LILLEY: Trudeau taking on Trump won’t end well for Canada

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On Tuesday, Justin Trudeau was campaigning against Donald Trump for the second day in a row.

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With Trump threatening to put a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods, campaigning against the American president-elect is a really dumb idea.

Maybe though, Justin Trudeau is doing all of this on purpose.

Sure, angering Trump could lead to the tariffs coming in strong, which would cripple the Canadian economy, but that might be Trudeau’s only hope for political resurrection. As crazy as it sounds, we shouldn’t put it past Trudeau to put his own political fortunes ahead of the health of Canada’s economy.

“Just a few weeks ago, the United States voted for a second time to not elect its first woman president. Everywhere, women’s rights and women’s progress is under attack – overtly and subtly,” Trudeau said Tuesday in Ottawa.

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This was at an event for Equal Voice, a non-partisan group that encourages women of all political stripes to get involved in politics. Trudeau turned that event into an attempt to say Americans made a mistake in electing Trump and then by extension say that electing Conservatives in this country would be similar mistake.

In Halifax on Monday, he made similar comments, not using abortion but rather warning Canadian voters for backing the wrong kind of change the way our American neighbours just did.

“Let’s be deliberate about the choices we make…But let’s take on the responsibility as electors, as thoughtful agents of change in our communities, to be smart about no matter how much we want change, let’s not fall into an easy trap of voting for change for the worse,” Trudeau said in Halifax.

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Two days in a row of campaigning against Donald Trump won’t go unnoticed by the man who has the ability to crush our economy with tariffs.

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On November 25, Trump surprised everyone with the threat of a 25% tariff on all goods from Canada and Mexico unless illegal immigration and drugs crossing into the United States was dealt with. The response from too many in Canada was to claim that Mexico was the real problem, that only a few thousand people were crossing into the United States from Canada.

That was an outdated view that missed the documented increase in illegal crossings from Canada into the United States over the past few years.

The number of people intercepted by the American Customs and Border Patrol grew from a few thousand per year to 109,535 in 2022 and to 198,929 in the most recent year. That’s an 82% increase in two years at the same time as Canada is responsible for 87% of all interactions with people on terror watch lists trying to cross into the United States. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics.

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Trudeau flew down to Florida to speak with Trump about the tariff issue and apparently assure him on the border. While that seemed like a good move at the time, it isn’t looking that way now.

Trump said to Trudeau at that dinner that if Canada’s economy can’t survive without America then we should become the 51st state and Trudeau could be governor. That quip was portrayed as a joke by Canadians at the table but since then, Trump has been trolling Trudeau online, calling him the “Governor” of the “Great State of Canada.”

Bottom line is, Trudeau and Trump don’t have a good relationship despite what Trudeau’s sycophants want you to believe. Trump has called Trudeau two-faced in the past and their relationship took a hit after Trudeau attacked Trump moments after his plane took off from a G-7 meeting in Quebec in 2018.

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Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who has since turned on Trump and campaigned against him, has said that the 2018 spat between the two leaders soured whatever was there.

“They could be courteous to one another but there is no warmth to that relationship at all. I think Trump thinks he’s a wiseass,” Bolton recently told the Wall Street Journal.

So Trump doesn’t trust Trudeau, he knows Trudeau is weak with very little support in the polls and most likely to be defeated in the next election. And at the same time, Trudeau is campaigning against Trump still in Canada to try and revive his political career.

It really does look like Trudeau is willing to sacrifice Canadian jobs and our economy in order to pick a fight with Trump to try and defeat Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives.

If Trudeau stays on this path, it won’t end well for Canada.

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