Trump, Trudeau, and the Premiers
Wanted: mature adults for convo, governance
Say what you want about Donald Trump but the truth is he understands how much Canada’s Prime Minister and Premiers are not serious people. He also knows how to show that to the world. Just a few words on social media caused a national panic, dominated the Canadian news for days and produced among other things, a change in media content that reflected the panic in the elite. Suddenly there were stories about fentanyl seizures on borders and crackdowns on illegal migrants and the need for tighter border security even though - as others noted - the issues Trump highlighted in his social media threat about tariffs applied to Mexico and not Canada and that there might well be many other issues we needed to talk about. The rest of the world took Trump’s bluster for what it was. Mexico’s president - also targeted by Trump - made no firm commitments, just took the whole thing in stride. Canadian political, business, and media leaders shat their pants.
Take Andrew Furey as a typical Canadian Premier. He wants to have a mature, adult conversation about trade and other issues raised by Donald Trump’s threat to levy 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods going to the United States unless he gets whatever it is he wants. Well, given that Furey hasn’t had a mature adult conversation about anything affecting *his* province since he took office, no one can or is likely going to take him seriously.
Put that line in the same category as Furey’s line to CBC’s David Cochrane that it is “almost impossible to plan for chaos” by which he meant an American politician we have four years of experience with who, weeks ago, told us what he did just this past week. The glib phrase is as laughable as Cochrane’s own line during the introduction to the Furey interview when he described the Canadian Premiers as united in the wake of Trump’s threat. If by united, Cochrane mean unprepared, panicked, and hysterical, then yes, the premiers all displayed the same reaction. But that isn’t the same as being united.
Given the cataclysmic Trump threat - if you judge by the political and business reaction in its wake - you surely would find it odd that no pictures turned up of the meeting of Canada’s first ministers on such a devastatingly critical issue. Turns out they met by teleconference. Odder still, it wasn’t Prime Justin Trudeau who turned up to tell everyone what “we” agreed to at the meeting but finance minister Chrystia Freeland, she of the vibecession idiocy, backed by the internal affairs minister Dom LeBlanc, and some prop-guy in a uniform to make sure everyone knew this was about security. By God, we Canadians take our security seriously. See? Uniform Guy is in the picture. The meeting was entirely about managing the herd of Premiers, nothing more.
“Strong, smart, united” is the way Freeland said Canadian governments would approach Trump, which would only be true if those words really were now synonyms for weak and vacillating and on our knees. After all, the Premiers had been so rattled, so unprepared for the mature, adult conversation about a predictable event anyone with a clue saw coming that Doug Ford, for instance, likened Trump’s handful of words to being stabbed in the back by a family member. He didn’t cry but he might have come close. Danielle Smith wanted to give Trump whatever he wanted, without question. Andrew Furey was so wildly out of his depth that he thought the tariffs were already in place.
“It's crippling,” Furey said of the tariffs that were threatened, not in place, and unlikely to ever affect Canada given the level of integration between the three economies not to mention a thing called the United States - Mexico - Canada free trade agreement. Furey like every other political and business leader across the country apparently drew a blank on that.
Did anyone from the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador attend the Halifax International Security Forum? Have they ever?
“It's devastating to the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador,” Furey whined. Present tense. Not conditional language… “the tariffs would be devastating, if the Americans were crazy enough to do it” … which would be the mature, adult, well-informed, leader-like response or the way CBC’s headline corrected what Furey actually said. But are devastating, or as he put it, “is devastating” as if they were already here and already decimating the provincial economy.
In his interview with Cochrane, Furey recited lots of lines about unity and all the rest and he told us what the federal government would do, which is what all the Premiers wanted each in their own way, which is to cave into Trump’s demands. No questions. No pushback. Just do what the Shopify guy said. There’d be a tighter border - what Trump wanted and whatever that really means - which all Premiers agreed was an issue, according to Furey. Never mind that Trump was like Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles, threatening to blow his own brains out if the common clay of the New West people didn’t give in to his demands. Canadians were quite happy to play the townsfolk of Rock Ridge in Trump’s little melodrama.
Furey did stumble noticeably in the Cochrane interview when Dave asked him if the border was really an issue and not just something because Trump brought it up. Credit to Dave where credit is due on that but remember that Cochrane is unlikely to point out that Furey didn;t have an answer. Instead, he stumbled and blathered about how Trump supposedly conflates this or that and how Furey has supposedly “always said” that tariffs and border don’t go together or some such rubbish. That’s when the line about mature, adult conversation turned up, by the way but such a conversation will never happen. Furey is safe.
Truth is that like most provincial governments in Newfoundland and Labrador since 2003, Furey is all about the borders and the bureaucratic obstacles to free trade. They may not be called tariffs but they are real barriers and Furey isn’t interested in getting rid of them. He just likes to talk about getting them gone. In his own way, Furey has been very good at hindering trade and in the process impoverishing his own province. And like lots of other mature, adult conversation about the province he leads, Furey avoids it.
Experience with Canadian Premiers over a very long time - at a mere four years in office, Furey is already a salty veteran - should tell anyone paying attention that Canadian Premiers are incapable of agreement on any issue and, like Furey, tend to shun mature, adult conversations. Take their collective reaction to Donald 2 as the perfect example.
Canadians watched the American election intently and for the month or more before counting day, coverage of tariffs and their potential impacts were a major feature. They’ve known Trump won since the fourth of November and yet three weeks later, no government in Canada - 10 provincial and one federal - had a plan to deal with what was inevitable. Not one. Being prepared is not just for Scouts. It is the mature, adult thing to do.
