Trump, Tariffs, Twillicks, and Twaddle
For your consideration
Canadians need leaders. This week, they got Trump, twillicks, and twaddle.
If politics is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage, then the Clown Car of Canadian provincial potentates and panjandrums showed up for intermission this week in Washington. Such is the dire threat to Canada’s existence as a sovereign nation that two of the red-nosed posse had to high-tail it back home because there was snow coming, while the rest of them swanned in DC until mid-week at least.
Most of their meetings were inconsequential. They made no news impact in the Disjointed States of Trumplandia, which is where it would have mattered. The best they could do for the whole trip was meet in the the OEOB, the Old Executive Office Building, with Sergio Gor, the guy who hires garbage collectors, janitors, and gofers in the White House and another guy from the White House. We do not know if any of the Premiers or their entourage left Gor their resume. Some of them should have.
The other White House staffer the Canadian Premiers met with knew already all their arguments and talking points. James Blair, ex-lobbyist and consultant, and these days a deputy chief of staff for public affairs in the White House had only one main job, namely to take one for Team Donald by meeting with the Canucks in the first place. His secondary job was to affirm as true and correct whatever Donald Trump had said at any point even if it made no sense or even if Trump contradicted himself more than once.
Blair did the job admirably and consistently, as one might expect, right down to correcting one of the Canucks about something he’d posted on X/Twitter after the meeting. Amateur Canuck got schooled by a Yank. Blair had briefing notes, of course, that described who he was meeting with and what they would say. He would have known - even if Canadian newsrooms turned a blind eye to the fact - that Canadian Premiers have never agreed with themselves on anything, let alone anything that matters to their own provinces and that they have no power to do much but defend their own tiny patches.
Left to their own devices, the Premiers would split three ways on a simple yes or no question, which is why no Prime Minister with a clue has met with the bunch in decades. And all of them are for sale, if the price is right, to each other or anyone else. After all, that has been their unrelenting message to everyone since last November. The truly powerful do not going begging but there were the Canadian Premiers with their knees already bruised from pleading, some of them on their second trip to DC inside a month.
In international affairs, Premiers of any Canadian provinces are not power. They are, in most cases, not even power-adjacent. As if to prove the point the Clown Car unloaded its cargo in front of the OEOB and one of the staffers along for the ego-trip snapped a picture for social media. Andrew Furey’s publicity department then shared it with the world. They look like yet another collection of mayors from Bunyan Butt, Arizona or Dickless Notch, New Hampshire on a gawking tour of the nation’s capitol. Tourists, in other words. The Unserious. Posers.
There’s an even better picture to show the unseriousness of it all, one of Andrew Furey, black and white, in the style of his Kennedy cosplay series just without Seamus O’Regan playing Bobby this time. Furey looks awkward. Out of place. Dumb grin on his face. Like he’s impressed with himself for being there. The fact his office staff posted *these* pictures - and in the case of the Kennedy cosplay and the gaggle in the board did it twice - adds to the amateurism of the whole thing. Even the words someone dreamed up to go with the pictures are a put-on, a campaign stunt for the punters back home, more for the “I Love Me” walls at home in Furey’s house and in his office, more than a serious attempt by a serious leader at resolving the international dispute.
“I had a constructive meeting with senior White House officials,” Furey’s office wrote for him, betraying the fact this is *all* about Furey’s outsized. “I conveyed that Canada is a strong and sovereign nation and we will not be the 51st state. We want to work together for the benefit of Newfoundlanders [and] Labradorians and grow the economy on both sides of the border.” There is no I in Team except on Team Furey and the Premier of a small province pretends to speak for all Canada in an unbelievably arrogant way before reverting back to speaking about his own tiny patch. This is truly second rate stuff.
The Premiers were so effective that on Thursday Donald Trump announced the Americans would be levying tariffs on everything from every country, right away.
Simple choice: be awkward and out of touch with reality or be a Bond Papers subscriber.
This is Team Canada?
This is impotence made flesh. Irrelevance incarnate.
