Well, things aren’t going so great for Justin Trudeau. Yesterday, his deputy PM and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, resigned. This is a big deal — she was a key advisor and member of his cabinet. She wrote him a letter.
“For the past number of weeks, you and I have found ourselves at odds about the best path forward for Canada,” said Freeland in a letter to the prime minister.
“Our country today faces a grave challenge. The incoming administration in the United States is pursuing a policy of aggressive economic nationalism, including a threat of 25% tariffs.
“We need to take that threat extremely seriously.”
Freeland wrote that Canada needs to keep its “fiscal powder dry today” so they have the reserves for a “coming tariff war”.
She warned Trudeau that “costly political gimmicks” need to be done away with as they can make Canadians doubt whether the government understands the “gravity of the moment”.
“That means pushing back against ‘America First’ economic nationalism with a determined effort to fight for capital and investment and the jobs they bring. That means working in good faith and humility with the Premiers of the provinces and territories of our great and diverse country, and building a true Team Canada response.”
Trudeau apparently wanted to replace her with Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada, and she didn’t want to roll over and give someone else her job.
Anyway, Trump decided to double-down on shitting on Canada when he heard the latest:
“The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau,” Trump posted on his site, Truth Social.
“Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!”
Ever since Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago, kissed up, and had his picture taken with Trump, Trump has been making dominance displays, proposing to annex Canada and make it our 51st state.
Tellingly, Trump has not gone after Claudia Sheinbaum, President of Mexico. She did not go to Mar-a-Lago, and as far as I know, has only had one phone call with Trump since the election. Here’s what she said about Trump calling Mexico a state:
Asked on Monday about Trump’s suggestion that Mexico should become a state of the United States due to the trade imbalance between the two countries, Sheinbaum expressed her desire to cease “dialogue” with the former and future U.S. president “through the media.”
On Tuesday, she explained that what she meant was that her government won’t respond to every “declaration” made by Trump with a public statement of its own. […]
Sheinbaum said Tuesday that her government will “always” defend Mexico as a “free, sovereign and independent country” in the face of insults, accusations and attacks, but emphasized that “everyone has a different way of communicating.”
“This question of entering into permanent dialogue … [by responding to] every statement that is made [by Trump], I don’t think that helps us in the bilateral relationship, right?” she said.
She’s also been quite vocal about the US role in Mexican cartel violence in Sinaloa.
I post on this a fair amount, but I think Claudia is playing it a lot smarter than Justin. She’ll probably have her time in the barrel, but not capitulating and flying to Mar-a-Lago was the smart move, and picking and choosing which bullshit provocations merit a response is also wise.
(Oddly enough, the President of Mexico does not have an airplane. AMLO sold the 787 that Enrique Peña Nieto bought when he was in office. Claudia flew economy to the G20 meeting in Rio last month.)
Steve LaBonne
You know she’s seen plenty of these pathetic male dominance displays in her time.
frog
Does the Great State of Canada get two senators for each province?
Raoul Paste
If Claudia is flying economy, I hope she didn’t have the middle seat.
Trollhattan
Ten minutes before Trump made that Tweet or whatever: “Who is Chrystia Freeland and why do I hate her?”
Also, “Finance minister? Canada must really love their money to worship it like that.”
Gin & Tonic
For those unaware, Freeland is Ukrainian-Canadian, speaks Ukrainian fluently, and is a strong supporter of Ukraine’s government and Western/NATO support for it. Just adds another factor to Trump’s apparent disdain.
She also has an undergrad degree from Harvard, was a Rhodes Scholar and has both studied and worked in Ukraine, so a) she’s no dummy and b) she knows what’s what in Kyiv.
Baud
Trump wants to help the right win in the Canadian elections. No similar situation exists in Mexico. I doubt the Mar-a-Lago visit affected anything.
Suzanne
Per that link:
He is aware that he would get the people as well as the land, yes?
ETA: Oh WTF.
TBone
At least he published an opinion that makes sense, not standing in the shadow docket of a flag.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/judges-criticism-us-supreme-courts-alito-over-flags-is-deemed-improper-2024-12-17/
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Raoul Paste:
Exit row, window. The linked story has a picture of her.
Doug R
@Gin & Tonic:
She’s also a former media person.
There was a press conference during a heat wave and she had popsicles for all the reporters.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
The fact Trudeau is (mis)handling all of this is true to form.
frosty
@Baud: So he wants to interfere in another country’s elections? Putin taught him well.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
So, she can president *and* handle the emergency exit row responsibilities in case of a “problem”.
Those are two things that our incoming kkklown can’t do.
Juju
@Baud: It made Trudeau look kind of wimpy and compliant.
