“Everything Trump touches dies.” That’s the phrase coined by Rick Wilson, the former Republican strategist turned anti-Trump activist and Lincoln Project co-founder, who documented its many examples in a 2018 book by the same name. Now, it seems, we may have a Canadian case study to add to his list: Pierre Poilievre’s once-insurmountable polling lead. 

After all, it’s not just the EKOS polls showing Poilievre’s lead is evaporating. A recent Pallas Data poll put the Liberals one point ahead of the Conservatives with Mark Carney as leader, while Mainstreet’s Ontario polling has the federal Liberals ahead by nine points in that province. Leger, the gold-standard pollster in Quebec, has a Carney-led Liberals at 38 per cent — a level the Liberals haven’t hit in a federal election there since 2000. Even Nanos Research, which had the Liberals trailing Poilievre’s Conservatives by 27 points in early January, now has them only trailing by eight points. 

Some of this is surely a dead-cat, post-Trudeau bounce. Kim Campbell saw a similar surge after she took over from Brian Mulroney in 1993, only to squander it with one of the worst campaign ads in political history. Some of it is a reflection of Mark Carney’s strengths and their fit for a moment that’s defined by a mixture of economic anxiety and political uncertainty. But much of this bounce, and maybe most of it, is because of Trump and his repeated threats to Canada’s sovereignty and security. 

That’s clearly bad news for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party, which has spent the last few years telling Canadians how broken their country is. Trump is essentially making the same argument, and laying the blame on the same government. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Poilievre is finding it difficult to pivot away from this message and towards something more positive and unifying. 

As he said recently, "President Trump has been given an incredible gift by these radical, anti-development Liberals when they block the projects that would have made us more self-reliant.” Never mind, for the moment, that it’s Trudeau’s government that built the first oil pipeline to Pacific tidewater (and new markets) in Poilievre’s lifetime, or that LNG Canada — the biggest new export project in Canadian history — is about to start shipping cargoes. Poilievre’s reflexive response to Trump’s illegal and unjustified economic attacks on our country is to immediately blame his domestic opponents for it. 

He has also found it conspicuously challenging to criticize the president who keeps threatening his country with economic ruin and existential oblivion. On the rare occasions where he summons the courage to actually invoke Trump’s name, as he did with the recent decision to impose tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, he’s always careful to only criticize his policies. It’s a striking contrast for someone who routinely refers to his domestic political opponents as liars, lunatics, and “extremist wackos.”  

This isn’t an accident. While only two percent of Liberal supporters approve of Donald Trump, that spikes to 46 per cent — a plurality — among CPC supporters. His movement’s fondness and affection for Trumpism is not a secret, and it’s something they have — until now — proudly advertised and embraced. It’s why they endorse his nonsensical pretext around fentanyl, facts notwithstanding. It’s why they trade in conspiracy theories about government agencies and their supposedly scandalous spending. And it’s why they continue to blame Trudeau and the Liberal government for the growing volume of American insults to our sovereignty. 

It’s because in their heart of hearts, they think Trump is right. They think he’s right about diversity, equity and inclusion programs, about the importance of growing oil and gas production, about the “scam” of climate change, about “wokeism,” and about the importance of revering our history rather than reviewing it. Indeed, it’s hard to find anything they don’t think he’s right about other than the tariffs directed at our economy, and even then they seem willing to grant him his various half-baked justifications and explanations. 

Just listen to Poilievre talking about foreign aid at his recent press conference in decidedly Trumpian terms. “We can’t be sending billions of dollars to other places, often as much of it is wasted and stolen and swallowed up by bureaucracies that act against our interests,” he said. “I will be bringing our money home with massive cuts to these wasteful and corrupt foreign aid grants.” Sound familiar? It should. 

The Liberal campaign ads here practically write themselves. That’s especially true when they have photos of high-profile Conservatives like Jenni Byrne, Poilievre’s senior adviser and close friend, proudly wearing their MAGA hats. The CPC’s affinity for Trump and those in his orbit is an anchor that Liberals will tie around their collective waist, one they know Poilievre and his team can’t actually cut. If they do, after all, they’ll invite the bleeding of far-right support to Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party that they’ve spent years trying to avoid. 

