Trump’s Tariff Psychodrama Will Go On And On And On

There’s No End In Sight

On a day when most of the rest of the world just got hit with huge, blanket tariffs by the United States, Canada and Mexico got spared. Both our countries managed a diplomatic crisis and a psychopath American leader and got a reprieve from the blanket tariffs. And I’m supposed to believe this is a bad thing for Mark Carney.

I’m not going to pretend that this argument isn’t self-fulfilling on some level - it’s obvious that everything I say in this case is being filtered through the fact that I am a partisan Liberal who supports Mark Carney. The idea that people get pissed at me for being partisan - as if I’ve ever pretended for a second of my life to be unbiased - is laughable. I am who I am, and if you come to me for something else that’s your fault, respectfully.

The last time we were in a Federal campaign I hadn’t really started listening to Wilco yet, and I worked through the bulk of their work in a time when I was actively heavily depressed. It’s a very different experience listening to Wilco now, in something close to a period of happiness for me, having found emotional resonance in much of their more … tortured, shall we say, work.

The reason I’m thinking of this in the context of Trump and tariff day is simple - those who want to claim this is bad for Carney fundamentally misunderstand what happened today. And the best way for me to frame it is in the confines of Illinois’s finest. There is no reprieve from Trump and Trumpism, no reprieve from the crisis we face, and no reprieve from the global catastrophe that Donald Trump created today. It will go on.

On and on and on.

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The case for this being somehow bad for Carney is based on a fundamental fiction - that because Canada has been exempted from the broad based tariffs, somehow we can go back to the election we airquotes “should” be having, the one we would have had if this was October 2024 or if Kamala Harris had won the election. The problem for those people claiming this is that they’re pretending that Canadians are fucking idiots who will believe that this is not the end of this moment and not the beginning.

If you have a functional brain, there’s no going back to November 2nd. There’s no unringing the bell, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, there’s no pretending that the last months haven’t happened. There’s no way to pretend that actually the top issue is safe injection sites or bail reform. It’s just not, because Donald Trump is still President, and his bullshit will keep going on.

On and on and on.

Donald Trump just dropped a nuke on the global economy, but as of right now if you want tariff free access to both the EU and the US Canada’s a pretty attractive place to be. If you want that, it’s worth pointing out that the next PM will have opportunities as well as crises because of these tariffs. That said, Europe and Asia will now be poorer because of Trump’s actions, making it harder for businesses to find buyers for Canadian exports in those areas.

This crisis isn’t over - Donald Trump could decide tomorrow we actually do apply, or GM and Ford stock could halve by Monday and the auto tariffs are similarly exempted for us. It’s a shitshow, but it’s not one that is cleanly resolved today. I get why Conservatives are desperate to pretend that this is now behind us, and that we can go back to the way things were, but we can’t. It’s a laughable proposition that we should not take seriously, because Donald Trump will not become a docile puppy.

We now have a global recession created by the President’s idiocy and malfeasance, and navigating that will take a steady hand who has navigated crises before. If you’re telling me that frame doesn’t help Mark Carney you’re either an idiot or lying - whether to yourself or to others. This crisis will not end. This crisis is our next four years. This will go on.

On and on and on.

Even if we ignore the tariff threat in specific, this campaign is now about who the best person to reinvigorate the Canadian economy is, to rebalance the economy away from American reliance and make a broader Canadian economy. Is the career politician who has never worked in the private sector and can’t make an ally with his own provincial party leader the guy to do that, or is it the PM who has been praised by Conservative Premiers in Ontario and Nova Scotia?

Yes, it was a catch-22 for Poilievre on Wednesday. He was fucked. If the tariffs went on the collective response from Liberals would have been “we need Carney to fight back against Trump”, yes. Now it’s that no broad tariffs make the case for Carney. I agree it’s unfair. I also live in reality where this is what incumbents do all the fucking time. It’s a time honoured tradition that if the Australian right have a good economy they say “the economy’s great, we can’t afford to risk a Labor government” and when it’s bad they say “the economy is weak, now’s not the time to risk a Labor government”. Stephen Harper used a global financial crisis to claim Canada needed strong and stable leadership for two election cycles, where good news is good news and bad news is also good news. If you weren’t outraged about Stephen Harper claiming both as good news, shut up now.

The honest truth is that Trump is not gone. He is still looming over us, and he will go on that way for the entirety of the next four years. It is a shame for Poilievre that we cannot wind back the clock to an election he easily would have won 6 months ago. He got screwed. Sucks to suck. Maybe you should have talked to Jagmeet and Blanchet more and actually taken out Trudeau in September, but you didn’t, so again, sucks to suck.

The reason Conservatives are so mad is Donald Trump has stopped this being the election they want to be fighting. Yesterday’s tariff reprieve didn’t change that. This is the Trump election, and the consequences will go on.

On and on and on.

On and on and on.

On and on and on.