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Newfoundland and Labrador’s economy is built on trade. Since the European arrival in the 15th century ended the near total isolation of the indigenous people of the island - all now extinct - the place has prospered or suffered based on the fortunes of trade. It’s worth remembering that considering how little mature, adult attention the government pays to trade and economy strategically.
Of the top 10 destinations for Newfoundland and Labrador exports, the United States is the single biggest ($4.5 billion in 2023), dwarfing even exports to Canada (roughly half that). European Union countries and the United Kingdom are individually smaller but collectively, they beat the United States at almost $6.0 billion. You’d never know that given that Furey’s only statement of any consequence lately on trade was to create a new position in Boston of all places to promote Newfoundland and Labrador.
We import far less from any place than we sell to them: two to three billion from Canada in any given year and about the same amount internationally in total. That’s why it was cringy and embarrassing to hear Furey say, like Tony Wakeham, that one of his goals was to see our products were not used as bargaining chips to protect other Canadian provinces. These are old lies - emphasis on old and lies - long disproven, never true, that local politicians trot out more out of ignorance than anything else but it manages to fool the punters. Clearly neither Furey nor Wakeham had a clue about the province and what is going on. They were just playing to the galleries.
Furey was also not above playing to the indifference of national media to Newfoundland and Labrador as he puffed himself up by doing media interviews anywhere he could. Regional voices need to be heard, he said. Fish, fish, fish, Furey talked about, playing as he frequently does to Mainland stereotypes about Newfies.
Fish makes up less than two percent of the provincial economy when lumped in with agriculture and even if we considered frozen fish blocks to be manufactured, you’d have a hard time cracking five percent of the value of goods and services produced in the local economy. Oil and minerals, by contrast, the globally strategic resources that are 27% of the local economy and that go mostly to the United States got no mention from Furey or Wakeham. By a bigger contrast, Alberta’s and Saskatchewan’s Premiers could boast of their own contacts among American governors and other federal , American officials they could rely on to carry messages for Canada on trade and other issues. In Newfoundland and Labrador, we are small time. We are small time because we waste time on fluffy words rather than substantive action and have for decades.
Fish played to Furey’s domestic constituency, too. He is in political trouble in districts outside the Avalon, which he equates with fishing even if he has no idea where any fish plants are. He cannot talk about oil because it would put him offside with his friends in Ottawa and their drive to shut down that part of our economy and control another. Furey is so keen for green and to play along with Justin that he blindly gave away to Ottawa control of some of the 216,000 square miles of the offshore that is Newfoundland and Labrador’s thanks to a 1983 court decision the feds never appealed. Furey’s regional voice line is hypocritical, a deliberate mask to hide what he has actually done to trade away local resource control for nothing in return.
More importantly though, the spasm panic about Trump, the hasty meetings, all the fluffy words, show how the Canadian and provincial elites - politicians, bureaucrats, business leaders, the media - are not only aligned with Americans like Pavlov’s dogs and dinner bells, the Newfoundland and Labrador crew have no sense of what is important to the province and how to get what the province needs not merely to survive but to thrive. They are not strategic. They have no plans. No awareness. No sense.
They are, as American columnist Peggy Noonan would describe them, the Protected Ones. The politicians, business leaders, the media, all deciding for the rest of us but all cut off in one way or another from the consequences of their choices. Those consequences are what the rest of us - the Unprotected - deal with, all without help or concern from the Protected.
There was very much a sense of that separation between elites - a word Noonan avoided - and the rest of us in what happened in Canada last week. It was especially obvious in Newfoundland and Labrador or when Furey talked to Cochrane, one Newf to another. What they said was a put-on. Recited lines, worn with age in some cases to the point there are scarcely threads holding them together as they flap in the rhetorical breeze. What they said was part of the schtick, jammed in between the selfies at a Taylor Swift concert that Justin also attended - remind us again without saying so how much you are so unlike most of the people of Canada, let alone Newfoundland and Labrador - or posing with a puppet or dinner with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and the Liberal campaign boss.
What doesn’t get said, again very much like Americans, is what the Protected know and what anyone with a clue sees. We did not hear until after the American election what the media knew of the actual campaign on the ground. In Newfoundland and Labrador, we got used to that during the reign of Danny Williams, proto-Trump, Cochrane’s original feeder.
In the same way, we did not hear anyone pointing out the Premiers’ knees were knocking in fear. We did not hear anyone point out this weekend from the Protected Ones that Trudeau got nothing from his trip to Florida at all. The reason he got nothing is because Trump knows that Trudeau is a dead political duck. Trump happily accepted the Trudeau humiliation, the groveling, and gave nothing in return. He got proof of how easily Canadian elites are manipulated and how utterly chickenscitte they all are, every one of them from one end of Canada to the other. Well, at least the English speaking bunch are.
The rest of us, meanwhile, the Unprotected, must brace ourselves against what is coming knowing we are unprotected by or from people who think that a game console is a “Christmas essential” and so should be tax free for a few weeks. At the same time, we recognize for what it is that first call from Ottawa and from the last Justin Trudeau cosplayer Premier the cry that we must all fall in line behind the Prime Minister and be on “Team Canada” in our response to Trump’s threat.
Danny Williams - an old Furey friend - loved this line and all his toadies would repeat it to anyone who questioned whatever crackpot scheme The Danny was pushing. Anyone who dissents is a traitor, as Danny and his boys used to say, and so beleaguered Trudeau and his friends try to shut down the criticism of any of them for their utter gutlessness and blatant incompetence by demanding everyone put on the NALCOR… err… Team Canada jersey and keep quiet.
At least in the United States, even in Donald Trump the supposed authoritarian’s own dining room, someone can still make faces behind the President-elect and remind us that the whole thing going on at the President’s table is a farce.