Poilievre could always decide to find his spine here and make a real stand. As Conservative activist Spencer Fernando wrote in a recent piece for The Hub, “to support Trump as a Canadian means effectively siding against your own country. It means choosing to hate your political opponents more than you love Canada. It means in my judgement giving up a claim to patriotism.” He suggested that Conservatives should view Trump as “the ultimate test of whether they’re committed to conservative ideas and values or prepared to choose the politics of personality over principles.” 

Poilievre seems destined, even determined, to fail that test. Canadian voters, on the other hand, might yet surprise us all. 

Sorry, oil and gas enthusiasts: the energy transition has only just begun

You can almost taste the glee among Canada’s oil and gas industrial complex right now. President Donald Trump has already announced his country’s withdrawal — again — from the Paris Climate Accord, signed an executive order aimed at halting all offshore and onshore wind energy development, and ordered federal agencies to “immediately pause” spending associated with the Inflation Reduction Act. His repeated threats to our sovereignty, meanwhile, have caused the federal Liberal government to publicly reconsider the merits of pipeline projects like Energy East. 

They should enjoy the good feelings while they last. The energy transition, which the oil and gas industry and its proxies have embraced with all the enthusiasm of someone going to see their dentist, is far from over. The return — and the revenge tour — of Trumpism may slow its progress in the United States, but its impact on global demand for oil and gas will be far more muted. If anything, it could encourage China to expand its dominance of the ever-expanding market for clean technologies like wind, solar, and electric vehicles, whose costs will only continue to drop. 

Indeed, Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s (BNEF) latest annual Levelized Cost of Electricity report shows that every major renewable energy technology decreased in cost last year, with battery storage (down a staggering one-third) and industrial-scale solar farms (down 21 per cent) seeing the biggest annual declines. “New solar plants, even without subsidies, are within touching distance of new US gas plants,” said Amar Vasdev, the report’s lead author. “This is remarkable because US gas prices are only a quarter of prevailing gas prices in Europe and Asia.”

Ironically, Trump’s plan to increase America’s LNG exports will increase domestic gas prices and make solar — which is already booming in predominantly red states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida — even more economically appealing. “The overall trend in cost reductions is so strong that nobody, not even President Trump, will be able to halt it,” said Matthias Kimmel, head of Energy Economics at BNEF. By 2035, BNEF also forecasts a further 26 per cent reduction in the cost of onshore wind, a 31 per cent reduction in the cost of solar, and an almost 50 per cent reduction in the cost of battery storage. 

And while Trump’s policies will slow the adoption of things like electric vehicles and renewable energy in America, they won’t stop it. The same BNEF forecast sees more than 900 gigawatts of new wind, solar and storage built in the United States by 2035 under a scenario where the U.S. government fully repeals the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment and production tax credits. Its automobile sales forecast, meanwhile, sees EVs accounting for one in three new cars sold in 2030. That’s a big step down from the 48 per cent market penetration they expected under Biden-era regulations, but it’s still a near-tripling from today’s levels. 

If Canada’s oil and gas enthusiasts want to know where things are actually headed, they ought to be watching what countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are doing. They might not play much hockey there, but the leaders of that region’s various petrostates clearly know where the puck is going — and have a vested interest in getting there early. As the Financial Times reported recently, the Middle East is now the fastest growing region outside of China for renewable energy, with massive solar and battery projects being proposed by oil-reliant kingdoms like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. By 2030, according to data from the energy consultancy Rystad, renewables will make up 30 per cent of the total capacity in the region. 

They’re not doing those out of the goodness of their hearts. Part of the calculus is that by producing ultra-cheap solar and capturing the energy, they can export the gas they previously burned to generate electricity. But it’s also a recognition that they cannot continue to be completely reliant on fossil fuels for their economic opportunities and government revenues. Even there — and perhaps especially there — the energy transition and its impact on global demand for fossil fuels cannot be ignored. 

