Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre, currently favored to become the next prime minister after the resignation of Liberal Justin Trudeau, is walking a tightrope by standing firmly for Canada’s interests without alienating the returning U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump offered many criticisms of Trudeau that Poilievre would doubtless agree with and Trump supporters see much to admire in the preternaturally calm and implacable Canadian Conservative leader, who excels at handling loaded questions from biased reporters.
However, Poilievre aspires to be the leader of Canada, which is on the brink of an economic showdown with the incoming U.S. administration over border security.
One of the major reasons Trudeau resigned is that even his own party lost faith in his ability to negotiate with Trump, and one reason for that loss of faith was Trudeau’s poor response to Trump’s trolling about annexing Canada as America’s 51st state. (Or 52nd, if Trump gets Greenland first; or maybe 52nd and 53rd, if turning Canada into two new states is more practical).
Trump has taken to belittling Trudeau as the “governor” of the prospective new American state.
Poilievre has rebuffed Trump’s statehood provocations before, and on Tuesday he felt motivated to write a lengthy response on social media platform X:
“Canada will never be the 51st state. Period. We are a great and independent country,” Poilievre declared.
The Canadian Conservative leader stressed his country’s long friendship and cooperation with the United States, and blasted Trudeau’s “weak and pathetic NDP-Liberal government” for failing to make those points in response to Trump’s goading.
The NDP is the New Democratic Party, Canada’s other (and, at the moment, more popular) major left-wing party, partnered with the Liberals to help them govern as a minority party in Trudeau’s second term.
Poilievre found a way to stress both ideological empathy with Trump and national independence for Canada by borrowing Trump’s famous campaign slogan:
When I am Prime Minister, we will rebuild our military and take back control of the border to secure both Canada and the U.S. We will take back control of our Arctic to keep Russia and China out.
We will axe taxes, slash red tape and rapidly green-light massive resource projects to bring home paycheques and production to our country.
In other words, we will put Canada First.
That was a neat trick, given that Poilievre became internationally famed for a viral video that showed him coolly dismissing a reporter who claimed “a lot of people would say that you’re simply taking a page out of the Donald Trump book.”
Poilievre may also be hoping to avoid drawing the ire of Trump’s ally Elon Musk, who has expressed admiration for Poilievre. On Tuesday, Musk described Poilievre’s demolition of Trudeau’s high-tax inflationary policies as “perfectly articulated.”
Interestingly, Poilievre used apples to illustrate the folly of Trudeaunomics – the very same fruit he was placidly chewing when he dealt with the biased reporter two years ago. Musk reposted that viral video on Tuesday and called it “another masterpiece.”
Trudeau, incidentally, decided to manufacture a more butch response to Trump’s annexation trolling on Tuesday by declaring: “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States.”
“Workers and communities in both our countries benefit from being each other’s biggest trading and security partner,” the outgoing caretaker prime minister said.