Whither Canada with Donald 2?
Whither Canada with Donald 2?
Three Things to Ponder
The image is from an excellent Wall Street Journal piece on the American election on the ground. It’s nerdy and full of analysis and this is the sort of stuff that leads you to reality far more than most of the reporting or commentary you have seen or will see in conventional media from either Canada or the United States.
WSJ isn’t alone in doing this. There’s a CNN version as well and there might be a few more. Certainly it isn’t new. There’s been a similar comparison run in 2016 and in 2020, if memory serves, although because it’s technical and nerdy lots of people tune it out. It’s also not confined to the United States. CTV did something similar in 2021 and that - of all the coverage in recent Canadian elections - helped explain what’s going on.
That CTV map was a visual aide for a column here called “This isn’t your father’s Liberal Party.” The column highlighted trends in conventional media coverage, which on both sides of the border has become more superficial. The coverage is also nakedly biased on partisan, ideological, or class bases. This is true both in print and in electronic media. And inevitably, the gap between the results of an election (what really happened) and what conventionally media generally were reporting before counting day grows alongside claims that conventional media is dead.
Conventional media isn’t dead but it it’s not the bastion of non-partisan, informative reporting people imagine. There’s still good reporting out there but you have to hunt hard to find it and you will find more often than not in new or upstart media outlets. In Canada, where the market is smaller, the quality of coverage has declined markedly .All of this has become part of the usual chatter during and after an election, just as surely as are the stories about squabbles among the losers over who is to blame, or in this case, about the impact of a second Donald Trump administration on Canada. what’s - whether it’s the Premier’s worry about tariffs or a political scientist like Emmett Macfarlane - is that what they know is stuff they got from American news coverage. And that means they really don’t know very much at all.
Let’s take a different route. First we’ll look at what happened in the latest American presidential election and then let’s find three take-aways to get you through the next while.
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A contender for the best bit of Canadian political coverage of the American election might well be the CBC localiser by Alex Kennedy. Alex talked to ex-pat Americans living in Canada and a Newfoundlander - Eddie Eastman - living in the United States. The ex-pat American voted for Harris: “Her message of hope and joy was one that I think so many of us really hung on to, and really thought would precipitate a lot of change.” Her Dad voted for Trump: “He felt that he had a successful four years ... and I think my dad felt like he needed to keep that going.”
Eastman could not support Harris as he told CBC because he didn’t agree with her policies. As CBC summarized it, Eastman and his wife “were happy to vote for the first time, saying he's looking forward to seeing regulatory pressures taken off small businesses and oil drilling, and making sure those who enter the United States do so legally.”
That’s the story of the election, actually. Americans voted on basic issues - things like immigration and the economy - and the Republicans were best at connecting with people on those issues. The campaign messaging that did all that work is stuff we simply didn’t see outside the United States, except in snippets, like the Republican spot aimed at Jewish voters worried about Israel and doubting Kamala Harris and the Democrats’ commitment to supporting Israel. It was an effective message as Jewish Americans turned to Trump the same way African-American and Latino men turned to Trump on economic issues.
And if you go back to that Wall Street Journal graphic, you can see a few more things. First of all, the Republican Party is a typical coalition party, made of lots of people who don’t all share exactly the same views but who can live comfortably under the tent. They don’t see Trump the way he’s portrayed in conventional media, which tends to follow the Democrat line that demonizes Trump and condemns his white supporters as poor and uneducated and his Latino and African-American make backers as sexist traitors.
The Democrats are much more ideologically narrow and much less tolerant of ideas that fall even slightly outside their core issues. That’s been a growing trend over a long time. Democratic strategist James Carville pointed out the problem when he spoke to CNN’s Chris Cuomo last July.
“We’re letting a noisy wing of our party define the rest of us. And my point is we can’t do that. I think these people are all kind of nice people. I think they’re very naive, and they’re all into language and identity. And that’s all right. They’re not storming the Capitol. But they’re not winning elections.”
Second, the Republican vote is much more efficient as a result while the Democrats rack up huge majorities in a smaller number of seats. This gives you deceptive vote tallies in publicly available polls. They tend to take a national perspective. That makes it look like the Democrats are doing much better than they are on the ground. But on that ground, where you see the views of the voters, the tale is wildly different.
Media coverage - especially the television stuff - doesn’t get down to the ground level deliberately even though they know the history and have access to some polling data that might well reflect this trending while the campaigns rage. That’s because it’s in their business interest to make races look like races rather than reporting what they know or can reasonably conclude based on facts and evidence. Imagine how much different *your* reaction would have been to the election result if there’d been more open discussion and frequent discussion of the fractures inside the Democratic Party when the party had a chance to do something about it. Hard to have a race and keep the ratings up with that kind of news reporting.
Third, and flowing from that, the real story of this election was of a Democratic campaign that exploded in Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Panicked and with little alternative, Democratic strategists swapped Harris for Biden and picked a mid-western male in an effort to balance out her own positions, which are great for the ideological core of the party but that don’t play well outside it.
There was no way Tim Walz could do what Joe Biden barely managed to do in 2020 and so the Democrats were essentially on the defensive strategically for the campaign. They played up celebrity, deploying former Presidents and First Ladies as well as Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift and the cast of the West Wing to shore up the Democratic vote. They avoided policy because Harris wasn’t a candidate of change. Democratic efforts to dent the Republican vote were ineffective because Republican voters had already locked in and those marginal or persuadable voters were too few in number to change the tide. Folks wanted change and even without Biden, the Democrats were more of the same. CNN exit polls found that 80% of voters for both parties had decided their ballot choices *before* September.
