In the history of Donald Trump’s geopolitical blunders, few missteps rival the United States president’s recent barrage against Canada — a campaign that began with the preposterous notion of the sovereign nation becoming America’s 51st state and escalated with punishing tariffs on Canadian imports, including aluminium and steel.
This swaggering assertion of American dominance has instead ignited a Canadian resurgence. It has also upended a political landscape in which Pierre Poilievre, the opposition leader and Conservative Party firebrand who built his campaign on a Trumpian playbook, looked like the inevitable next prime minister after the end of the Justin Trudeau era.
Washington’s tariffs against Ottawa are no mere policy tweak but an economic declaration of war, cloaked in the flimsy pretext of national security. The impact has been swift and brutal. In March alone, Canada lost 33,000 jobs.
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