William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry.
My goodness! So many headlines. So many miles of print coverage and commentary. So many more Canadians disillusioned by the antics of our political and media class. Let’s see if we can’t cut through the headlines to see what is really happening. And at the same time try to provide a framework to interpret the antics and focus in on future important headlines.
First off, whether you like Trump or his style or is policies, or not, you have admire his preparedness and the sheer power of his roll-out. He has completely dismantled the Democrat dominated woke progressive dominance of the Jill/Joe Biden era. At one point the Babylon Bee summed it up perfectly “Exhausted Media Begs Trump To Take A Day Off”. Pierre Poilievre is watching this master class and is taking some notes.
Speaking of the next elected Prime Minister of Canada, Mr. Poilievre is hardly shaking in his boots at the prospect of facing the next unelected Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney in a federal election. Recent fundraising data shows that the CPC raised nearly doubled the combined total of the NDP and Liberals. The war chest is full and ready for a writ drop.
Also, recent polling headlines herald that Poilievre is in big trouble and could lose the election to the Liberals. Really? Canada’s two resident polling super-nerds Eric Grenier and Philippe J. Fournier talk about the EKOS poll and Grenier even did a Sesame Street rendition of the song “one of these is not like the others”. Their conclusion is the EKOS poll is just plain wrong and the other polling says the CPC has fallen slightly but it is within the margin of error. (For a backgrounder on the weaknesses of modern day political polling see Marriott WS – Polls more annoying than Harry and Meghan).
Fournier’s most recent aggregates show only a 2% point drop for the CPC but have them winning 15 fewer seats. We saw the same thing in the US polls when Harris replaced Biden. However the bump could not be sustained once voters actually got to know her. The same is likely to be true for Mark Carney. If you add to this the leftish bias in most polls (add at least 5% points to the spread) and the fact that Quebec always has a bunch of MPs in the governing party, and the “none of the above crowd” (10 million in the US election) will be disgruntled Liberals then the CPC is still on route for a rout — perhaps a 230-250 seat super majority. Yikes!
While on the topic of the next federal election (probably May 12 unless Mark Carney makes a slimy deal with Jagmeet Singh) there is not really much going on. Mark Carney seems to have forgotten Stephan Dion’s Green Shift fiasco. He seems to have also forgotten about Michael Ignatieff, Kim Campbell, and the total rejection of the Justin Trudeau’s climate agenda.
But more importantly he seems to have overlooked the most recent colossal failure of the Hail Mary strategy in Kamala Harris. And still he persists with the radical environmental agenda causing commentators to call it a “word salad”. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that Trump obliterated anything Canada can do on this file with one stroke of a big black sharpie. Nor has he seemed to noticed we are in a trade war by suggesting the way to climate Nirvana is with more tariffs. It makes you want to believe there is parallel universe out there, but it seems there is only one person in it. The fact that he persists along these lines shows that he has failed to understand the paradigm shift in current political sentiment, engagement and communication. Trump understood the shift and so does Poilievre.
Speaking of Poilievre speaking, he has done very little. His current message on Trump is simple: this is a matter for Parliament to deal with. Here is a voice from the past that couldn’t be clearer. He has also dribbled out a few more items in his campaign platform some of which are a bit confusing. His views on equalization seem to be a bit odd but only because we don’t have the complete story. The fact of the matter is every Prime Minister needs to deal with Quebec. The Liberals are all over this even firing a candidate, Chandra Aryra because not only does he not know French, he said he had no intention of ever learning French. Ouch! I wonder if any of the new CPC voter base has ever heard the concept of Canada as two solitudes. Probably not. Nonetheless, both the incoming provincial QC party with an explicit reference to “Never let an oil pipeline pass through Quebec” and the ruling QC provincial party, QC is weighing into the federal election. So Poilievre has likely made some sort of deal with his current and future QC caucus on what the trade-off (perhaps a pipeline or dumping supply management) agenda is once they take power. Besides Equalization is an issue probably best left for the Western premiers to negotiate.
Speaking of negotiating it looks like we are now in a trade war with the US. We have as our chief negotiator a Prime Minister whose party recently polled at 16% , whose personal dissatisfaction rating is 80+%, has been fired by his caucus, and is generally not considered the sharpest knife in the drawer. What could possibly go wrong? Add to this, one of the negotiators is an Ontario leader who has decided to use this crisis to win a snap election, and another, Quebec, whose sole purpose in any crisis is to advance more special treatment for his province. Things aren’t looking good.
The current rallying cry is “stand up to the bully”. Because, as we all know when you stand up to the bully he/she invariably backs down. At least in TV shows and other fairy tales. In real life kidnappings and ‘protection’ racket shake-downs the advice from police is rarely “stand up to the bully”.
As far as retaliatory tariffs, it is surprising that there is anything left on which Canada could apply a tariff. Currently, for example agricultural products like milk cheese and butter over 250%; eggs and poultry over 150%; grains over 150%; processed foods and fresh meat and vegetables over 100% ; consumer goods 25-45%; industrial goods like steel and metals over 25%. And yet there has not been one article listing all these tariffs and Canada’s anti free trade policies. And still we claim we are good neighbours.
So what do we do with Trump, whose call for more border security, more military spending and less fentanyl, although not without substance, are turning out to be just part of his bigger agenda.
He really believes that he alone (with God’s help) can preserve free enterprise liberal-democratic capitalism not just for the US but for the entire West as well. He views the real enemy to be BRICS who not surprisingly didn’t send a single representative to the WEF gabfest this year. Remember Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa represent four of the six trading continents in the world. Longer term this organization will dominate these continents economically and eventually politically. If he has to drag Canada and Mexico and even Europe into stronger trade relationships, he will do it. He believes the current temporary pain he will cause Americans will be forgiven sometime in the next year with a new freer trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and lower taxes based on higher economic growth.
In Canada, the oil industry will suffer a bit as the price of Western Canadian Select may drop a bit. Remember, during the government caused COVID-19 recession the price was actually negative for a while. The April 2020 average was about $US 3.50. And yet this year volumes reached record highs. Volumes will continue to increase so longer term, no big deal.
The same is not true for Ontario’s car industry. I don’t understand the cross border back and forth supply chains involved in automobile manufacture but they can’t be very efficient. Some of those steps will be eliminated and moved to the US, and this will happen regardless of when the current crisis is resolved.
In conclusion, ignore most of the scary headlines around trade, it will be sorted out in less than a year. Ignore anything to do with the Liberal leadership election and the Ontario election. Listen to Poilievre who is trying desperately to not be labelled Canada’s Trump and Smith who just wrote Poilievre’s election platform. It seems they are the only ones with any grasp on what’s reality.
What is most terrifying about this are the parallels to the COVID-19 moral panic. The press leading the fear mongering with the politicians feeling they have to agree. Small Dead Animals just couldn’t resist the tagline Just Two Weeks To Flatten The Tariffs.
William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry.
