A tale of two 'Team Canadas'

When Ontario blusters, we all suffer.

“We’ve put our collective heads together, and we’re going with ‘Covid Communism’ again. Hey, wait, where is everyone going?”

How quickly the world has changed in just a matter of days. With the stroke of a pen, hundreds of times over, the United States has again charted a course of Manifest Destiny under a true “America First” approach to cracking down on allies turned free-loaders, border liabilities, and layabouts on foreign policy and defence commitments.

That the Canadian establishment, and its economic ethos of “tax, ban, or subsidize,” refused to see this threat coming should largely be viewed as their fault, and their fault alone.

However cold, cunning, and uncouth some of Trump’s bully-ball, Art of the Deal tactics may be, a portion of Canada’s immediate response is also deserving of no claim to the high road.

It should stick in the craw of many that the same federal Liberals, ‘Liberal-lite’ Conservatives, and NDP premiers who boarded up statues of Sir John A., wouldn’t defend a single solitary energy project East of Quebec City or West of Winnipeg, and who have abdicated responsibility, disgracefully, on matters of economic ruin, the unrest in our streets, and Canada’s very identity, have finally undergone some bedside ‘Team Canada’ conversion.

And in wanting to go shot for shot on tariffs, a move Canada’s shrinking economy can ill afford, that burden would be placed predominantly on Alberta, the West, and the stifled energy producers who have kept a once-great nation on life support over a lost Liberal decade.

Given the latest news on the failures of their Stellantis EV gambit, which has cost Canadians billions in corporate welfare (and the apparent return of disastrous pandemic handouts for those suffering under a government-escalated trade war that now appears to be an act of wagging the dog), if Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his partner, a resigning-in-disgrace prime minister, fancy themselves ‘Team Canada,’ perhaps they’re referring to the 2024-2025 World Juniors team that failed to medal on home ice.

"You can't let someone hit you over the head with a sledgehammer without hitting them back twice as hard, in my opinion," Ford has offered up as of late, along with the cheap parlour trick that he would remove American-imported liquor from LCBO stores; a far cry from Alberta being forced to turn off its taps to the United States.

And to drive home the callousness and apparent self-interest of his recent posturing, the Premier has triggered an early election for a renewed mandate when his majority is all but two years old; and while the federal Liberals are being rightfully hammered for holding a vainglorious leadership coronation at such an inopportune time.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, and now Saskatchewan Premier Moe, who has announced he no longer supports retaliatory one-for-one tariffs on goods bound for south of the border, clearly seem to grasp the bigger picture here.

The Trump administration loathes Trudeau; loathes Freeland; and would grow to detest Mark Carney in a matter of minutes. They’ve kept receipts of the endless insults they’ve received, they’ve tracked the thousands entering illegally from Canada, they’ve noticed the unprecedented uptick in cartel smuggling, fentanyl, and the terrorists who now view Canada as an easy loophole, a go-between, to inflict mass casualties on American soil.

The other Team Canada – the one, literally, with Wayne Gretzky: the kind that wins – is aware of this too. Smith and Moe are Canada’s finest premiers for a reason; they’re also aware of how disenfranchised those presently being handed Canada’s less than rosy future have become, how half of our young people won’t rule out the appeal of accepting the U.S. as some annexation liberator. Those are our future energy executives, middle managers, and roughnecks, who at present see no path to home ownership, stable employment, or the slice of the Canadian Dream their country once promised.

To bet big and recklessly on more of the same, and the same Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Montreal interests who have so deliberately land-locked, punished, and sought to redistribute the limited proceeds from the liquid gold that runs beneath our feet, and that can be harnessed far greener and more ethically than Carney-Liberal investment interests in China and the Middle East, would be just as foolish as sitting back and allowing the Trump administration to walk all over us.

There is no ‘Team Canada,’ not yet; not until the Liberals are removed from office and Trudeau’s legacy is destroyed. But there is a better way, a balanced way, and at present that belongs to the path being charted by Danielle Smith.

When Ontario blusters, the West suffers. We all suffer.

As Brian Martin sings in the 2022 country hit: “Everyone’s an outlaw, until it’s time to do outlaw sh*t.”

Westerners and sober-minded Canadians should be thankful that we still have leadership willing to wear the black hat, to risk ostracization and the scorn of effete, irrelevant talking heads on Power & Politics.

Because here’s the crucial part: The ‘Team Canada’ these Liberals and Liberal-lites think they’re defending – it already failed.

In the minds of millions, it no longer exists.

Alexander Brown is a Director with the National Citizens Coalition and the writer of the best-selling ‘Acceptable Views’ newsletter on Substack. To receive new posts and support the work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.