Baud
@Juju: Maybe. I just don’t think it affected Trump’s behavior.
VFX Lurker
I doubt folks here know this, but Canadian film/TV subsidies means a lot of VFX work for big-budget American films gets done in Montreal and Vancouver. I know a few of the thousands of VFX artists who moved to Canada for work.
Which means that on Nov 6, 2024, a number of Facebook contacts showed off their Canadian passports and/or congratulated themselves on moving from the USA to Canada for work.
I hope Canada stays sane next year, for their sake and for the sake of my Canadian in-laws, but I’m skeptical.
Baud
Whoa
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Juju:
Yep. Similar to the pics Trump took with Romney when he was dangling SoS in front of Mitt. Pics make the dominance display more obvious.
Juju
@Baud: Not much affects Trump’s behavior one way or another. He’s always an asshole.
p.a.
That was the concern in 1849/1849 for those that wanted all of Mexico: Mexican Catholics…
Gin & Tonic
@Juju:
OT, but do you really want your nym to be an apparently valid e-mail address?
VFX Lurker
@Baud: Good for them.
Juju
@@mistermix.bsky.social: I lost all respect for Mitt when he bent the knee for Trump’s endorsement, when he Mitt, ran for president. I’m pretty sure when Mitt did the same thing with the dangled Secretary of State position, that obsequious compliance from Mitt was frosting on the cake for Trump.
Barry
He folded, she said ‘F@ck the h@ll off’.
Juju
@Gin & Tonic: Eeek. I don’t know how that happened.
West of the Rockies
That’s a real pic? Looks like a cover from a 1951 copy of an Amazing Worlds scifi magazine or something.
Juju
@@mistermix.bsky.social: Can you take my email address out of my comments? I think I had a cursor jumping incident that changed my commenter name to my email address.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic: Yes. Did she used to write op ed pieces too? One of my heroes.
(Smart/wise) Women see right through Trump.
WaterGirl
@Juju: I fixed that in your comments and the replies.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Elizabelle: Yeah, she was a columnist for the Globe & Mail (as well as some kind of editor, don’t recall 100%). I remember reading her columns.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: Thanks for pointing that out.
Elizabelle
@@mistermix.bsky.social: Thank you. I remember reading one or two and thinking she made sense.
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
No, Judge Diaz, Samuel Alito did that all by himself.
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: She used to be a regular guest on Tweety’s MSNBC show
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: No idea. Don’t watch TV. Thank you.
PS: Tweety? That is a long time back.
buggrit
@TBone: Improper. Not untrue, but improper.
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: I haven’t had cable for over a decade. This was during Obama’s administration.
beckya57
@Baud: All true, but Trudeau isn’t helping his party by looking wimpy with Trump. Unfortunately it’s looking highly likely the Canadian version of MAGA wins next year. Trudeau should resign and take the heat off his party, but my impression (TBC my knowledge of Canadian politics is very limited) is the Liberals are dead ducks either way.
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: She also worked for The Economist and the FT at various points.
sab
@Gin & Tonic: Didn’t she also write a book on plutocrats years ago?
@mistermix.bsky.social
@West of the Rockies:
Yeah, here’s another angle in El Pais: https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-09-30/claudia-sheinbaums-time-challenges-and-unknowns-of-mexicos-first-female-president.html
KatKapCC
Since it’s an open thread, here is something lovely: Trans power couple Zooey Zephyr & Erin Reed got married & the pictures will melt your heart
The pics are indeed heart-melting. They both look absolutely gorgeous and so blissful. I know the coming years are going to be extremely difficult for them, but I’m glad they’ll be facing it together.
Princess
@Gin & Tonic: And I learned yesterday that there are quite a number of tankies on Bluesky, all of whom present themselves as hip, leftie young women, who love to take Freelance to task for being a Nazi (she is not a Nazi.), a bad feminist, you name it. She scares Donald and it looks like she scares Putin too.
Quinerly
@Gin & Tonic:
I always liked her when she was with the Financial Times and Reuters and would report on MSNBC.
Time flies. Almost 10 years since her journalism career.
twbrandt
Justin is no Pierre.
MomSense
@Princess:
I’ve had some terrifying interactions with former students of late. These were top students in high school who went to fine liberal arts schools. They think that the Holodomor never happened and is western (read US)propaganda and that NATO caused this war by encroaching on Russia. They resent any aid to Ukraine, etc. I try to provide facts -and reasoned response to no avail. I have seen crazy memes about Ukrainian soldiers with swastikas that are obviously fake. The problem is they want to believe it.
I don’t know how we combat this.
Baud
@MomSense:
They are effectively MAGA. Regard them as such.
