Poilievre's Plummeting Polling

The CPC is polling just a hair below 30%, and Pierre Poilievre's "favourability" as next PM is now tied with "Undecided" at 18%.  Add to that, another CPC MP just announced they are leaving elected office - the 7th MP to leave caucus since last year's election. 

I'm not sitting here writing this to gloat over the smouldering ashes of Poilievre's leadership career.  Frankly, that's not the point at all.

No, this is about the much more bizarre reactions I am seeing online to this.  Instead of seeing CPC supporters rationally saying "hey, this isn't working, we need to make changes", a lot of them are doubling down - getting angry at Carney instead.  I see comments like "how come nobody's talking about the departures from the Liberals?", or "Carney's done nothing for Canada".  

I don't actually care what your opinion of Carney is.  I don't particularly like Carney, but I also really don't like Poilievre.  So what?  

The issue is that ever since the election, Poilievre has been on a downward spiral in his personal popularity.  That has dragged the party down in the polls as well.  Polling at 30% is getting down to the CPC's "core base support" - meaning it's mostly coming from the prairie provinces.  A look at 338 Canada's current projection map supports that conclusion.  

Yes, I know - land doesn't vote, people do.  But look at that map for a moment - outside of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the CPC simply doesn't hold a whole lot of support - it's concentrated in the Prairie provinces mostly.  This is very much reflective of the problem we saw for years with Reform and Canadian Alliance (Reform, with different logos).  While they swept the Prairie provinces, they struggled to make real inroads.  Under Poilievre, a party which garnered its largest proportion of seats in years in the 2025 election is now set to retreat to its old stomping grounds as a "Prairie rump party".  

Great ... you'll have secured the Prairie provinces, where apparently getting elected has more to do with the colour of your shirt than anything else.  At this point, people in Ontario and Quebec have made it pretty clear where they stand, and it's not with Poilievre.  

But the problem for the CPC doesn't end when Poilievre resigns as leader.  Like Andrew Scheer, it seems he's likely to stick around as MP, and will continue to be a drag on party perception unless he simply goes quiet.  

The problem the CPC is now facing is in fact the same fundamental problem that makes Alberta's UCP so toxic:  policy wise, it has been taken over by a highly radicalized fringe movement.  A new leader not only has to deal with that fringe, but they somehow have to find a way to shift the party's direction away from the far right.  I am not convinced that is likely to happen.  I don't see anyone in the CPC's "front line" that is capable of not only sounding reasonable, but in fact being able to redirect the party away from the Trumpian cliff Poilievre has set it hurtling towards. 

So, Trump Wants To Decertify Canadian-Built Aircraft

 So, the latest Trumpian temper tantrum is that the US will decertify Bombardier built aircraft.  On the surface, this is as ridiculous as it seems.  Ostensibly, this temper tantrum is over Canada having not (yet) certified several newer models from Bombardier rival Gulfstream.  But is it really?

Consider the following:  only 4 days ago, US Ambassador to Canada Hoekstra was making threats over the purchase of F-35s, and an orchestrated defence of the F-35 started last fall.  The Americans started sweating over the F-35 sale to Canada quite a while ago, and Sweden/Saab's offer presents Canada with the ability to reboot its aerospace industry in a way that we haven't seen since the cancellation of the Avro Arrow project.  

Now, here's where Trump's outburst may in fact finalize Canada's pivot away from the F-35 - let me explain:  

That Is Not A Sales Pitch

According to US Ambassador Hoekstra, if Canada doesn't buy the full fleet of F-35s, "that will affect NORAD".   Coming from the Trump regime, this is another mafia-esque threat that boils down to "do as we tell you, or else".  

Hoekstra might think that yammering on about NORAD, interoperability, and how the F-35 is "the superior aircraft" is some kind of sales flex.  It's actually telling us all that buying the F-35 is ultimately going to be a huge mistake for Canada. 

Every second day, the US is threatening to annex Canada, and as our European friends just learned in the dust-up over Greenland - a deal with Trump made today isn't worth the paper it's written on tomorrow. Why would Canada think we'd be treated any differently if we bought the F-35? 

