Podcast #271: The Canadian Episode—Trump’s Tariffs and Trudeau’s Travails
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with The Line editor Jen Gerson about how US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats have affected Canada’s already fractured political landscape.
[00:00:00] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week’s episode. To hear the full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, visit us at Quillette.com and click the Subscribe button.
[00:00:27] This week I’m going to be talking about an issue that’s close to home, which is to say, my Canadian home: Newly elected US President Donald Trump recently threatened to impose crippling 25 percent tariffs on exports from my country. Fortunately, Trump relented at the last minute, but the threat isn’t gone, as Trump says he will impose the tariffs in a month’s time…
[00:00:53] though whether he makes good on that threat is anybody’s guess. This crisis has come at an awkward time for Canada, as our unpopular Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is on his way out the door. And the question of who will succeed him is still in flux. With me to discuss these developments is my fellow Canadian, Jen Gerson, who’s from Alberta, and edits the popular news and opinion site, The Line, which comes to us via Substack at ReadTheLine.ca.
[00:01:23] And just to let you know if you are a regular Quillette podcast listener, you might find this episode a little unusual—as my discussion with Jen is more informal and kibbutzy than most of the interviews I do. Partly I think that’s because I’ve known Jen for a long time, as well as her fellow The Line editor, Matt Gurney.
[00:01:43] But to be honest, I think it’s also because she’s just Canadian, like me. So there’s going to be a lot of gossipy Canadian banter and crosstalk that you’re going to hear. I tried to avoid it but, you know, things happen. As you’ll hear, Jen and I are both conscious of the fact that all this inside-baseball Canadian tariffs and politics stuff might not be of maximum interest to our non-Canadian listeners.
[00:02:07] I promise not to make a habit of it. In any case, I invite my Canadian and non-Canadian listeners alike to enjoy my interview with The Line Editor, Jen Gerson.
JONATHAN KAY, HOST: You said something very intriguing to me when I first raised the subject of tariffs with you by email. I think you said, “I think Trump is giving Canada a head fake.”
[00:02:32] And I wasn’t sure what you meant. What did you mean by that?
[00:02:34] JEN GERSON, GUEST: To sum up just sort of the craziness that’s happened in the last week or two, you know, we’ve had Trump take Canada and Mexico right to the brink of a potentially catastrophic trade war with very serious economic consequences—and only hours before that trade war was supposed to come into effect and a 25 percent tariff was supposed to be levied on all Canadian goods, 10 percent on Canadian oil, and of course, Canada was planning a series of retaliatory countermeasures in place…
[00:03:04] Trump and Trudeau had a phone call. Afterwards, we’ve got Trump having a public appearance, basically saying, well, Canada doesn’t treat us very well. I believe he named a bunch of specific grievances he had with Canada that hadn’t come up previously and had nothing to do with fentanyl or the border.
[00:03:23] And then he said ... I believe he made a reference to the idea of Canada becoming a 51st state if we didn’t like it. And then he said, well, yeah, but I’ve got another phone call with Justin Trudeau happening later today. Three o’clock Eastern time.
[00:03:37] Apparently, they hammer out some kind of agreement, which was a bunch of border measures and border spending in addition to the announcement of a fentanyl czar.
[00:03:46] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Right.
[00:03:47] JEN GERSON, GUEST: And after that, Trump says, well, I’ll give you a 30-day reprieve from the tariffs. And why I think that was a head fake was two-fold.
[00:03:55] One is, what did we do? What did we give him?
[00:03:58] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: A fentanyl czar, whatever that is.
[00:04:00] JEN GERSON, GUEST: For people who are in America, I mean, I think the idea of naming a czar, right, to deal with a specific problem is a very specific, is a very American thing.
[00:04:07] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: The word czar, of course, is, even in the United States, used metaphorically because, of course, the last czar of Russia stepped down about a century ago.