TBone
@buggrit: that right there could be the story of my life. I jest, but that Article III Project is dead serious and Orwell is spinning like a top in his grave. Doublethink.
David Collier-Brown
She impressed the heck out of me when she was running a contentious debate in Toronto. She reserved a bunch of seats for the people who were protesting one of the positions.
Sure enough, it worked. We polite Canadians stacked our signs and filed into the room when the 5-minute alert was announced.
MomSense
@Baud:
They are not MAGA.
Gin & Tonic
@Princess: She was put on a KGB enemies list back when there still was a KGB, so she has a history.
Baud
@MomSense:
Ok.
Quinerly
@twbrandt:
Justin is no Margaret.
(I adore her….Great memoir. Great woman)
Gin & Tonic
@MomSense: I bet they’re Joe Rogan fans too.
MomSense
@Gin & Tonic:
Nope. They were all big Bernie supporters in ‘16, voted for Biden in 2020 because of negative partisanship, voted for Democrats in 2022, and then because of Ukraine and Gaza either abstained by skipping the top of the ticket or voted Stein.
Bazza
Canada is going to have an election sometime between now and October (I’m betting on the spring) and either Trudeau will be in charge and lose badly, or he’ll have resigned and a sacrificial lamb will lose badly. Then Freeland can knife fight with the three other likely contenders to see who gets to rebuild the party for the day the pendulum swings back the other way. (It probably won’t be Freeland, sad to say. She’s extraordinarily competent but she is terrible at retail politics and not a great communicator.)
The good news is that Canada doesn’t have a Canadian version of MAGA. We have Bernier, who is more of a Nigel Farage, and will not win anything because he’s a muppet. Pollievre will be PM but he’s just a standard sh**ty Canadian Conservative (ie to the left of the Republicans before they all went crazy). He won’t be great (especially on climate) but he might not be disastrous and he’ll go away when the electorate eventually gets tired of him.
The worry for Canadians isn’t that we are going to become an autocracy, because that won’t happen. The worry is whether any of our parties can be serious people now that the world has suddenly become a very serious place.
sentient ai from the future
going on right now, 5:20pm PST, legal conversation around transgender rights and the coming challenges
https://www.youtube.com/live/OBxUrR7I5bM?si=yfXOPMmRhiISepue
p.a.
@MomSense: They’re too smart by half. The obvious can’t be true because they’re smarter than the people seeing the obvious. And others like them and bad actors reinforce them.
Gin & Tonic
@MomSense:
Ah, horseshoe.
tobie
@MomSense: They are the social media generation. It’s easy to prey on young people’s sense of injustice and their eagerness to be seen as bucking the conventional wisdom, but I’d expect them to be savvier about the media they consume. They’re not. And that means they fall for the propaganda they’re fed on YouTube, TikTok and elsewhere.
Sister Golden Bear
@KatKapCC: Heart melting indeed. Thanks for sharing!
Miss Bianca
@MomSense: Did you look ’em in the eye and say, “Next you’re going to tell me the Holocaust wasn’t real”?
Scary.
MomSense
@tobie:
Social media is absolutely a major factor. I also think unfortunately that there is an element in academe that sort of embraced Russian/Soviet propaganda because it was critical of the United States and they were not able to handle the complexities of the world when they don’t line up perfectly as black/white, up/down, good/bad.
There is an old book, now out of print, called In Over Our Heads: the Mental Demands of Modern Life. It is a sobering read. Most people really are not able to navigate complexity. It’s a problem.
VFX Lurker
These kids either have privilege, or they think they have privilege. They voted to preserve their perceived privilege. They don’t care what happens to the less-privileged.
They hope to keep their friends and family by using Ukraine/Gaza to excuse their harmful behavior. It could work.
I’m old enough to remember when folks like that used Goldman Sachs, single-payer, and student loan forgiveness to justify the harm they caused to others with their votes. I blocked them on social media.
VFX Lurker
@KatKapCC:
Beautiful couple; beautiful photos. Thank you for sharing this.
eclare
@MomSense:
Makes sense they embraced Bernie, he honeymooned in the USSR.
Now which came first, either “hey, I like Bernie, wow, he honeymooned in the USSR, so it must be ok” or “Hmmm, USSR wasn’t as bad as the US says, Bernie honeymooned there, let’s vote Bernie” I have no idea.
Obviously more to it than that, but there is a link.
Bill Arnold
@MomSense:
Shrug.
They are intellectually lazy, gullible, and thoroughly, willingly cocooned in their soft comfortable echo chamber, which is directly fed lies by Russian propagandists.
Doug R
@Bazza:
He’s Harper’s minion and he REFUSES to get a security clearance-I’m not as hopeful as you that he doesn’t send Canada into a spiral.
