By Jonathan Martin
The U.S. president’s tariffs and insults have altered alliances everywhere, with reverberations from Quebec to Alberta to Washington.
TORONTO — In March, shortly after Ontario Premier Doug Ford decisively won re-election here, Canada Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre grudgingly telephoned the leader of this country’s most populous province to grudgingly ask for advice from a conservative rival.
“People said, ‘You’ve got to call him,’” Ford happily recalled to me this week. “He said, ‘What advice can I get?’ I said it’s one thing, our polling shows it, we just came off a big victory: It’s the tariffs. A number of years ago, [James] Carville said, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Well, it’s the tariffs, stupid. That’s what it is.”
So why didn’t Poilievre adjust his message?
For months now, the dynamics of Monday’s federal election here seemed easy enough to grasp on either side of the border: A campaign that had been a referendum on former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s increasingly unpopular decade-long tenure had, once Trudeau stepped down, become a vote on who was best able to manage Donald Trump, his tariff arsenal and designs on annexing Canada.
But it isn’t that simple.
Liberals are poised to hold power, and Prime Minister Mark Carney may even claim a majority of Canada’s 343 House of Commons seats, because Poilievre never pivoted to accommodate a changed race and alienated crucial leaders and voters; because Liberals didn’t just dump Trudeau, they replaced him with a sober central banker, an Alan Greenspan from the Northwest Territories who can still lace up the skates; and because Canada has momentarily imported two-party, tribal politics from America into their multi-party parliamentary democracy.
It’s this final element that may prove most crucial — and could determine whether Liberals claim a majority or minority government — but is not easily grasped in the U.S. Canada has long had robust minor parties that play a pivotal role in both provincial and federal politics, most notably the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Bloc Québécois, which advocates for Québécois nationalism in Canada’s Francophone province. Yet the effect of Trump’s existential threat has been to marginalize these parties, to render purity politics or domestic questions as a bit like the clogged sink disposal when the house is on fire…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (politico.com)
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