That points to a strategic weakness the Democrats have not dealt with. Joe Biden’s implosion actually dates back to the failure of the party leadership in 2022 - when Biden was already showing signs of deterioration - to get Biden to limit himself to one term. That would have allowed time for a proper nomination fight that is a crucial part of every election. But really, the strategic problem of candidate choice was the decision to pick Biden in 2020 despite his advanced age. That just increased the likelihood of an issue within the subsequent four years. But the even bigger strategic problem was the decision taken long before that to shift the party to a more narrow ideological and geographic base. The Republicans just slipped into the gap left behind and have never looked back.
Not the view you’ve seen in media coverage is it? But just watch how Trump 2 plays out. His Chief of Staff appointment Thursday already reflects a very different administration than the caricatures. You can see that as Trump campaign messaging made a point of noting that one condition of her accepting the job was that the Clown Car of folks - Robert Kennedy, Jr, Elon Musk, and that ilk - have to go through her to get to the President. The campaign leaned on that message almost as hard as they did on the fact she’s the first woman to hold the office. Not what you’d expected, eh?
The parallels between the Republicans and Democrats in the US and the Liberals and Conservatives in Canada are obvious and you can translate that analysis across the border easily. It lines up with similarity of conventional news media coverage, the commentariat performance, and with the current party standings. Not surprising. Canadian elites are basically aligned with the United States across the board. That Americanization is so pronounced that CBC even ran its own live network coverage on Tuesday as if the election were Canadian or the CBC were an American news outlet.
That’s why your first Canadian take-away from the American election is to be aware that what you see in the conventional media will play up the superficial heat of personal attacks just like Americans did. They’ll offer up free air time to partisans for political panels and challenge little of it on a substantive or balanced basis. And they’ll not tell you much in the way of detailed news and impartial analysis either.
That superficial approach will draw attention, drive coverage, and on some level will be linked to efforts - as the New York Times story on the campaign shows of the American case - to appeal to specific voter segments who are moved by some aspect of the issue or the attack. The media just won’t note that even if they know it. Canadian media outlets are every bit as biased as American ones but pretend otherwise. CBC isn’t just the same as the rest. It’s one of the leaders of the pack. The Sun but without the subtlety.
Your second take-away from the American election is about two pragmatic impacts on Canada. One is economic, where the most likely early impact will be a heavy push by the Americans to knock down the remaining trade barriers between the two countries. The Republicans under Donald Trump will use tariffs as sticks again, as they did the last time. There are no carrots.
That means the Canadian agricultural sector will find itself an American target, for one. Any federal government, including the Liberals, will be hard-pressed to defend the system of supply management that inflates consumer prices for dairy products and chicken as well as other barriers that keep consumer costs higher than they need to be and needlessly limit access to health care.
There may be some cascading pressure to lower trade barriers between provinces, which will have a knock-on impact on provincial politics where protectionism remains the order of the day. Greater access to American markets and greater interprovincial free trade in goods, services, and labour would be good for Newfoundland and Labrador consumers and businesses alike. That will pose a challenge for the local parties who are all beholden to local corporate interests, labour and business corporations alike.
The other challenge will be defence where the Liberals have been consciously resisting the need to increase defence capabilities and spending while at the same time putting Canadians in uniform on the front-lines of global confrontations. That’s something a second Trump administration would have an issue with and the usual Canadian excuses won’t fly.
Don’t expect Trump to cut off ties to Ukraine. Long-term American strategic interests now link China - a long-time Trump target - with the Middle East and Russia in a way that doesn’t let the amateur-hour Trump 1 come back a second time. Trump may expect Europeans and Canada to carry more of the burden but the United States cannot afford the death of NATO any more than Canada can.
That will pose another challenge for Canada, namely to recover its position of greater influence within the alliance that’s been lost under the Liberals. That’s not an issue for Justin Trudeau to handle well since - like the Biden-Harris Democrats - the Trudeau Liberals are already agents of the old order when voters clearly want change. Canada’s NATO partners might be like the oil patch, though: waiting for a change of government.
The third take-away is less pragmatic and more philosophical but still very important. It’s about Canada as a country. Who are we and what do we stand for? That could become a key issue in the election. The Americanization of the country’s elites is staggering but that’s been possible at a time when we haven’t had to think about the differences between the two countries on fundamental issues. Do those differences even exist any more? Do we need NATo or will we become a satellite of the States?
All the same, we could well see an election that pulls from the depths an old-fashioned definition of Canada, with the Liberals emphasising green versus oil, less defence spending versus more, and so on just so we don’t look American. Even greater firearms restrictions would fit that agenda as well. They might try to reinforce the existing biased message that the Conservatives are just Trump Republicans.
That would run against the grain of current messaging from the Prime Minister but a desperate party might well try something that desperate without seeing it that way. After all, the Trudeau Liberals - like the American Democrats - remain wedded to their narrow ideological beliefs and all those things remain part of the Liberal canon. If you don’t think so, just look at the recent announcement targeting the oil industry yet again for new pressure all in the guise of fighting climate change.
The political reality the Liberals will face federally, like the problem provincially in Newfoundland and Labrador will still be captured by James Carville’s sign from 30 years ago though:
Change versus more of the same.
The economy, stupid.
And don’t forget health care.
That’s as inconvenient for the Liberals as it was for the Democrats.