Canada's Conservatives still want to bet on America

The much-anticipated Poilievre pivot has apparently begun. After months of dismissing or discounting the threat posed by Donald Trump, the Conservative Party of Canada leader has started to talk tough — well, tougher — about the American president and the economic war he’s waging against Canada. Rather than telling Trump to “knock it off,” as though he was some misbehaving toddler jumping on the furniture, Poilievre has begun using the sort of language and tone that Doug Ford has deployed from the outset. “Their President has chosen to betray America’s best friend and closest ally,” he said on Wednesday. 

But make no mistake: if he becomes Prime Minister, Poilievre very much wants to save their friendship. Despite the tariffs and the betrayal they represent, he seems anxious to re-engage in trade talks with someone who has broken the very deals he negotiated. “CUSMA must be renegotiated anyway next year,” Poilievre said. “Why wait? Why not get it done now? Why not end the uncertainty that is paralyzing both sides of the border and that is also costing us jobs today?” 

Poilievre still seems to believe that the best path for Canada involves closer economic ties with the United States, not diversifying away from them. As he told Jordan Peterson just a few months ago, “I think that we can get a great deal that will make both countries safer, richer, and stronger.” Said deal would, of course, revolve around the export of more Canadian resources to America. “What I would encourage him to do is to approve the Keystone pipeline,” Poilievre said.

In this, as in so many things right now, Poilievre is in close alignment with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. As she said during an interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies podcast back in early March, “we would like to get back to talking about how we find our common cause, get more oil to market and build on that partnership.” 

To Smith, this means more oil and gas going south. “I have a [presentation] deck ready and raring to go for when we do get over this short-term bump, which has a multitude of different potential projects on it,” she told the interviewer. Above all, Smith seems determined to avoid doing anything that would upset or annoy the United States and its government. “They are right now our principal customer and we want to maintain that. We certainly wouldn't want to do anything that was seen to be against their interests.”

Both Poilievre and Smith are still operating as though the world, and Canada’s place in it, haven’t fundamentally and permanently changed. They want to believe that the Trump administration’s threats against Canadian sovereignty and its attack on our economy can be put behind us, and that business can and should continue as usual. 

In that, as in most things lately, they are dangerously wrong. 

In an election where it’s been difficult to find much in the way of policy-related daylight between the two front-runners, this is an important exception. Mark Carney, after all, has refused to give in to this sort of wishful (or perhaps delusional) thinking. Instead, as prime minister and Liberal leader, he’s given Canadians the unvarnished and unpleasant truth: there’s no going back to the way things used to be. 

“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday,” he said on Wednesday in the wake of Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War — a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades — is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.”

Carney didn’t even try to find the silver linings on this dark cloud. “While this is a tragedy,” he said, “it is also the new reality.” Indeed, it is. The challenge for Canadians now is deciding how we want to respond and adapt to it, and how much we’re willing to sacrifice along the way to protect our independence and autonomy. That doesn’t mean we won’t still trade and do business with American companies and consumers. But it does mean taking stock of the cost of remaining intertwined with them — and understanding that anyone promising to deepen those ties is essentially inviting more dependence on a country that has proven it isn’t dependable. 

In some respects, the orientation of the two key federal leaders on this issue makes sense. Poilievre wants to go backwards, as tends to be the Conservative impulse on most issues, while Carney wants to move forward as befits the more progressive of the two. But this is also a key test of their judgment and ability to properly identify where the risks to their country and its future really lie. If pressed, Poilievre would argue that another Liberal government is the real threat to Canada, not Trump. Smith might not even need to be pressed.

But it seems increasingly clear that Canadian voters don’t share this perspective. They don’t believe that the United States is still the friend it once was, or that it ought to be rewarded with our trust and faith. And I suspect they’re not going to look too kindly upon the politicians who still want to pretend otherwise. Yes, America is still our neighbour, and we have to reckon with that. But the friendship, at least as we understood it, is over. The sooner Conservatives start acting like that, the better off they — and we — will be.