How Donald Trump Might Save Justin Trudeau

D onald Trump has repeatedly stated that he intends to introduce 25 percent tariffs on Canada. Most recently, in a call with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Trump suggested that if Canada could not survive without fleecing the United States to the tune of $100 billion a year, maybe it should just give up its sovereignty and become a state.

There are many reasons why Donald Trump is wrong about tariffs. Canada is not “fleecing” the United States, but is able to produce certain goods cheaper than American manufacturers, thus benefiting American consumers. Yet, if Donald Trump and his team do not care about higher prices for American consumers, perhaps they should consider that these proposed tariffs just might save Justin Trudeau.

Many Americans may not be aware that Canadians are heading to the polls next year, with an election scheduled to be held no later than October. As the polls stand right now, Justin Trudeau is a dead man walking: Trudeau and his Liberal Party (LP) are trailing the Conservatives by between 15 and 20 points. In fact, the Liberal Party runs the risk of dropping into third place, as the New Democratic Party (NDP) looks set to give it a run for second place.

This is even more disastrous when considering that Canada, like the United States, uses a first-past-the-post system. Vote-splitting between the LP and NDP could very well result in an outcome where neither party wins any significant number of constituencies. This fate befell the previous conservative party of Canada, the Progressive Conservatives, which in 1993 was wiped out, losing all but two of the 156 seats it held before the election as the populist Reform party split the right-wing vote. For Trudeau, whose father was prime minister and led the Liberal Party before him, any gamble that could save him and his legacy from such an ignominious fate might be worth it.

This brings us to the tariffs. Donald Trump appears to assume that Canada will yield much like it did when Trump, during his first term, replaced NAFTA with the USMCA. Yet, circumstances back then were much different. Trudeau then was in a strong political position and had little to gain from picking unnecessary fights, especially considering that the changes compared to NAFTA were mostly cosmetic.

Today, however, Justin Trudeau has nothing to lose. A trade war would allow Trudeau to reframe himself as a strong, patriotic leader who won’t let his country be bullied by its larger neighbor. After years of being associated mostly with runaway immigration and woke nonsense, this new image would be just about the best thing Trudeau could wish to find in his Christmas stocking.

Would Canadians rally around the flag and their leader? Yes, probably. This is yet another difference between now and 2018: When Trump proposed renegotiating NAFTA, the trade agreement had been in place for 15 years. No trade agreement stays unchanged forever, and the changes demanded by Trump were rather minor, making them a relatively easy sell to voters in Canada and Mexico. What Trump is proposing now is effectively ripping up his own trade agreement that he himself stood next to Justin Trudeau and signed and that was supposed to be valid for 16 years. While Trudeau played nice during his meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, pleading with him on the economic impact and laughing nervously when Trump joked that Canada might solve its economic woes by agreeing to U.S. annexation, Trudeau’s change in rhetoric since that meeting indicates that it was merely the calm before the storm.

After all, if Trump cannot be trusted to keep to agreements that he himself signed and praised, then there is no reason for anyone to play nice with him. What is to say that whatever concessions Canada makes now, Trump won’t come back and demand additional tribute in time for the midterm? Trudeau will make the case to Canadian voters that, yes, a trade war will be painful, but bullies only respond to strength. He will remind voters that he negotiated with Trump in good faith back in 2018 because he believed that an America led by Trump could still be a reliable trading partner, but his latest antics and talk about how honest Canadian businesses are supposedly ripping off Americans have proved that this is not the case.

Slow economic growth has been a persistent problem for Trudeau’s government, and it is one of the main reasons why his polling numbers have tanked. In light of this, one might think that he would avoid any moves — such as a trade war — that could push Canada into an outright recession. That, however, would be to misjudge the political situation. If a trade war triggers a recession next year, Trudeau and the Liberal Party will tell the voters that the economic troubles are all Donald Trump’s fault. Voters have short memories, after all, and many will have forgotten that the economy was not doing too hot even before Trump took office.

Making matters even better for Trudeau, the modern Canadian conservatives are known for being the more pro-American party. Already, the leader of the Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, is clearly struggling to respond to Donald Trump’s tariff threat. On the one hand, he has promised that he, as prime minister, would “fight fire with fire” and refuse to yield to Donald Trump. On the other hand, he has himself adopted Trumpist rhetoric such as the “deep state.” Poilievre has the potential to be a great prime minister, but his balancing act between populism and conservatism has now become a lot more difficult.

The opportunity to turn Trump’s election and tariff threats into a headache for the Conservatives has not been lost on Justin Trudeau, who in recent days attacked Poilievre, claiming he would be unable to unite Canadians to defend their country against Donald Trump. This is likely to be a popular attack line against Trump-friendly right-wingers in other countries, including in Europe, who are now grappling with how to reconcile their previous positive statements about Trump with the threat he is now posing to their countries’ economies.

Finally, one reason to think that Justin Trudeau will take a hard-line stance on tariffs is that, on a strictly personal level, he despises Donald Trump. Privately, many world leaders share that sentiment, but most of them are not facing an election where they are currently set to go down in flames. If Trudeau figures he is most likely doomed anyway, he might well decide that he would rather go out in a blaze of glory by defying Trump. In a best-case scenario, this approach could turn his political fortunes around, and in a worst-case scenario, at least he can sleep at night knowing he wasn’t a doormat to a man he abhors.

In 2018, during Trump’s first term, a wave of anti-American sentiment swept over Mexico, leading to the election of the left-populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president as Mexicans sought a leader who would stand up to their neighbor in the north. This sentiment spelled electoral disaster for the conservative, U.S.-friendly Partido Acción Nacional that greatly (and controversially in Mexico) aided U.S. border security efforts when it held the presidency between 2000 and 2012, going so far as to launch a militarized campaign against the drug cartels, which Lopez Obrador drastically scaled back. We can only hope that Trump’s second term won’t cause a similar political development in Canada. Ironically, for all the animosity between the two men, Donald Trump’s tariff agenda is now Justin Trudeau’s best hope for political survival.