If I was a defence planner for Canada (I'm not), I'd be looking at the current situation and saying to myself "why would Canada buy a major military asset from a country that is threatening to invade us?".  

The F-35 is very much a "closed, proprietary platform".  What assurances do we have that any planes sent to Canada don't have a "kill switch" buried in their software that Washington can use at will? Fundamentally, there are no such guarantees, and that has been a concern about the F-35 in my mind for a very long time.  

Then there is the servicing of the F-35 itself.  Need parts for the F-35?  Buy it from Lockheed-Martin (now a division of Boeing) ... need major service?  Well that plane now has to be shipped to facilities in the US.  Software updates?  Oh yeah - that's a thing, and those will also have to be installed in US facilities.  Starting to see a problem here, when the US has decided that we're the adversary?  

Hoekstra wants to talk about the F-35 as the "superior aircraft".  Maybe the F-35 is on some levels a "better" aircraft technologically than its rivals - but when the country selling it can so easily turn a fleet of F-35s into "Tarmac Princesses" by choking off parts supply, or by leaving booby traps in the software that enables these craft to fly, technical superiority takes a back seat to "actually flies".

If I were making the buying decisions for Canada's military, I'd be looking at the ground game as it looks today, not how it looked prior to 2016.  The ground game today is very different.  The US has shown itself to be not merely an adversarial nation, but it is one where an agreement today means nothing tomorrow.  This is a purchase that will affect Canada's military for the next 3 decades or more.  Even if the F-35 is technologically "the superior aircraft", that means very little if it effectively hands the US control over the fleet either directly or indirectly.  

Trying To Understand The Carney Government’s Actions

Online, I am seeing a ton of reactions to what the current Liberal government in Ottawa is doing.  These range from outrage over a perceived non-reaction to Trump’s latest temper tantrum, to anger over cuts to various parts of the civil service.  

I get it - a lot of people are thinking “this isn’t what I voted for!”, and to some extent they are right to criticize the government’s actions.  There’s a very visceral desire to punch back every time Trump does something so utterly bone-headed, and while doing that hearing Carney talk about tax cuts and cuts to the government seems like we elected Poilievre with a better personality.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time here talking about specific details, or directives given to ministers.  What I want to do is tease apart the big picture of what we are facing and highlight how this all fits together.  

Make no mistake about it, Canada is very much in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.  What exactly their intentions are is hard to say, but it’s clear that the US government has started a trade war with Canada, and in doing so has made it very clear that our current relationship with the US is no longer a thing going forward. 

Second, on the world stage, Trump has pulled back from its traditional allies and role.  This includes all but walking away from NATO, the G7, and the UN.  This makes the world as a whole a lot more unstable, and dangerous for traditional “middle power” nations like Canada. 

Canada’s place in the world is now much more precarious than it was before January 20, 2025.  The country we traditionally relied upon both as a key customer for our economic activity and as a key partner in defence has turned against us, potentially with territorial ambitions. 

In normal circumstances, the negotiations currently going on with the US over trade and defence relationships take place behind the scenes with diplomats and policy specialists doing the heavy lifting.  Normally, national leaders don’t say anything much until those efforts are mostly concluded and an agreement is imminent.  This time, Trump is routinely making extreme, if not outrageous, statements that likely undermine those negotiations entirely, or make the job of the diplomats exponentially more difficult. 

Like it or not, Carney has taken a “I’m not going to react to Trump’s bellicosity in public” approach.  In some respects, this is appropriate.  Trump is a bully.  If you react to his provocations by coming out swinging, you’re playing his game.  He’s stated many times, “you hit me, I’ll hit you back twice as hard”.  So, yeah, while punching back would feel momentarily satisfying, the escalation it would produce would not be helpful. 