Remember he had the secret #MGTOW hashtag on his videos-any friend to incels is no friend of ours.
Juju
@WaterGirl: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
MagdaInBlack
@Juju: @WaterGirl: just noticed one of JuJu’s over on the fat cat post, with the email, if youve not caught it already …..lemme double check
#69 on Betty’s Fat Cat post
Bazza
@Doug R:
Poilievre is a member of the privy council and holds a security clearance. In order to be briefed on the foreign interference investigation he had to agree to not disclose the contents and he declined to do so. And that’s Poilieve in a nutshell – he’s a smart guy but he’s always preferred playing stupid political games.
Harper won three elections and had a majority for four years and could have done anything he felt was worth doing, and did so – a lot of it was bad but none of it comes close to what Trump did when he had guardrails, let alone what we’re likely to see come January.
I’m not saying I’m looking forward to PM Skippy but putting him in the same category as Trump is unrealistic.
tobie
@VFX Lurker: @MomSense: I know quite a few “burn it all down” types. No one in power is ever pure enough for them. I do wonder what consequences they will face for their votes. Or are they comfortable enough that cuts in Medicaid, SNAP benefits, ACA subsidies won’t affect them? I really don’t know
ETA: Thanks for the recommendation of In Over Our Heads. I’ll check it out from the library.
Princess
@Doug R: My biggest concern with Polievre is he plans to get rid of the CBC. We can see what having zero independent news media has done for the States.
Bazza
@Princess:
This is a genuinely significant concern; the fact that we have the CBC instead of Fox News is a big reason we aren’t in the soup right now (or at least, in a different kind of soup). Worth noting that Harper talked a good game about the CBC and accomplished basically nothing. Structural change is hard, especially in Canada.
Bazza
Honestly one of the biggest problems Canada has is that Jagmeet Singh’s pension doesn’t vest until Feb 2025 so we won’t have an election before March and Trump becomes President Jan 20.
Jay
@Bazza:
Stop reading The Epoch Times.
Bazza
@Jay: The what now?
MinuteMan
Our neighbors to the north need to get their shit together. If they put right wing whackos in charge of their country, even as a minority government, they’ll be trading the Maple Leaf flag for a 51st star on Old Glory. Anschluss—there’s precedent!
Jay
@Bazza:
MP Jagmeet Singh is the leader of the NDP, faces no internal revolt, won his re-election handily, and far out polls the potential Liberal, Con and Green Candidates in his riding.
No matter when the election is called, or under what grounds the election is called, (eg Non Confidence Motion), Jagmeet Singh will be the next MP for the Riding of Burnaby South.
So, early election, late election, Jagmeet Singh’s MP Pension will vest when it is supposed to vest, no matter which political party is in power.
The whole “Jagmeet Singh” won’t vote for a non-confidence motion because then he will lose his pension is a fairy tale made up by the Fallun Gong Cult and first spread through their free “newspaper”, The Epoch Times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times
It gained an echo chamber amongst the Cons, the Trucker Nut Jobs, Albertans, anti-vaxxers, Romana Didulo acolytes and of course, Pierre Poilievre.
The real reason Jagmeet Singh and the Dippers won’t vote for a Non Confidence vote is because the Dippers lost seats in the last election. By propping up the Libs in their Minority Government, they have an outsized say in Legislation.
As the Cons are currently polling to win the next election, as either a Minority Government or a slim Majority Government, the next election will see the NDP probably lose any influence in Legislation.
The key reason that Freeland quit, and loudly, is that she took a run at Trudeau, but could only get weak support from 13 Liberal MP’s. Jim Carney will be a much better Finance Minister, look at his track record in Canada and the UK.
The festering sore between Freeland and Trudeau, is money. Freeland is an 80’s “austerity” Liberal, (make the rich richer, it will trickle down), Trudeau is not.
If the Con’s win, well, Canada will become Alberta, where an Ozzi Billionaire can buy a Government, and Coal Mine project that will make southern Alberta uninhabitable. Have a nice glass of Bow River Mineral Water, with 760% of the daily dose of selenium a growing body needs.
Jay
BTW, Freeland’s Grandfather’s Bio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chomiak
Now, he wasn’t a Nazi, he was a Ukrainian Nationalist, but acceptable to the Nazi’s, in a hard time and a hard place.
Canada has long had an issue with this, as we let a whole bunch of Nazi’s and Nazi adjacent people into the country after WWII, because they were “anti-Communist”, poorly vetted or “useful” to our Security Services, or other Allies, (USA, Britain, looking at you two).
Chris Johnson
@MomSense: Those are MAGA.
It’s a different angle, but those are MAGA.