But the biggest winner in the energy transition, and America’s deliberate retreat from it, will be China. Its growing dominance of clean energy technologies and their supply chains is an obvious economic asset, one that will allow it to both wean itself off fossil fuel imports and increase high-value exports to other countries. Global clean energy investment was worth more than $2 trillion for the first time last year, a figure that will need to more than double to $5 trillion annually by 2030 if the world wants to remain on track for its 2050 net zero targets. Trump is guaranteeing that China will capture an even bigger slice of that ever-expanding pie. 

That’s not all. There’s also a growing diplomatic dividend that China will receive from its investments in clean energy. As it exports more low-cost clean technology to the developing world — solar imports have, for example, started spiking in sub-Saharan Africa — China will help those countries reduce their dependence on fossil fuel imports and increase their energy and economic security. As Tama University professor Brad Glosserman wrote last year in an op-ed for the Japan Times, “Tackling and conquering the pre-eminent global challenge would constitute an extraordinary diplomatic, political and economic victory and bestow status and influence not unlike that which the U.S. enjoyed after World War II.”

China, in other words, has every reason in the world to bet even more heavily on its leadership role in the energy transition. It will continue to drive down the costs of technologies that destroy demand for oil and gas, and export them to the countries that fossil fuel advocates expect will provide future demand growth. In the end, the most aggressively pro-oil and gas president in American history may end up doing the most damage to its long-term economic prospects — and not just in America, either. 

Canada’s oil and gas industry might want to take heed here. In four years, and maybe less, Trump will be gone from office. His policies, meanwhile, may have only increased the desire in Europe, China, and the developing world to wean their economies away from — and eventually off — fossil fuels. And if he’s increased American oil and gas production the way he says he will, prices will almost certainly be in the toilet. But hey, at least they’ll have those first few weeks of 2025 to look back on. 

Canada has its own aspiring Elon Musk

Canada’s tech community is sick and tired of being ignored by Ottawa. That’s the message it’s apparently sending with the launch of Build Canada, a new website that seeks to influence public opinion around key issues in advance of the next federal election. Its stated priorities include “selling more Canadian products and resources around the world,” “changes to boost productivity and competitiveness,” and “tax reforms that drive innovation and investment.” 

These topics are all fair game, and they’re presented as part of a politically neutral effort to stimulate new ideas. But given the US tech sector’s recent realignment towards Donald Trump, and its subsequent role in shaping (and, indeed, executing) the priorities and policies of his new administration, it’s not hard to imagine Canada’s tech sector leaders wanting their own piece of that action. And remember: it wasn’t that long ago that Elon Musk was professing to be politically neutral. 

Canada’s tech community even has its own answer to Musk in Tobi Lütke, the billionaire founder of Shopify. Lütke’s company is the biggest Canadian tech sector success story since Blackberry, and its core purpose — helping entrepreneurs chase their dreams and sell their products — is an unalloyed good. Its politics, though, are a bit more complicated. 

Shopify’s chummy relationship with the right-wing media company True North has been well-documented. That fits with Lütke’s inherently Libertarian approach to issues like free speech, and his company’s refusal to set limits around who and what it hosts. “When we kick off a merchant, we’re asserting our own moral code as the superior one,” he wrote back in 2017 when asked about Shopify’s decision to host the store of the far-right news site Breitbart. “But who gets to define that moral code? Where would it begin and end?”

You’d hope it would at least begin with literal Nazis. But as The Globe and Mail reported recently, Kayne West’s own store — hosted by Shopify — was selling a t-shirt “emblazoned with a black swastika, typically associated with Nazi Germany. … the website contains no other information other than an image of the product offering three sizes, with the product name ‘HH-01.’” The “HH” is commonly short for “Heil Hitler,” of course.

