Let's handle that better next time, yeah?

Cooler heads prevailed, for now, but more should be expected of American re-negotiators and "Team Canada."

Image via Grok.

“Canada is not for sale,” they said; but it was, right up until President Trump and Canada’s sort-of PM — who refuses to recall Parliament while his team attempts to anoint and inflate the polling numbers of an unelected central banker — finished playing “No, you hang up first.”

On this snowy February in the ‘Every Crisis Is Going To Be Maximally Inflated And Preyed Upon Like It’s Covid All Over Again, Isn’t It?’ capital of the world, she may already be for sale once again.

For the Canadian gaslight-averse, we have at least been granted a few hours of peace and quiet.

But, gee, what the hell was that?

Combat money laundering? Goodbye Canadian real estate sector.

Here, again, in a clash of moral perceptions, where unthinking hatreds and prejudices bubbled and boiled and the back-slide to Covid controls, money-printing, and the end of the Canadian economy became a sickly-attainable reality, we were almost made to lose it all.

At times, it felt that all that was missing on the timelines and in the newscasts of the nation were glimpses of unnamed and uncorroborated Chinese elderly falling down in the streets on grainy CCTV footage.

Doug Ford, ever the *redacted for the sake of future employment*, was back to his old ways, assuring “folks” he understood the gravity of the situation, that his deeply unnecessary snap election cash-in was to “outlast Trump,” put “Ontario first,” and that billions in handouts were being prepped for a have-not province as productive as lowly Mississippi.

He inflamed trade war tensions in the news, even tearing up rural Ontario’s Starlink contract meant to bring not-horrible internet to hundreds of thousands of rural Ontarians who each year are further encroached upon by Ontario’s unwieldy, pro-crime cities turned failed post-national experiments.

By the end of the day, his campaign to outlast Trump no longer had a purpose. And the scotch tape was out for performative displays of Toronto-suburb placation.

We shall rebuild.

It’s here, cherished reader, that we enter the ‘Things Some People In The Business Don’t Agree Upon Zone.’

I have a lot of respect for the writers, journalists, and politicos in Canada who call things as they see them, report their facts, and who may differ from myself, or the rabble, when it comes to the amount of Trump they can take, or the situation at Canada’s border.

All I can do, here, is continue to write what I know, and speak truthfully to — and sometimes for — this audience I greatly admire.

Here is what I know, because I do have sources — and good ones at that. (Who knew.)

Trump’s “51s state” rhetoric both has and continues to be shit-talk. That’s not just out of his books, I hear that from people who know more about this than any columnist or consultant’s often-inflated expertise. (Almost everyone in this pseudo-racket is playing pretend, at all times. I refuse to protect that kayfabe.)

It has also become obnoxious and difficult to defend, when it has repelled even common-sense-minded voices with its reverse-Siren song, into assuming “it’s time we start taking Trump at his word.”

As with many things Trump, one shouldn’t take him at his whole word, especially when he starts rolling, off prompter. The man headlined a Wrestlemania and hosted SNL for a reason. He is empirically funny, and the world’s most gifted internet troll. One can debate him on policy, but they can’t deny the weather. He has immense talents, and shoving people into lockers during negotiations is also one of them.

And if one were to be keeping a scorecard at home, the Republican President of the United States has now accomplished more on cleaning up Canadian mass immigration and the drugs and international crime that have been invited, politically, across our border, than the Liberal government ever managed to muster.

As the President of the Conservative Party of B.C. put it yesterday on X: “Trump had to threaten economic ruin for our Liberal-NDP government to do what is in the best interest of our country anyway. Don’t forget that.”

On that, we are very much in agreement, and it should serve as a stark and sobering reminder of how far Canada has been allowed to fall, under human choices, entirely able to be overturned with enough courage and a lack of fear of ostracization, which still holds power over far too many Canadian minds.

It must also be said that Trump likes tariffs. With his mandate, and with some wind in his sails, they represent red meat for the base. Not only can they rewrite some deals, and push defence-spending laggards like Canada to get their act together, they can invite (or force) talent south of the border. In that act, one can be sure there is little benevolence between nations. But they’re saying “America First.” We’re, finally, allowed to say “Canada First” without cancellation. (To hear that from the kneelers, statue tear-er down-ers, and history rewriters remains a ridiculous insult.) All is fair in love and trade war.

And Canada will now, absolutely, have a problem keeping talent. With the threat of another round of deadline meltdowns pushed barely off to the horizon, and after premiers like Doug Ford lost their minds, longest lockdown in North America-style, quite a few Ontario founders are said to be scrambling to the States, unsettled by how poorly that negotiation was communicated.

Already a made-hostile environment for entrepreneurs, the Trudeau-Ford Covid-socialism act wore itself thin in 2021; to continuously default to a Laurentian economic model, CERB, and “this will only be good for the real estate value of boomers who live in cities and the Liberal-Chinese donors who bought in Shaughnessy” is not how you run an economy, nor a supposedly free nation.

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And on the border, Trump was right. Danielle Smith was right.

Pilloried as a “traitor” by certain bed-wetting Globe columnists, who have rightfully earned debonair dressing-downs from Conrad Black, Smith asked for a “Border Czar,” and weeks later, she got one.

This was (kind of) about the border. It’s those concessions that have bought the feds time to further get their act together and to better position themselves for the next round of Trump bully-ball.

That it took a wholly unique POTUS to clean up some of this mess tells you how deep the rot goes, and how reluctant certain major players are to address it.

• The bipartisan calls to action started two years ago.

• “The White House knows that Mexican cartels are now involved in Canadian fentanyl production — a fact that’s been largely hidden from the Canadian public.” (Anthony Furey for the Post)

• We now have a “Fentanyl Czar” but under Give People Fentanyl governments. Arguably, by performatively (and embarrassingly) restricting American liquor in stores, this was the first time a Bonnie Henry, David Eby, or Olivia Chow have done anything to discourage substance use or abuse in their once-not-terrible population centres.

• And the claim that only 1% of the fentanyl that’s passing through the border is from Canada is just plain wrong. Canada is now home to the worst of the worst. Even TD Bank was revealed to be handling cartel accounts.

Funny, how those claiming loudest to be a part of “Team Canada” seemed to have helped make all of that happen…

Perhaps ironically, Canada now finds itself in a better position as a nation than before this ‘mess’ all started. The clean-up crews are out, the Danielle Smiths are owed apologies, the federal Conservatives have been aces on messaging and striking the right tone between rational negotiators and not losing a flag-waving match (and thus, votes) to their country-breaking counterparts.

The Liberals may see this as an opportunity for a “reset” in the polls, but, much like the premier and the outgoing PM returning to their Covid playbooks of the past, there is little that’s appealing about being left behind or forever turning to a stopped clocked when in need of the time.

Canada’s neighbours to the south are more rational than we give them credit for. Three-and-a-half weeks from now, instead of turning on one another, or mindlessly supporting the “Team Canada” that’s often been anything but, let’s make a better attempt at modelling the behaviour we claim to wish to see in others.

All the signs are there that we can make a deal, even from a position of government-enforced weakness.

And hey, for the first time in a long time, at least it won’t be a drug deal.

Alexander Brown is a writer, director of communications, and part-time politico. To support the best-selling Acceptable Views Substack, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.