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Some people think the incoming 25% tariffs are Trump bullying Canada and that he didn't expect Trudeau and Canada to fight back.

I'd argue the opposite.

Canada's Liberals are bullies. Massive bullies. They bully their own MPs and ministers, they bully their own people, and when they felt like they could get away with it they bullied the US president. And they spent 10 years spitting on the guy in charge of the United States, And now they're shocked that he is punching back (and he's got a way stronger punch).

We'd be in a totally different scenario if we had a leader like Chretien in charge, he dealt with the bully George W. Bush by being wily and clever, not by trying to out-bully the bully. But that's not how der fuhrer Trudeau functions. He only has one mode, and it doesn't work when he's not the most powerful person in the room. His little toadies only know the same language by the way. Freeland is claiming she should be the next party leader because Trump is afraid of her. I don't believe she has the level of self-deception to actually believe honestly that Trump is scared of her, it's more likely intended to continue the game the liberals have been playing, a stupid game but one that worked well for her until reality hit.

Trump isn't like a native justice minister, Trudeau can't just kick him out of the party for not doing as he's told. He can't tell Trump to sit down and shut up like he did his first secretary. He can't demote Trump like he did to Freeland when she didn't go along with his vote buying scheme late last year. When he's not able to do that, the pathetic nature of his one note bullying becomes clear. In reality, Canada's exports go 70% to the US, and US exports go 13% to Canada. Regardless of whatever power Trudeau pretends to hold, Canada disproportionately will be harmed in a trade war, and Trudeau didn't just win an election on a platform of tariffs. In fact, his political career is nearly over.

There are at least two forms of bullying. One is when a person is on the bottom of the heap and they bully to climb the heap. The other is when the person is at the top of the heap and they bully to try to keep their position at the top. Trudeau's treatment of Trump is the latter. It's similar to how hot girls become mean girls to ensure they stay the top of the roost.

He went out of his way to try to attack and belittle Trump because the president of the united states is obviously more powerful than the prime minister of Canada but Trudeau wanted to stay the cosmopolitan hero to the globalist lib left. The problem is that Trump isn't a woman, and so once he got a real mandate, reality hit like a ton of bricks. The fact is, Canada needs the US more than the US needs Canada, and so a trade war will result in the US winning.

One of the most important keys here is that multiple games are being played that correlate, and Trudeau is only good at one of them, the globalist elite game. His domestic governance has self-evidently gone sour (there's a whole superposition one can analyze there, but I'm simplifying for the purpose of argument as you'd expect given the blurriness heuristic), his global diplomacy has been catastrophic in a number of ways (In terms of diplomacy, Canada's actually made some really bad strides. We're not doing well with China, we're not doing well with India, and those are also great powers we need to be doing somewhat well with), per capita productivity has been in recession for years now, and now trade with the US is facing massive tariffs. Trump is playing more of these games, just not the one Trudeau is good at, but at this moment Trump isn't the same 2016 Trump that Trudeau could just bully because even Trump's own party didn't really support him, in 2025 Trump has laid a lot more groundwork to exercise the power of his office, and so scoffing at him and attacking him doesn't have the same outlook -- but that's the only game Trudeau and his lackeys know how to play. Ironically, in many ways Trudeau is looking more like Trump did in 2016, with a party that doesn't support him, a media that's losing confidence in him, and a new global elite that really opposes him rising.

The right thing would be to quit trying to win the globalist elite game and try instead to start doing better domestically and in terms of the diplomacy game. Chretien had some great stories about convincing George W. Bush not to implement tariffs, "Mr. President you're still eating PEI Potatoes", and I think Poilievre has a good strategy of showing how both Canada and the US can win.

Unfortunately, it's a powerful truth that Trudeau has played every card in his hand to make sure there aren't many options. He prorogued parliament to prevent a spring election (which his platform in 2015 explicitly said he would never do), and so he's basically sitting there on his own until March as the Liberals try to run a leadership campaign prior to the next election in a hail Mary play to try to deal with the catastrophic electoral collapse that polls are suggesting -- the liberals will get to third place, behind the Bloc Quebecois, a regional party with 0 votes outside of the province of Quebec. For such a party to become the official opposition (#2 in seats) as they are projected would be an absolute denouncement of the liberals and NDP who are national parties.

I suspect that this is part of Trump's calculus, basically putting a thumb on the scale of a failing government to help keep things moving towards what will be for him a much friendlier regime in the Conservatives. Unfortunately, that thumb will be a giant deus ex machina for many Canadians until the election can finally take place and some real diplomacy can start. When I say "deus ex machina", I'm invoking the imagery of a giant hand from a machine that imposes power at the end of a story rather than a specific thing that's going to magically end Trudeau when he was actually ok otherwise. The next Liberal leader will have to explain how they can go to (trade) war with the 900lb gorilla and expect to come out victorious, whereas Poilievre is already working to ensure the narrative out of his government is one focusing on mutual benefit in trade.

I fully expect that the Liberals will eventually recover from this current situation, but many smart former liberals are estimating it could take decades. Both the liberals and NDP will need to go back to the drawing board, but I suspect only the liberals will successfully do so, and it'll look like them trying to find a center-left position they used to hold before Trudeau. Unfortunately, they'll be fighting to regain trust the whole way. The NDP by contrast will keep thinking they need to just double down on their current ideas and they just didn't go hard enough.

I fully expect that once Poilievre is in, his new team will be able to talk Trump down from the ledge in part by having policies Trump will agree with, and in part by showing respect to the President instead of immediately talking about how much they hate him. We'll see how much damage is caused in the interim.

Honestly, if Trudeau wasn't about to lose power, becoming the 51st state wouldn't look so bad. But I think Canada can recover. We have recovered from Trudeaus in the past.