America has officially entered its “finding out” stage. As the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency take a chainsaw to the federal government, self-identified Trump supporters are now begging for mercy from the administration they helped elect. Whether it’s farmers in the midwest discovering that programs they relied upon no longer exist or Venezuelans realizing that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric also applies to them, the metaphorical face-eating leopards are dining out in style right now. 

These sorts of Schadenfreude-laden anecdotes will surely multiply in the weeks to come, as Trump supporters discover their jobs, schools, and local businesses weren’t as safe from his purge as they imagined. But it’s the damage that Trump and Musk are doing to the entire country with their wholesale attack on the federal government that’s really worth watching right now — and learning from, if you live in Canada. 

Not that it matters, but the number of federal employees in America actually peaked in 1990, and is now well below that level as a percentage of the population. The vast majority of government spending, meanwhile, happens in areas like social security, medicaid, and the military. Instead, though, Musk’s crack team of young coders have targeted more mundane areas of government like education, health and human services, and the Environmental Protection Agency. They’re also targeting agencies and organizations like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and National Labor Relations Board that have active investigations into Musk’s companies. Funny, that. 

They claim to have saved $55 billion already, mostly by canceling leases, subscriptions to news and information sources like Bloomberg, and diversity-oriented programs and grants within government. As it turns out, though, many of these supposed savings don’t exist. Some were overstated by a factor of 1,000, as with a DEI-related contract for the Department of Homeland Services, while others were flagrant misunderstandings of how federal contracts work and ought to be accounted for. As one eagle-eyed social media user noted, “the savings they are claiming are not annual savings, but rather hypothetical savings if we spent every unobligated penny.”

That’s not the only banana peel they’re stepping on. Musk has also repeatedly amplified self-evidently bogus claims about “fraud” within the government, which seems to really mean programs or policies he doesn’t like or support. His more specific claim that there are millions of dead people collecting social security checks has been repeatedly debunked — and mocked — as a failure on his part to understand what the data is actually saying. James Surowiecki, the editor of the Yale Review and a former economics correspondent for the New Yorker, described it as “absurd, corrosive nonsense” on social media. “To believe that tens of millions of those benefits are going to dead people, you'd have to believe that 15-30% of all Social Security checks are fraudulent. More than that, you'd have to ignore math.”

But, of course, Musk’s supporters on social media — and, crucially, the White House — are more than happy to believe anything he says. And if his recent comments are any indication, he’s only just getting started. “At this point,” he said last week, “I am 100% certain that the magnitude of the fraud in federal entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Disability, etc) exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you’ve ever heard by FAR. It’s not even close.”

We’re still waiting on the receipts. In the meantime, the Trump administration is continuing its shotgun-blast approach to governing, firing probationary employees across government — including the terminally understaffed Federal Aviation Agency and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which has since tried to re-hire the employees they fired. It even fired some of the officials working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak right as it threatens to spiral out of control and into another pandemic. A majority of Americans may be fine with the idea of defunding the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), even if it costs lives in other countries. I doubt they’ll feel quite so cavalier about decisions that cost lives in their own.

Musk’s bet here is that the United States government is no different than Twitter, where he came in and laid off thousands of employees without immediately collapsing the business in the process. Never mind, for the moment, that those layoffs have created a social media product that’s more dangerous and less reliable than before, or that advertisers have largely fled the platform as a result of the rise in hate and misinformation on it. He bought it, and he has the right to break it. 

His massive donations to Trump could easily be seen as an attempt to buy the country — and a successful one so far. With $4.5 trillion in new tax cuts being proposed by House Republicans that will disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations, Musk’s $277 million investment in Trump will pay for itself many times over. That’s before factoring in the subsidies that will inevitably continue to flow to his companies, or the scrutiny and oversight it will avoid. 

But if Musk and DOGE break key aspects of the federal government in the process, he won’t pay the price. Instead, it will be many millions of Americans who will lose access to the things they’ve taken for granted, whether that’s clean water, a functioning electricity grid or a social security payment. In some respects, that will be a useful lesson for people in other parts of the world. But it’s surely not one most Americans thought they were signing up to teach when they voted for Trump in November. 

Canadians should be paying close attention to all of this, and not just because of the potential risk of blowback. We also have a politician in Pierre Poilievre who has repeatedly talked about the importance of shrinking government and “unleashing” the private sector. Americans are about to learn just how important their federal government and its much-maligned employees really are to their lives and livelihoods. We must avoid making the same mistake. 

The freedom convoy never really loved Canada

Canada, as it turns out, isn’t broken. That was the message coming out of Pierre Poilievre’s big rebrand rally, where he tried to reposition himself as a champion of Canada’s virtues rather than just another critic of its failures. And while Liberal partisans will look skeptically on this attempted political metamorphosis, the biggest doubters might actually be some of his erstwhile fans: the freedom convoy. 

