Memo To The Liberals: How To Fight Trump

On The Coming Chaos

Donald Trump has, in what might be described as classic Trumpian fashion, started to appoint some of the world’s worst people to his cabinet. An AG who fucked a 17 year old, a Director of National Intelligence who’s 80/20 to be a Russian agent, and a Defense Secretary whose current job is weekend host of Fox and Friends top the list. Somehow, Marco Rubio at State is a win.

The cascade of crazy (seriously, Matt fucking Gaetz? Tulsi?) has the potential to completely unravel whatever coalition Trump put together, but it is also a test for Pierre Poilievre. Whether you think the election of Donald Trump is an important opportunity for the west or a wildly moronic move from a population that didn’t believe the explicit things Trump promised, it is a test for Poilievre, who will need to straddle a divided party. Leger polling showed that 42% of Conservative voters would vote for Harris, against 45% that would vote for Poilievre. And every time Trump does something crazy, it puts Poilievre under pressure.

I believe that Poilievre isn’t an idiot, and therefore that he will make the electorally sane decisions. There’s a reason I don’t think the Liberals can really come back from this. Hell, Donald Trump (21/64, -43) only has barely worse favourables than Trudeau (22/60, -38) right now in Canada, per Abacus. But if they’re going to come back to something resembling competitiveness they need to take advantage of the opportunities of Trump.

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Last week, I wrote that the Liberals should use the opportunity of Susan Holt’s victory to help some women get reproductive health care and play some politics at the same time. In the same vein, I do think there’s some opportunities for the Liberals in capitalizing on the Trump Administration’s arrival, even on issues where there’s not necessarily an easy to see path to success. So, here’s a few ideas on how Trudeau can use Trump’s win to revitalize the party.

A Joint Commission On Border Security

One of Justin Trudeau’s worst traits is that people think he is a smug elitist asshole who never admits he’s wrong. As much as progressives hate Doug Ford, Ford’s ability and willingness to admit when he’s wrong is why he’s politically teflon. Trudeau is seen as too soft on immigration at a time when the public mood is vociferously anti.

Trump’s National Security Advisor and his Border Czar are both on the record saying the northern border is a security problem. I’m not particularly inclined to believe them, given they’re morons, but you need to give the Americans something. So why not announce a joint commission to look at the border and assess the security and crime situations. It punts the issue into the long grass, it makes Trudeau look reasonable and responsive, and it gives the Americans a sign that you’re willing to be reasonable. It’ll also help you blunt one of Poilievre’s attacks that you’re soft on crime, especially since you can use the commission (or the lack of answers from it yet) to say you’re going to do something about basically everything once it reports.

Staunchly Push Back On Israel

Trump has announced his appointment of Mike Huckabee as his Ambassador to Israel, and has signaled he is going to let Bibi do basically whatever he wants. Annexation of the West Bank is now seriously on the table, and the American government is going to back it to the hilt. Trudeau needs to oppose it strongly.

Yes, this government has taken a lot of shit from pro-Israeli people for being insufficiently committed to the cause of the Jewish people, but the fig leaf that what Israel is doing is necessary or proportionate is already running thin. When the Israelis try and use the very legitimate tragedy of October 7th as an excuse to do a thing it’s wanted to do for decades anyways, no amount of claims of anti-semitism will stop the public from understanding it for what it is.

The honest truth about the Middle East is that the average Canadian seems to have a fairly nuanced, and fairly correct, set of views. October 7th was a horrible massacre, anti-semitism is a scourge, Hamas can all get ripped to shreds, but the Israelis have gone way too far in killing any Palestinian in the name of killing Hamas. It’s comforting to know that the public seem to be able to hold that together, and that it’s only morons in our country’s opinion pages and on Twitter that can’t grasp it. And when the Israelis overreach, it’ll be both morally correct and politically useful to undercut Trump and claim to lead the moral opposition to him.

Bribe Cities To Cut Development Charges

This is only barely Trump-relevant, but Trump is not just proposing huge deportations of illegal immigrants but also huge cuts to legal immigration. There will be huge increases in talented people who want to come to Canada. We need to get our housing market fixed as soon as possible so that we can ensure the cuts to immigration levels in the medium term can be lifted.

The biggest remaining impediment is development charges, which make the cost of new housing unaffordable. DCs make it incredibly hard to get housing development to pencil out for developers, and cities have been abusing DCs to make municipal budgets balance without raising property taxes too high. Mike Moffatt has noted the government has hinted in the right direction on DCs, with the CHIF funding requiring cities over 300k to freeze DCs, but we need to do more.

The government needs to bribe municipalities to slash DCs at this point. Is it a bad way of governing to have to bribe other levels of government? Maybe. But I’d like to be able to lift immigration levels eventually to take advantage of the surge of talented applicants that Trump 2.0 is going to bring to Canada, so bribing communities to slash DCs is what we need to do.