalism going forward, and prepare accordingly. That means designing policies that aren’t needlessly difficult to understand, which become easy targets for those who trade in misinformation and confusion. And it means politically fortifying policies that have already been legislated.
The life and death of the carbon tax will serve as an important lesson there. First and foremost, it’s a reminder that political durability is more important than policy ambition — and that the battle is never fully won. Other countries looking to implement their own climate policies will be able to benefit from these teachings. In the end, it may well actually advance the global cause of those fighting climate change.
But that’s still cold comfort for those of us who spent years trying to defend the policy, its market-oriented simplicity and its direct financial benefits to Canadians. If there’s any consolation, it may lie in the election yet to come — and the battle Pierre Poilievre won’t get to wage.
The corruption has already begun
If you’ve never heard of something called “fartcoin,” well, consider yourself lucky. You’ve managed to avoid exposure to the bizarre world of “shitcoins,” a particularly fetid part of the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem where scammers are even more free to separate fools from their money.
Not surprisingly, the new United States president wants in on the action. On Friday, a new shitcoin was unveiled to the world: $TRUMP. The meme coin, which is almost entirely controlled by Trump and his enablers and has no underlying value or inherent scarcity, quickly shot up in value overnight, adding billions in illusory value to his net worth. On Sunday, his wife Melania dropped her own coin, one that immediately cratered the value of Trump’s and made her worth billions more (on paper, anyways).
On some level, anyone dumb enough to put their money into these obviously fraudulent enterprises deserves to lose it. If that’s Trump’s supporters, well, all the better. But it portends a level of corruption (and shamelessness) that could make his first term in office look like Camelot by comparison.
After all, unlike most shitcoins — Dogecoin, for example — this one might actually have a tangible real-world application: bribery. “Suppose you wanted to buy a favor from Donald Trump, and he wanted to let you buy a favor from him,” Bloomberg’s Noah Smith wrote on his Substack. “How could you do it? You can’t just pay him a giant bribe — that’s illegal. Maybe you could pledge him a bunch of cash for his presidential campaign. But there are campaign finance laws that will get in your way, and even if you succeed, he can only use the money for his campaign, not to buy yachts or whatever else he might like to use the money for. Instead, what you can do is to buy a bunch of TRUMP or MELANIA. When you buy one of those meme coins, you increase the demand for the memecoin. Its price then goes up. This makes Donald Trump richer, without any money actually having to change hands.”
Yikes. It’s not hard to see how this could be used by, say, state-level actors in Russia or China, to advance or exploit their preferred policies. It’s a giant, gaping hole in America’s national security that the new president and his family seem determined to make as wide as possible.
Remember, MAGA: you voted for this. The least you can do is put your money where Trump’s shitcoins are.
Yes, the far-right is a cesspool of misinformation
It’s not just your imagination, folks. According to new research that studied 32 million social media posts from parliamentarians in 26 different countries, right-wing populists are far more likely to trade in misinformation than their peers on the centre or left.
“The results suggest that current political misinformation is not linked primarily to populism, but specifically to the populist radical right, and points to its particular relationship to an ecosystem of alternative media—largely unrestrained by journalistic integrity and standards,” the authors conclude. “These radical right populist movements are exploiting declining confidence in official information and established democratic institutions, drawing on misinformation with the aim of undermining institutional legitimacy and destabilize mainstream politics.”
That’s not just a one-way relationship, either. “As the media ecosystem is shaped by the political logic of radical right populism, so is radical right politics shaped by the incentives of an attention-driven media environment. Misinformation and radical-right populism must hence be understood as inextricable and synergistic—two expressions of the same political moment.”
Here in Canada — which was included in the study — it’s worth noting that right-wing parties and governments are turning more and more to these alternative media ecosystems in order to spread their message. In Alberta, the government is actually funding them. Both the Western Standard and the Counter Signal are being paid to run banner ads for the government, with the latter receiving almost $120,000 in 2024. Rebel Media, meanwhile, continues to have an unusual level of access to politicians like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
This intellectual and political echo chambering comes at an obvious cost: the truth. After all, it’s clearly not something the left will (or even can) replicate, given their reluctance to engage in the sort of culture war campaigns that thrive on misinformation and the misinformed. “Left-wing populist parties blame economic elites and institutions for inequalities and economic deprivation, largely sparing mainstream media from attacks (March, 2017; Schroeder, 2019),” the study’s authors note. “Misinformation campaigns are hence more suitable for communication strategies of right-wing populist parties’ emphasis on the cultural role of mainstream media, than for left-wing populists’ focus on economic inequalities.”
There are no easy fixes here. As this study shows, some people actively seek out misinformation in order to either confirm their biases or validate their partisan identities. The issue then isn’t one of access to good information but a temperamentally-driven refusal to make use of it — and a willingness to exploit that on the part of certain politicians and cultural entrepreneurs.
We can, and should, try to drown out their misinformed arguments and beliefs with better information. We should bury them in intellectual receipts. And we should probably expect most of them to ignore it anyway. Unless and until social media platforms start to prioritize and reward accurate information, or governments regulate them accordingly, this is the best we can probably do.