[00:04:16] JEN GERSON, GUEST: In Canada, we try to resolve our problems by appointing a Supreme Court justice to study the issue for several months and then issue a report with a bunch of recommendations that just so happen to perfectly align with the Liberal partisan agenda. That’s a whole other conversation. So I mean this [czar issue] is not in alignment with Canadian norms.
[00:04:33] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: It’s not part of the political idiom in Canada.
[00:04:36] JEN GERSON, GUEST: That’s right And it’s to deal with a problem that I think frankly is mostly manufactured. Not totally manufactured. Obviously, we in Canada need to be taking fentanyl seriously. It kills Americans and Canadians. You’re not going to hear any complaint from me about taking fentanyl seriously, but it was a weird symbolic thing to add to a bunch of things that we’d already announced we were going to do in order to address Trump’s border and drug concerns.
[00:05:01] And, of course, then the real head fake problem is like, Okay, well, that buys us a reprieve of thirty days. So we start this weird reality-show cycle potentially up again in three weeks, right? And we’ve already demonstrated to Trump that he can gain some kind of at least symbolic concession by picking on us this way.
[00:05:18] So why would he conveniently ignore that thirty-day deadline a month from now? I would also point out that that means that this tariff reprieve is going to come to an end just before, I believe, the Liberals are about to announce their new leader, Justin Trudeau’s replacement as prime minister, and then just before we go into an election.
[00:05:36] The reason why I think it’s a head fake is because as the tariffs were about to be announced, I thought that Canadians were starting to gain a real resolve around what was about to happen. There was a weird psychological kind of rally-around-the-flag effect that was starting to form and take effect.
[00:05:51] People were passing around Buy-Canadian memes, you know, there was traffic surging to Canadian websites to help Canadians make more informed buying decisions.
[00:06:00] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Which is weird because we’re such a free trading country that it’s like we had to borrow this whole patriotic language from other societies.
[00:06:09] It doesn’t really fall naturally from our lips, does it?
[00:06:12] JEN GERSON, GUEST: No, it didn’t. But also, I think that there was a real and sincere anger and sense of betrayal about the fact that America was seriously considering doing this. I mean, the American anthem was booed at two hockey games up here. I mean, that’s…
[00:06:24] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Which I object to.
[00:06:25] I can see why people did it, but leave the hockey out of it.
[00:06:31] JEN GERSON, GUEST: The hockey is sacrosanct. That should be a place where we can all come together.
[00:06:34] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: And plus, half the American players are from Canada anyway, so…
[00:06:37] JEN GERSON, GUEST: Well, don’t tell Americans that. They’ll start tariffing them.
[00:06:40] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: That’s a good point.
[00:06:40] JEN GERSON, GUEST: The point being in all of this is that there was a real sentiment among Canadians that a relationship that we had relied on and built our entire economy and lives around has fundamentally proved itself to be unreliable. And that was leading to a real sense of resolve and anger, I think, among a lot of Canadians. A lot of Canadians are really starting to pay attention to the risks here.
[00:07:02] And when Trump announced the thirty-day reprieve, my fear is that a lot of Canadians who otherwise were starting to get themselves ginned up to make some real and necessary systemic changes to the way this country operates, suddenly went, Oh, thank God, of course he’s bluffing. Cool, we’ll give him a fentanyl czar and some border money and then nothing, we don’t have to really change anything and everything will be fine because he doesn’t actually mean it, he’s just being Trump, we can just ignore this.
[00:07:31] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: But that’s not a crazy thing to think, right? First of all, this is the second time we’ve been through this. When Trump first became president, after the 2016 election, he threatened to rip up NAFTA. I thought at the time Justin Trudeau dealt with that situation fairly deftly, and there was some minor changes to the free trade agreement.
[00:07:52] NAFTA, of course, being the free trade agreement that governs Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and that was that. And then Trump shifted to other fixations. Is it unrealistic to think that Trump, who’s already talking about moving two million Gazan Palestinians to other countries…
[00:08:10] JEN GERSON, GUEST: Yeah, that’ll occupy his time.