The only people who think this was an important trip that accomplished anything are the folks who don’t know how this stuff works. That may or may not include the gaggle of Canadian geese in the pictures and clogging up the Canadian media with their claims of progress and victory. The one meeting that mattered this week in any serious effort to sort out the trade dispute is the one the Canadian media ignored in favour of the circus act. That meeting, the real one, involved federal finance minister Dominic LeBlanc and his American counterpart on trade Harold Lutnick, the American commerce secretary.
This second trip by the Premiers to Washington in less than a month is so nakedly a put-on that the jokesters across Newfoundland and Labrador were already sharing their own mash-ups of Furey and some other image or other mere minutes after they appeared on Furey’s social media. Others told him off in the comments spaces.
Politically, that’s deadly. In place where people are deferential to any authority and careful with what they say outside very friendly circles, once folks no longer fear or respect a Premier, whatever political power he or she had is gone. Just before Danny Williams skedaddled from office in 2010, people started to make fun of him publicly. They were all over Kathy Dunderdale for the whole of her four short years, especially towards the end. They were merciless in lampooning Dwight Ball from the start and Andrew Furey’s been an easy and self-refreshing target for his whole four years.
In his first test as Premier four years ago, Andrew Furey failed spectacularly. With four years of bungling and fumbling to his credit, Furey is doing no better in this supposedly mortal crisis for Newfoundland and labrador and for Canada. He is fluff. Furey could not even keep his cabinet in line, as proved by the need to call one of key ministers back from a politically stupid golfing trip to the States but only, mind you, once word got around he was on the American links during this crisis. So desperate was Furey’s office to show the guy was back they sent him out to do a live interview - unheard of in a government that answers even the most serious media inquiries with verbal diarrhea in a written statement - so people could see him standing in the snow in St. John’s. Wouldn’t even let him off with a Zoom appearance using a dirty lens webcam, like the education minister.
“Everything is downstream of character,” Free Press publisher Bari Weiss told Howard Kurtz on Monday in an interview about Donald Trump. Give Justin Trudeau full credit. This week, Trudeau called for internal free trade in Canada. It is the right thing to do anyway, even if Trump weren’t rattling the windows on the Clown Car of Canadian politics. Free trade is the best answer to Donald Trump. Free trade within Canada. Free trade with other countries. Trudeau called for doing away with all the things that keep our domestic economy in Canada hobbled, that has held back for every year of its existence billions in jobs and new business across the country not to mention better medical care.
Weiss also marveled at what she called the“overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him” that pretends to be progressive but that is authoritarian in its nature. This rings true to local politics as well, where Andrew Furey is the least accountable, least transparent Premier since well into the distant past of Newfoundland and Labrador history. Furey and his cabal have reduced the House of Assembly to a laughingstock. Newfoundland and Labrador is a democracy in name only.
While Furey was in Washington, still spewing his over-zealous, hysterical, out-of-touch media lines, allnewfoundlandlabrador.com reported that Furey’s officials will protect locally-made American beer, which is the only alcoholic drink sold in convenience stores in the province. Everything else, including local brands are sold only in the government’s liquor stores. A couple of hundred union jobs are at stake, proof Andrew Furey is more afraid of Jerry Earle and Lana Payne than he is of Donald Trump. We already knew milk was off the table as are - without a doubt - every other obstacle to free trade among provinces.
The only answer to Trump‘s illiberalism, to his regressive conservative ideas, is free trade. Change and transformation, not more of what has kept this country backward. And if you want no more proof that all the talk by Andrew Furey of Team Canada and change is drivel understand that *this* week, while Andrew Furey played in Washington, his administration is fighting *against* free trade, the one thing that makes most sense for Newfoundland and Labrador. Add hypocritical to the list of Furey adjectives after out-of-touch.
Rather than continue to fawn and grandstand, any genuine leader in Canada worthy of the name would let the experience of Trump’s tariffs hit home to Americans. The global ones will be especially devastating. Stay home, Canadian twillicks. Let the American twillicks in the White House do the job of undermining the tariffs with their twaddle that we could never do as effectively. In the meantime, build a country that is better than it is today and better off, without the same kind of barriers between Canadian provinces that are so obviously stupid between Canada and the United States and now the United States and the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, convincing Canadian Premiers of that will be harder than convincing Donald Trump.
