Given Trump’s sabre-rattling over Canada’s sovereignty and real threat of annexation (if you still aren’t taking this seriously, stop here), I’ll say out loud what many find themselves silently contemplating: If Canada were invaded, would I fight?
In the event, much like Ukraine, each of us would need to decide in an instant whether to take up arms or roll over. And if we fought, well… as in 1812, blood would spill between neighbours, families and (former) friends.
This is no longer the absurdity it sounds. A Second World War vet I once worked with explained how when he and his platoon mates shot at Nazis they didn’t think of them as people; they were agenten of an enemy, and the enemy was Hitler. So, they were shooting at Hitler—not young men like themselves conscripted in their prime to an imperial white-supremacist suicide mission. And you can see how easily this can happen; at this point it wouldn’t take much to see yourself in a fight-to-the-death to save Canada—and the world—from a destructive, delusional fascist, a righteous quest in which we’d automatically dehumanize any frontline vanguards.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that and we find more-savvy ways to repel the in-creep of conservative greed and cowardice. Regardless, the stakes remain high in the current federal election, in which the only outcome that really matters is the kind of Canada that emerges from the ballot box—which, for the 60 to 70 per cent of Canadians who vote progressive, will hopefully be the nation of enduring decency and imperfect progress we know and love. The True North strong and free.
I won’t further attempt to saw through the Gordian knot of what has come to pass between Canada and the U.S., but offer some factoids to consider before marking your X. Remember: Election #Never51 is for all the marbles.
The Good
Patrick Weiler, our current Liberal MP, is the best representative this riding has ever seen. Motivated, engaged in our community, and possessed of a high level of understanding about the necessary integration of economic, social and natural values, he has delivered on everything from environment (i.e., a landmark greenwashing bill) to infrastructure and housing (i.e., almost $600 million worth in the riding since 2019). A summary: https://shorturl.at/eqmGH. Bottom line: even without the added benefit of reinstalling Mark Carney as PM, we’d want Weiler back.
Trudeau had to go. He’d become an often-ham-fisted distraction guilty of the worst of political crimes: having one of the worst comms teams imaginable. And yet… “It matters deeply that it is not criticisms of policy failures or proposals for reform that have caused Trudeau’s downfall, but rather a coordinated campaign of misinformation and personal attacks from the right,” wrote Laurie Adkin, professor emerita of political science at the University of Alberta of this “right-wing propaganda coup d’état.” Yes, the sand had run out on Trudeau’s leadership, but his government’s record (also viewable at the link above), remains impressive, with many lasting social, economic and environmental accomplishments—as well as adept stick-handling of crises like Trump 1.0, the pandemic, global post-pandemic inflation and Trump 2.0—the latter, ironically, Trudeau’s final but finest hour.
The Bad
By contrast, author and historian Andrew Cohen calls Stephen Harper’s decade, “a failure... He created nothing lasting. Of prime ministers since 1945 who served a full term or more, his is the thinnest record… His legacy is style: small, nasty, narrow, divisive. [He] misread the country. His instincts were dark and conservative in a decent, progressive [nation].” Harper’s former lapdog Pierre Poilievre (PP) is a man 10 times as small, nasty, narrow and divisive.
Indeed, the Trump dumpster fire has showcased many other conservative leaders as horrible, greedy, cowardly people able to turn a blind eye to criminality, the most naked abuses of power, and violations of civic freedoms, landing the U.S. on international human rights and democracy watchlists. Propelled by unfocused anger, we’ve seen one-dimensional far-right voters put such things aside. We cannot allow this to happen in Canada.
According to Business Insider, Elon Musk’s DOGE fired some 216,000 federal workers, most trained specifically for specialized jobs in security, defense, foreign aid, disaster relief, science, medicine and health. In addition to stated Orwellian attempts to “root out” progressive policy and thought from U.S. institutions—the act of cowards afraid to do the hard work of equality—these unconsidered firings have created high unemployment among the highly educated, a huge hit to tax revenue, and a staggering loss to U.S. science capacity.
PP wants to do exactly this in Canada. Arno Kopecky, campaign reporter for the National Observer: “Everywhere Poilievre touches down, thousands turn out, and everyone knows his lines… ‘Axe the taxes’ and ‘stop the crime,’… It gets darker fast, as [he] waxes on about halting foreign aid, ending support for ‘woke’ research, shuttering the CBC and unleashing more oil and gas.”
The Trump administration continues gaslighting over fentanyl and manufacturing capacity, problems caused not by other nations but by American greed. Not only did corporate avarice gut the country’s manufacturing sector, but it invented and distributed, through wildly lucrative sales incentives, the fentanyl that led to the opiate crises—a crisis America then exported to the rest of the world where other criminal players decided to cash in on it.
As malign and ill-considered as Trump’s tariffs are, people forget (or never knew) that America has always been a bully when it comes to trade, and that many of their global defense commitments already come at the cost of economic concessions (i.e., build a Coca Cola plant in Togabanga and we’ll put a destroyer within a thousand miles of your unprotected island). More countries would happily pay their fair share for U.S. defense if America paid its fair share for the pollution and environmental degradation—including climate change—caused by its global corporate hegemony.
The Truly Ugly
Mark Bourrie, historian and winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, is the bestselling author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre. “[PP] is an angry teenager in the body of a grown man. He made his name on sneering, incivility, insults, over-the-top accusations and utter meanness… the nastiest leader of a major party in this country’s history.”
Conservatives steal from each other, notes Bourrie, then steal back. He frames PP’s frequent comparison to Trump (Trump Lite, Mini Trump, Maple MAGA) as iniquitous. “[Canadian Conservatives] started this stuff,” he says. “They pioneered a lot of what [Trump’s] now doing… the degrading of mainstream media, the attacking of institutions that are checks on authoritarian power, etc. All this stuff was happening in Canada before Harper lost in 2015 and Trump didn’t even run until 2016.” Which explains CPC Trump acolytes like interim leader Candice Bergen and PP’s own campaign manager, Jenni Byrne, both photographed proudly sporting MAGA hats. If it walks like a MAGA and talks like a MAGA… well.
Finally, like the closet authoritarians they are, PP’s Maple MAGA backers (hello oil and gas!) are now publicly threatening to split up Canada if we don’t vote for him. While we’re rallying to fight Trump, Alberta’s traitorous RWNJs and MAGAt lickspittles Danielle Smith and Preston Manning are publicly fighting Canada. The upside of this cowardly betrayal? If there’s an invasion, we already know who the quislings are—who will choose to roll over.
Leslie Anthony is a science/environment writer and author who holds a doctorate in reversing political spin.