[00:08:11] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Greenland… he wants the Panama Canal… I don’t want to call it childish because I don’t want all our Trump fans to turn off this podcast at the same time. Call it a child-like propensity to shift his attention radically. He fires off some tweets, and then, geopolitically, he seems to have ADHD.
[00:08:32] The stuff he’s talking about with Gaza is pretty off the wall. But at the same time, as a Canadian, I’m like, well, if that occupies him for the next couple of months, at least he won’t be talking about tariffs, right?
[00:08:43] JEN GERSON, GUEST: I would say there’s two points to that, and that is Canada’s best hope for getting out of a second presidency and relatively unscathed is exactly that.
[00:08:52] He just gets distracted. He starts bombing a Mexican cartel. He starts bulldozing the Gaza Strip. He starts doing God knows what. I mean, who knows what he’ll announce next week?…
[00:09:02] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: By the way, we don’t want those things to happen. We’re not like, Oh please, go, destroy other societies, so ours will remain.
[00:09:08] JEN GERSON, GUEST: We’re not really advocating that. But honestly, if we’re being ruthlessly strategic here, and taking the reality of human lives and equations out of the equation…
[00:09:18] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Who is this monster I’ve invited on the podcast?
[00:09:21] JEN GERSON, GUEST: People think Canadians are nice. We’re not nice.
[00:09:25] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: I would like to disassociate myself from this!
[00:09:27] JEN GERSON, GUEST: Jon, Jon, you have to understand… Or what your audience has to understand is that Canadians are polite, but we’re not nice. So, you’re starting to see a little of the true colours coming…
[00:09:34] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: We’re a little bit nice…
[00:09:37] JEN GERSON, GUEST: Speak for yourself.
[00:09:39] So, yes, I think that that’s right. Our best hope is that he gets distracted with other priorities and more or less forgets that we exist and we manage to stay under the radar. However, there’s two things that I would respond to with that, and one is if that happens and we miss the opportunity that Trump is giving us to make the necessary changes that we need to make in our economy and society, that would be a real crime.
[00:10:02] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Sorry, the “opportunity” that Trump is giving us? This, this sounds a lot like, thank you sir, may I have another?
[00:10:07] JEN GERSON, GUEST: In the sense that all crises are opportunities.
[00:10:09] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: There’s some things that we agree is kind of crazy, like becoming the 51st state, that’s not going to happen.
[00:10:15] JEN GERSON, GUEST: But wait, let’s come back to that.
[00:10:17] Because the other thing that I would say as well is Canada can’t build a strategy for the next four years. around trying to guess when Donald Trump is serious because that’s a mug’s game. All of the forces that led to Trump’s ascendancy are still going to be present in American society.
[00:10:32] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Barack Obama’s not coming back.
[00:10:33] JEN GERSON, GUEST: Yeah, exactly. The world order is fundamentally changing and Trump won was our first red flag that that was happening and we completely ignored it and failed to make any kind of internal strategic changes to prepare for that as a country. And all of those ascendancies and those currents will still be in play after Trump leaves office.
[00:10:50] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Tell me some of the things that Trump was pushing for that really would be in our best interests to make serious policy changes.
[00:10:59] JEN GERSON, GUEST: The first one that I would bring to the top of the table, and the one that I think is really interesting that Trump hasn’t prioritised, is our NATO spending. It’s really interesting to me that he’s built the whole moral rationale for this tariff war around these manufactured concerns around fentanyl and migrant crossings and has really underplayed the place where we are morally not defensible. And that’s our NATO spending.
[00:11:22] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: I think it was the New York Times that had a very interesting graph, defence spending as a percentage of GDP. And if you looked, it wasn’t just NATO countries. It was basically Western countries, OECD nations, dozens of countries were listed.
[00:11:34] In terms of defence GDP, Canada was at the bottom, along with, if memory serves, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and maybe it was Spain. I’m sorry to the Spanish if I got that wrong, but pretty much near the bottom of the barrel, two percent is seen as the minimum responsible number.