Check the social media accounts of any prominent convoy participant, whether it’s Tamara Lich, Pat King, or their dedicated transcriptionists in the alt-press, and their sympathy for Donald Trump and antipathy towards Canada becomes immediately apparent. “Your sudden, newfound, fake patriotism is truly indicative of how stupid you think we are,” Lich said. “The entitlement of certain Canadians is humorous,” fellow organizer Chris Barber wrote. “If we had leadership in Canada who cared about Canadians like Trump cared about Americans … we wouldn't be in this situation.”

They insist the real problem isn’t Trump’s ongoing threats to our sovereignty but Justin Trudeau’s continued existence — and, of course, the injustices and affronts that were inflicted upon them by his government. Rupa Subramanya, one of the most sympathetic chroniclers of the convoy’s exploits, suggested that “Canadians have bought into the lie by politicians across the board that Trump wants to annex Canada, when what I believe is that he really wants Canadians to get rid of the Liberal government and have greater economic integration and cooperation with the US.”

That’s right: for these folks, public health orders aimed at protecting them and their fellow citizens are a greater threat to their liberty than an American government explicitly threatening their liberty. Policies like vaccine mandates and mask regulations — most of which, it’s worth reiterating, were implemented by provincial governments — are worth resisting, apparently, but unjustified economic warfare is best met with submission and docility. 

In some respects, the convoy’s refusal to join the rest of the country in its fight against Trump’s repeated provocations isn’t all that surprising. What brought them to Ottawa in 2022 wasn’t love of their country but hatred of the government in charge of it, which helps explain the very conspicuous presence of American flags, Trump flags, and even Confederate and Nazi flags. It’s why they plotted, at least in the beginning, to overthrow that government. And it’s why, in a moment where the country they claim to love is being actively threatened with economic and political subjugation, they’re rooting for the person doing the threatening. 

They’re welcome to believe whatever they want, of course. That’s one of the virtues of living in a free and democratic society: you can pretend it’s a woke dictatorship if that makes you feel better about your life choices. For many of the convoy’s leading figures it has become their version of Woodstock, albeit one where peace and love were replaced by grievance and anger. They’ll spend the rest of their lives re-living and re-litigating its supposed glories, facts be damned. 

In the process, though, they might trip up Pierre Poilievre in his own quest to defeat the federal government they all love to hate. He’s spent so long running the country down, and running alongside the convoy, that it might be hard for him to convince enough Canadians his sudden outburst of true patriot love is genuine and sincere. His proximity to their movement, and his party’s willingness to aid and abet their ambitions in the past, may yet come back to haunt them. 

That will be decided, like so many things, in the next federal election. But one thing is already mercifully clear: Canadians can wave and wear the maple leaf again with pride and honour. In their eagerness to surrender to Trump the convoy is effectively surrendering any claim they might have had to our flag. No longer will it be associated with a movement that sought to undermine and interfere with our collective wellbeing and safety, and is so clearly willing to do it again. That alone is a win for the rest of us.

Mark Carney’s climate plan won’t be an easy target for Conservatives                                                                                          

Mark Carney clearly has Canada’s Conservatives running scared right now. After polling well ahead of the Liberals for more than a year, Pierre Poilievre’s party now appears to have a real fight on its hands — one it could theoretically lose. And while it has many millions of dollars to spend on attack ads targeting the likely next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, none of the arguments against Carney that have been mooted so far — including, hilariously, that he’s a “Marxist” — have shown much promise. 

That includes the attempt to tie his climate plan to the Liberal government’s consumer carbon tax that Carney has said he would scrap. In a recent column, University of Calgary economist Jack Mintz tried to portray Carney’s industrial-oriented strategy as a more complex version of the existing policy. It’s worth unpacking that argument, and I’ll do it right here. 

Mintz begins with some garden-variety concern trolling by complaining that Carney’s “scheme” will be “an administrative nightmare compared to the existing fuel charge, even with the current system’s rebates to consumers and small businesses.” Let’s be clear: the opportunity to advocate for a more simple and transparent system is over. Folks like Mintz had that opportunity for years, and could have stood up and more vocally defended the carbon tax and rebate. They didn’t. We should all feel free to ignore any argument that tries to weaponize its virtues in order to attack its inevitable replacement. 

To his credit, Mintz is willing to acknowledge that Carney’s proposed alternative directly addresses the oversupply of carbon credits that has driven the price of those credits down to $47 per tonne (rather than $80 per tonne headline price). “To deal with this problem,” Mintz writes, “Carney promises much stricter emission standards than are currently in place. With more emissions subject to tax, carbon credits get soaked up, eventually raising fuel prices.”

