At 9 am MST, January 6, 2025, Justin Trudeau finally pulled the plug and announced his intention to quit — sometime 11 weeks or so down the road. Everything about his speech reeked of the same hypocrisy and stupidity with which his tenure began.The most egregious — or hilarious — thing this quitter said was that he was a fighter. It was all, as Tasha Kheiriddin pointed out in the National Post “classic narcissism” filled with sighs and tears. It was everyone else’s fault that he was going, not his. The self-pity was disgraceful and pathetic. Like other hollow men, he left not with a bang but a whimper.At the same time, 81% of Canadians approved of his quasi-resignation; 51% strongly approved. Only 19% disapproved.Trump was trolling Justin to his face last November when he suggested Canada become the 51st state. Even Romeo Leblanc, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, saw that. The problem for Canada’s deep state and their flacks in the legacy media is that they also know that Trump doesn’t say things unless he has done his homework beforehand. That’s one reason why his critics developed the legend that he is chaotic when he states the obvious about Greenland, the Panama Canal, Ukraine, NATO, the COVID-19 event and so on. He is not chaotic. Albertans would be especially unimaginative to think he was.There are two issues here. The first is Justin as progressive poster-boy and how that has worked out. The second is how Alberta can defend its interests, not Laurentian interests, in the context of the new president and in the near term.If you remember 2015, take a walk down memory lane. Donald Trump’s star was rising towards victory a year or so later. Barack Obama was a very lame duck and Hillary Clinton, Barack’s anointed, was failing to live up to his dream of a third term. If you were a globalist and a progressive and an American, the 2015 victory of Justin was a reaffirmation that your ideological commitments were not in vain. The other North American democracy would carry on a soon-to-be frustrated common progressive legacy.With Trump’s victory in 2016, Canadians, aided by the clamour of their bought-and-paid-for legacy media came to believe both that there was a benevolent global political agenda brokered by the supermen at the World Trade Organization, and that Trudeau was the new helmsman of progressive policies.This was not entirely true.Following his recent semi-departure, many commentators have noted, for example, that the early Trudeau government did not see themselves that way. Obama helped change the Liberals’ self-understanding.In his first major print interview, with the New York Times Magazine, Justin was still dazzled by having the American president ask him to call him by his first name. A week later, at the Asia-Pacific meeting in Manila, the were best buds. And Obama already knew of Justin’s ways since a couple of his aides had worked on the Liberals’ campaign. He invited Justin to DC for a state dinner and made it very clear that he and Michelle wanted lots of quality time with Justin and Sophie. Justin was thrilled. And as more or less moderate personalities left the Liberal government — the two Bills, Brison and Morneau, for instance — he gave free rein to his progressive delusions, as did his cabinet. By then, 2015 had been interpreted as an ideological endorsement by the electorate.Decriminalization of drugs (and then, effectively, of crime) followed, along with an open border and a flood of new immigrants. The government embraced defunding not the police but the military, the promotion of identity politics and of the view that the first post-national state would be paid for by the practice of a fraudulent Modern Monetary Theory, where budgets balanced themselves.Living in a fictional world was endorsed by all those glowing articles announced on the cover of glossy magazines. Our first feminist even made it to the cover of the Rolling Stone! And then came the COVID-19 event, which as Sean Spear recently observed in The Hub consolidated the dogmatic radicalism at the heart of progressive politics along with the disconnect from the views of ordinary and generally moderate Canadian citizens.As is usually true of those who construct ideological interpretations of political reality, critics are not in error, they are evil. The aftermath of the over-reaction to the COVID-19 event, and especially to the Truckers’ convoy, showed that in vivid detail. As well, because Canadian politics has chiefly been a problem of Laurentian control over the rest of the country, Albertans constituted the major target for the progressive onslaught, now carried out in the guise of environmentalism. The rhetoric of Canada’s environment minister clearly paints Albertans as evil planet-destroyers.Here is where the barque that is Laurentian progressivism encounters the rock of Trump. The failures are obvious: deficit spending failed to boost income; carbon taxes were accompanied by increased CO2 emissions, not reductions; oil and gas production set new records; national “unity” was in shambles, which was okay because of Ottawa’s “trenching” on provincial jurisdiction; immigration policy and its minister, Marc Miller, turned out to be disasters because of the impact of immigration on health care and housing. Canadian foreign policy was as directionless as that of the Biden administration. Sucking up to China was sidelined by the “two Michaels” fiasco, to say nothing of Chinese interference in Canadian elections and the Chinese origin of COVID-19.More recently, Justin’s vision of a post-national state has become widely viewed as just another fantasy. As Philip Cross pointed out in the National Post, Canada is pre-national not post-national owing to internal trade barriers that amount to about 7% in interprovincial tariffs.That is the context for understanding how Alberta needs to act towards the new administration in Washington.One of my imaginative email correspondents said Alberta might obtain “protectorate status” from the Americans to keep the oil border open if Laurentians followed through on the threat of Melanie Joly to close it. Saskatchewan could add potash and uranium to the mix.The domestic purpose of such a response, as usual, would be to change the Canadian regime and make the prairie west partners in a federation, not quasi-colonies of predatory Laurentians. The realism of President Trump could be a great boon to Alberta. No wonder the premier’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, presumably to promote, along with Kevin O’Leary and Jordan Peterson, some kind of economic union, made the Laurentians go ballistic. That is also a good sign for us, not them.