[00:11:54] JEN GERSON, GUEST: Two percent is what we’ve agreed to.
[00:11:55] I think we’re 1. 5 or something to that nature, but I would want to double check. But people will say, well, two percent is an arbitrary number. No, it’s the arbitrary number we agreed to spend, and haven’t for decades, and haven’t for generations. And I think that where I get really pissed off about the NATO spending personally as a Canadian is that Canadians have a tendency to be extremely smug and smarmy with Americans, especially where it comes to our entitlements that we have purchased for ourselves, the health care entitlements. Justin Trudeau a couple of weeks ago he went on the CNN Jake Tapper show and started talking about the just and compassionate society that Canadians have built as proven by his dental program and his national childcare program and all these entitlements.
[00:12:39] And of course the CNN host ... regarding Canadian leaders as not real people, didn’t actually give him a bunch of hard questions and one of the things that I think Canadians need to get their heads around is the reason why we can afford those entitlements is because we rely on America, we just know America will come and defend us if need be.
[00:12:57] We direct and prioritise entitlement spending with the knowledge that if need be Americans who don’t have access to a fraction of our entitlements can be expected to bleed and die for us. And I think that that’s a morally indefensible position that we’ve staked out for ourselves. And if Trump were to make an argument for a protectorate tax or even tariffs around that argument, I think that he would have a strong moral case to be made.
[00:13:22] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: So you’re on Trump’s side, you just think he picked the wrong arguments.
[00:13:24] JEN GERSON, GUEST: Well, no, I’m not on Trump’s side. I don’t think the tariffs are justified. I don’t think they’re economically justified. I don’t think this is correct. I think Donald Trump is arguing for tariffs for his own domestic reasons.
[00:13:34] I don’t think that they’re in response to anything Canada has done or not done. I think he’s arguing he wants tariffs because he sees tariffs as being a fundamentally better way to fund the American government.
[00:13:45] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: The drug thing, the migrant thing, the crime thing resonates more with the average American than oh, they’re supposed to spend two percent of GDP.
[00:13:53] They’re only spending 1. 5. The stuff he’s emphasised has more of a visceral appeal to his base.
[00:13:59] JEN GERSON, GUEST: The other conspiratorial argument is that he doesn’t actually want us to incentivise or spend that money on military spending. He’d rather us spend it on stuff that’s frankly symbolic and useless and have us fritter away our resources because it benefits America to not have Canada be strong on defence.
[00:14:16] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: I don’t know about that, but going back to that CNN thing, I have noticed that when American journalists interview Canadians, they don’t ask hard questions, it’s like they’re interviewing a community group or something. Like, we’re now going to talk to the leader of the local Lutonian association about the statue they’re putting up to their Lutonian leader.
[00:14:35] They were probably handed a half-page fact sheet. What do Canadians like? Where’s Canada? You’re right. It’s its own country. It has its own currency and passports and stuff and stamps.
[00:14:44] JEN GERSON, GUEST: Your friends probably drank there when they were nineteen. And we’re so exposed to American media. It’s so interesting to watch how Canada is treated and perceived, thrown back at us all the time, right?
[00:14:54] And what I think is really interesting, because on left-wing Canadian media, there’s an assumption that Canada is this sweet, little utopian socialist paradise where we’re like the Netherlands. It’s so adorable and a subsequent unwillingness to acknowledge that the entitlements that we’ve purchased for ourselves and the kind of culture we purchased ourselves also included some significant trade-offs and an unwillingness to address problems like NATO spending and then on the right you hear this kind of caricature of Canada where we’re a woke hellscape where all freedom of speech has been totally diminished and crushed.
[00:15:24] I mean, Jon, I hope that you have your door reinforced for when the Canadian anti-speech SWAT team smashes it down.
[00:15:31] JONATHAN KAY, HOST: Okay, that’s not going to happen, but it is annoying. It’s true that we don’t live in a totalitarian state. But it can be very kvetchy here when it comes to the anti-hate stuff.
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