And? Carbon pricing is designed to — you guessed it — raise the price of carbon emissions. If folks like Mintz want to argue that carbon shouldn’t be priced at all, they can do that. But criticizing a policy for achieving its stated goal is some deeply thin gruel. 

So too are his complaints that it will inevitably require more staff to verify the integrity of Canada’s carbon credits and associated emission reductions, or the possibility that it will “line the pockets of financial traders like Goldman Sachs, where Carney once worked.” Mintz, after all, is ordinarily a big fan of financial markets and those involved in price discovery for the things trading on them. 

His complaints about Carney’s proposed “carbon border adjustment mechanism” ring equally hollow. Europe and Britain already have a carbon border adjustment, while Republican politicians in the United States — including new treasury secretary Scott Bessent — have considered one of their own. And even if the Trump administration prefers old-fashioned tariffs there’s very little they might export to us that would be hit by one. The majority of America’s exports to Canada, after all, are in areas like services and goods like motor vehicles (where CBAMs don’t tend to apply) rather than raw inputs like oil or steel. 

And yes, of course, there are complaints about how Carney’s climate policy might impact the oil and gas industry. “He’ll strengthen regulations for oil and methane gas and he will introduce new climate-risk disclosure regulations and investment guidelines for financial institutions,” Mintz writes, effectively trying to threaten most Canadians with a good time. He suggests that if Carney tried to apply things like climate risk disclosure to the Canada Pension Plan, “not a millisecond will pass before Alberta Premier Danielle Smith declares: ‘Alberta Pension Plan!’”

I mean… maybe? But that’s not a good reason to not do it. Climate-risk disclosure is just that: the disclosure of risks related to climate change. The fact that the Trump administration has bullied its banking sector into pretending climate change doesn’t exist doesn’t mitigate the very real risks, or mean that Canada’s pensioners and the people investing their hard-earned money shouldn’t know about them. For too long, the Liberals have shied away from these sorts of fights. Carney should go on the attack. 

Mintz gets downright frisky in suggesting that when it comes to Canada’s oil and gas industry, Carney “wants to shut it down.” This might have worked on some people when it comes to Justin Trudeau, whose last name and reluctance to talk about economic issues made it easier to spread this fiction. It will not work with Carney, who understands this sector better than almost anyone in the country. 

Finally, he concludes with his prescription for the future, one that Poilievre will likely echo if and when he articulates his own climate policy: do nothing. “Whatever energy transition does or doesn’t take place over the next few decades should be based on simple, non-distortionary policies that don’t prevent Canadians and their firms from being economically competitive.”

First of all, the phrase “whatever energy transition does or doesn’t take place” suggests that one might not, in fact, take place, when it’s already well underway. This is a tell. So too is the implication that economic competitiveness will depend on the absence of climate policies, which inevitably — and, as I said before, deliberately — distort the market’s perception that carbon pollution is free. 

“The Trudeau government has undermined Canada’s growth by zealously blocking oil and gas development,” Mintz writes, “with the result that we are wholly dependent on U.S. demand.” This, again, is a fiction, one that completely ignores the existence of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion or LNG Canada. In terms of its export volumes and our ability to reach new markets with them, Canada has never been less dependent on the U.S. than it is right now. It’s a far cry from the previous government, which bet heavily — hello, Keystone XL! — on increasing dependence on refineries in the U.S.

More nonsense: “While Canada has been serving as the world’s climate boy scout, China has used its cheap, reliable coal-powered electricity to fuel a dominant position in the world markets for EVs and renewable energy.” China has increased its usage of coal-fired electricity, largely because it needs something other than hydro to firm up its massive fleet of solar and wind energy. But Mintz finally gets one thing right: it does indeed have a dominant position in the world markets for renewable technology. 

“A plan that kills off Canadian oil and gas while other countries continue to produce it will never win over westerners,” Mintz finishes his column by saying, neglecting to mention that no such plan exists for the current federal government. He is, of course, welcome to continue peddling these fictions to Alberta readers who believe, all evidence to the contrary, that Justin Trudeau has been secretly plotting against them this entire time. But I’d gently suggest they won’t work nearly as well when they’re directed at Mark Carney. We’ll all find out soon enough. 

And with that, dear readers, I will take my leave — and not just for today. I’m going to be scaling back to one column for the foreseeable future as I dedicate more of my time to a book-length project that’s been taunting me for too long. I will miss writing this newsletter, just as I’ll miss the opportunity it gave me to really stretch my legs on some topics. But I promise I’ll be back to it as soon as I can. 

In the meantime, you can still read my now once-weekly column and find me on/in the various social media hellscapes.