Shopify’s initial response wasn’t to immediately take it down and apologize for indirectly trafficking in such odious and obvious hate. Instead, according to messages from an internal Slack channel that were shared with The Logic, employees were given talking points. “It instructed employees not to answer such questions and instead ask if they had any support needs for their own stores. And if they persisted in asking Kanye-related questions, ‘kindly let them know that you will be ending the chat, then do so,’” The Logic reported.

Eventually, the store was booted off Shopify’s system after public outcry from a number of former Shopify executives, including its former senior director of investor relations and former chief marketing officer. “It’s great to grease the wheels of commerce, but not the wheels of hate,” said Katie Keita, former senior director of investor relations until 2022. “Not everything should be scaled.”

This isn’t the only public relations fiasco that Shopify has dealt with lately. In recent weeks, Lütke has taken his own highly conspicuous Musk-esque turn towards Trumpism, one that has involved him hauling copious amounts of water for the new US president. “Canada thrives when it works with America together,” he said on social media last month, amplifying a post from a Rebel Media reporter in the process. “Win by helping America win. Trump believes that Canada has not held its side of the bargain.” 

Lütke’s contribution was celebrated by Trump’s allies at the New York Post as a “withering critique” of the Canadian government’s position. The Globe and Mail’s business columnist, Andrew Willis, was decidedly less charitable. “Mr. Lütke is channeling disgraced British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the appeaser, when his country needs Winston Churchill, the fighter,” he wrote. 

That hasn’t stopped Lütke from continuing to moot Trump’s case, whether by arguing against retaliatory tariffs and other forms of self-defence or applauding the appeasatory efforts of Alberta’s Danielle Smith. As if to really hammer the comparison home, he’s also shared videos praising Elon Musk’s “genius.” 

Maybe this is all because Lütke is genuinely fearful of the impact of a trade war on his company and its customers — and is, as Willis suggested, politically naive. Trump’s decision to eliminate the so-called “de minimis” exemption for goods shipped from Canada and China under a certain value is very much a direct threat to Shopify’s business model. 

But maybe Lütke is in the midst of the same sort of political radicalization process that transformed Musk from someone who sold electric cars and cared about climate change into an alt-right edgelord hellbent on slashing government spending. If that’s the case, don’t be surprised to see him running Canada’s own version of DOGE under a future Poilievre government — or the rest of our tech sector’s leadership cheering him on. 

Before you go….

I’d encourage you to read this excellent op-ed in the Toronto Star by Robert Jago, one that emphasizes the important role that Indigenous communities will play in any successful resistance to Trumpism — and why their concerns can’t be pushed to the side in the renewed drive for pipelines. 

“We can build peacefully, quickly, by means of talking and accommodation at the highest level. It’s true that traditional forms of consultation are slow, and a burden for everyone. So, during a potential emergency we need direct talks between Ministers, Industry and Chiefs — the nation-to-nation talks that Indigenous people have long demanded — so that we can fast-track projects without sparking another conflict.

First Nations, whether we like it or not, are going to rise and fall with Canada. If we are going to succeed, Canada must succeed. But if your solution is to push First Nations around, you’re going to end up with a worsened economic crisis. Trump wants your country and our land, and he’s promised to use economic pressure to get it. Don’t fall into his trap.”

This needs to be read especially closely in Alberta, where the average lifespan of Indigenous people is now a staggering 19 years shorter than the provincial average. All the oil and gas production in the world doesn’t mean much if this is one of the outcomes —  or byproducts. 

And in Vancouver, we seem to have spotted the political equivalent of Bigfoot: cooperation between competing parties. In one of city council’s last byelections, the various progressive parties in Vancouver’s municipal scene fought hard for their share of the vote — and allowed the centre-right NPA to scoot past them. This time, with two seats up for grabs, they’re not making that mistake again, with each of the three progressive parties only running a single candidate. 

It’s not quite the “progressive primary” that I suggested in a column last year, but it’s a start. And if Ontario’s two progressive parties end up splitting their vote and allowing Doug Ford to win another majority? Maybe we’ll see more political parties entertain the idea.