by Bob McGuire

Halifax, Nova Scotia—After months of seemingly cartoonish boasts by Donald Trump since the 2024 election, bragging that he would seize control of Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada, he began his trade war on March 4 by unilaterally imposing 25% tariffs on most imports from Canada and Mexico, including a 10% tariff on energy. Clownish act or not, Canadians were not laughing.

They took Trump at his word, as he continues to insist that Canada would be forced into the U.S. as the 51st state. Through canceling vacation trips to the U.S., booing The Star-Spangled Banner at hockey games, and shunning American products on store shelves, regular Canadians pressured national and provincial officials to take countermeasures.

SOLIDARITY WITH BRUTALIZED AMERICANS

This wasn’t just some nation-vs.-nation chauvinism—there is plenty of solidarity with Americans who are being crushed by Trump and Elon Musk illegally aiming state powers squarely against them. Canadians have also booed Wayne Gretzky, the National Hockey League (NHL) all-time points and (for now) goals leader, as he hangs out with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In reaction, there has been a revival of attention to hockey great Gordie Howe as a better wartime hero. Howe, who held those records before Gretzky, was also instrumental in founding the NHL Players Association, and who shared the proceeds of his autobiography with striking/locked out Detroit newspaper workers.

The last week before Liberals chose Mark Carney as new Party Leader and Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau followed that popular resistance by overseeing the first round of retaliatory tariffs on $30 billion in U.S. imports on pretty much everything at grocery, clothing and home improvement stores—with the promise of added tariffs on $120 billion more industrial goods in three weeks. The retaliatory tariffs from Canada remain in effect even as Trump successively retreated from nearly all of his original tariffs.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford not only overcame earlier praise for Trump, but won an early election by leading the charge to remove U.S. liquor bottles from government stores and promising to cancel a $100 million contract with Elon Musk’s Starlink. He did, as promised, impose a 25% surcharge on electricity exported to the U.S., but rescinded it with the first threat of retaliation from Trump. Even opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre had to say he supported retaliatory tariffs, before devoting most of his time to his “Canada is Broke” message.

Trudeau had been the first casualty of Trump’s tariff threats, not because Trump kept calling him “Governor,” but because in November he went on bended knee to Mar-a-Lago to forestall the tariffs that Trump, still a private citizen for two more months, was already threatening. He promised $1.3 billion in militarization of the border to curb the non-problem of drugs entering the U.S. from Canada.

KOWTOWING TO TRUMP, A LOSING STRATEGY

Trudeau compounded that error in December by shaking up his Cabinet, demoting Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who had been the target of Trump’s insults. When Freeland resigned instead, Trudeau’s resignation became inevitable.

The next political casualty might be Poilievre, who previously could taste victory in an early snap election this year. He had opened up a daunting lead in the polls based on attacking Trudeau’s carbon tax that had sharply raised the price at the pump. But Prime Minister Carney canceled the carbon tax on his first day in office, March 14, making it harder for Poilievre to keep repeating “Axe the Tax” in ad after ad.

In any case the election will be over who can lead a defense of Canada against Trump’s acts to absorb it, and Liberals have closed the gap in polling. Poilievre’s endorsement by both Trump and Musk is now a liability to all except the small minority of his party—around 20%—that favors accepting Trump’s offer to join the U.S.

Poilievre’s refusal to apply for a security clearance reinforces questions about his financing from Modi in India and Putin in Russia. Still, since Poilievre has seemingly bottomless funds for negative advertising and ties to MAGA donors in the U.S., the outcome is no certainty, as Putin allies in Slovakia and the U.S. have proved.

TRUMP’S TARIFF LIES

Trump’s declaration of a crisis at the border is his only pretext for imposing tariffs without Congress. Despite 20 times as much fentanyl crossing the border into Canada as was headed for the U.S., he still claimed that Canada and Mexico (whose President Claudia Sheinbaum demonstrated that 80% of drug traffickers at the border were U.S. citizens) haven’t adequately addressed the drug problem.

Trump imposed 25% tariffs globally on steel and aluminum on March 12 without even this tattered shred of legal justification. He has stated his intention of conquering Canada economically, but this might backfire. Canada supplies four-fifths of the aluminum that the U.S. needs. If imports from Canada dried up, then Trump’s tariff missile aimed at Canada would instead destroy the jobs of U.S. industrial workers. In any case, you have to wonder if it’s Trump’s way to hit workers with the ultimate regressive tax, as in the decade he has praised: the Gilded Age of the 1890s.

The 1890s had everything he loves: no income tax, for the most part women couldn’t vote, Black people were battling Jim Crow, gaudy displays of wealth for poor workers to stare at, media like the Hearst newspapers to push the country into an imperialist war to acquire the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guantanamo Bay, plus the depression known as the Panic of 1893.

TRUMP/MUSK’S ATTACK ON WORKERS AND THE POOR

The parallels are there: If not stopped, Trump and Musk will limit the income tax in practice to those with low and moderate pay—already, Tesla is just one of the corporations which owed nothing in the last tax year. The prospect of recession or worse is on the horizon.

Trump has only gotten louder in demanding that Canada cease to exist, calling the border an “artificial line” supported by treaties that he could easily renounce. He has vowed before Congress to get control of Greenland one way or another, and repeated that before the NATO Secretary General.

The indigenous Inuit people of Canada’s Nunavut Territory and the indigenous Inuit people of Greenland are the ones separated by an artificial line through one Arctic island. But Trump is of course not aiming to reunite Indigenous people who have long freely moved across northern lands.

Gaining control of both while Trump remains junior partner to Putin would give Russia utter control of the Arctic Ocean just as global warming has created a Northwest Passage that is navigable longer and farther each year. Trump, who loves to rename bodies of water, could rename it Lake Putin. But, as Carney and other Canadian leaders have repeatedly said, Canada is not for sale—or for conquest.

Trump has denied the legitimacy of Canada in phrases not unlike what Russia used before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. His foreign adventurism is clearly intended to distract from instituting full fascist rule over Americans at home. Homeland Security has already begun treating some Canadians as enemy aliens, fingerprinting or even incarcerating them with no criminal charges. If Trump goes farther, he will face a population on alert and, thanks to his demand for border security, a more militarized presence facing the border.