Election 2025

As was widely predicted, including in this column, U.S. President Donald Trump’s initial brinkmanship remarks about Canada and tariffs were his usual shock and awe technique for commencing negotiations. At his “Liberation Day” ceremony on the White House lawn on Wednesday, almost no new tariffs were proposed for Canada and his only direct references to Canada were about our exorbitant and antediluvian supply management measures that cushion the incomes of a large number of Canada’s farmers with artificially inflated prices. This has been a particular bugbear of People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier and a ludicrous anomaly that we should not have needed the president of the United States to highlight for us. The best way to deal with farm income insufficiencies is direct income supplements to the farmers, not forcing the entire population to overpay for what they put on their breakfast table.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Creepy! @fancypants_s https://t.co/dmtkdJoNIQ

— Auntie Polly (@auntie_polly) April 5, 2025

h/t Auntie Polly

As economic strategies go, Liberal Leader Mark Carney is the ultimate confidence man. He wants to tax what Canada exports and subsidize what we import. Judging by the poll numbers, many Canadians are somehow persuaded this will lead us to prosperity.

As a candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party, he pitched himself as an outsider and an unconventional politician who will focus on “getting our economy back on track” – an outsider who’d advised the Liberal government since 2020, during which time Canada’s per capita GDP has been shrinking 0.4 per cent a year, the worst performance amongst the top 50 developed economies, and eventually became the chair of Justin Trudeau’s 2024 Task Force on Economic Growth. And in true confidence man-style, he wrote a book about 21st century economic governance, Value(s), that is full of outdated, conventional economic theories rooted in the 1970s – an economy we no longer live in.

Mark Carney says Canadians, including Canadian companies, should pay their fair share of taxes.

The problem is that the Liberal leader thinks that applies to you but not to him or the companies he helps run.

According to calculations done by the NDP, Mark Carney has helped Brookfield Asset Management – the company he was formerly chair of – avoid $5.3 billion in Canadian taxes since 2021.

VAUGHAN, ONT. — Liberal Leader Mark Carney strolled into an election campaign event on Monday past a ghostly figure.

In a hallway near the main entrance of a Toronto-area trades college, a newspaper front page is framed on the wall. It features a photo of former prime minister Justin Trudeau visiting the school, sporting a grey hard hat and rapturously engaged in what the former leader said he loved most: campaigning.

THREAD

How can PM Carney claim to:

Fight tariffs, protect Canadian workers & industries + strengthen the economy?

When he wants to:

Hit Canadians with his own Carbon Tariffs

‍Hurt Canadian Industry with a Carbon Tax

⛔️Block pipelines & choke Alberta?

Carney record⬇️ https://t.co/ZAsmexLoaW

— Kris Sims (@kris_sims) April 3, 2025

h/t DS

The storm over Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs over the Canadian border crisis has been baked into a vote-winning meme by Canada’s Liberal Party. Yet with an election only weeks away on April 28, can a sentimental appeal to a vanished Canada secure a win for Mark Carney?

Trump’s tariffs were expected to hit Canada on Wednesday’s “Liberation Day,” refueling a furor over Canadian sovereignty which has led some to say this is “shaping up to be the trade war election.”