Meanwhile, Carney has stated that he is planning to re-orient Canada’s economy in a big way.  Not only is he committing to a much bigger military than we have traditionally managed, he is wanting to change procurement so that our military purchases aren’t automatically from the US.  That’s no small matter at all - putting our military on track for a spend at 2.5% of GDP, escalating to 5% of GDP over the next decade is an enormous change all by itself.  (We’ll come back to this) 

Then there is what Carney is clearly doing behind the scenes with other trading partners and allies, in particular the EU.  He’s in the process of starting to diversify our trading relationships with the longer term aim of reducing the enmeshment with the US we currently have.  This is a huge project in its own right - we can’t just “slam the doors shut” on the US border (nor can they, realistically).  Canada’s economy is big enough to make us part of the G7 - you cannot change the direction of something that size “on a dime”.  Doing so is a complex and difficult process.  I applaud Carney’s approach here where he is reworking trade relationships with Europe first (which is collectively a huge economy as well), while continuing to negotiate “in good faith” with the US.  

On top of that, Carney has to do this in the context of a minority parliament, which is almost guaranteed to be fractious once Poilievre returns to the house in a few weeks’ time.  He also has to (one way or another) get enough buy-in from the various provincial premiers to be able to move major policy goals forward such as dismantling inter-provincial trade barriers that make it easier to sell to the US than to our neighbouring provinces (and yes, that includes somehow finding ways to keep Danielle Smith from going completely rogue).

I don’t know how many people realize that doing this relatively quietly so as to not immediately anger Trump’s administration is a very careful balancing act.  This is “diplomatically threading the needle” stuff.  It’s hard to do, and even harder to communicate to the average person on the street who is sick of hearing Trump go off every few days on some incoherent rage-filled tirade.    

Trump’s rambling about tariffs and threats to annex Canada united a lot of people behind Carney who made it clear that he wasn’t going to be Trump’s patsy, while the conservatives under Poilievre continued a campaign that basically said “look at me, I’m mini-Trump”.  As much as I loathe nationalism, it made Canadians stand up and take notice of what was going on.  

We have to put Canada onto a “war footing”, and that’s going to be a monumental task because this isn’t just a bunch of military posturing, like the Cold War, its real impacts and tactics take place in the realms of the economic and diplomatic.  I don’t think a lot of people have thought about it in those terms - it will mean decisions that people won’t like for one reason or another, and it will mean that our “comfortable lives” may well get turned upside down.  

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t criticize Carney and what he’s doing.  But it would be worth your time to think about how all of these things fit together and how a given action fits into the picture before going off. 

Why Dems Can’t See Through Fascism

This morning, I awoke to hearing an interview of Senator John Fetterman on the radio.  It was this interview:

 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/john-fetterman-on-trumps-raw-sewage-and-what/id1050430296?i=1000694829127

To be clear, I don’t know Fetterman from any other US senator, and I have no engagement with him politically.  What I heard in this interview was a case study of why the Democrats have been so utterly ineffectual in countering Trump - they still think this is “normal politics”, and are treating Trump as “just a minor political disagreement”. 

Several times in the interview, Fetterman said “well - Trump can’t run again in 2028”.  I wanted to scream when I heard that.  Seriously - he said that … out loud … after so many clear signals from Trump that he doesn’t give a damn about the law, conventions, or other factors that represent a limitation on his personal powers.  

Then he walked through a whole bunch of issues - and he correctly identified that Trump has “filled the zone with 3’ of sewage”.  Sure he has.  What the good senator is overlooking is, of course, that the issue is in fact not the sewage, but the willingness of Trump and his allies to spew it. It is another variation on Goebbels’ “big lie” - pure propaganda and a smokescreen for their real objectives.  To borrow from the work of Paul Ekman, lies succeed because nobody does the work to identify them - Trump lies constantly, and the Democrats in particular haven’t bothered to even so much as call them out.

Democrats have convinced themselves that what we are seeing right now as little more than a “kindly argument over the height of the hedge”.  It isn’t.  The Trump Administration is actively moving to break the system of checks and balances that have held the abuse of power by any one branch of government in check. 

DOGE isn’t going to “make a more efficient bureaucracy”, its sole job is to break the bureaucracy and render the administrative aspects of government so ineffective that whatever privatized hellscape Musk is dreaming up will seem like a good idea.  Public health - nah - don’t need that (until the next outbreak of major disease…); food inspection?  - who needs that?  Vehicle safety?  Has anybody else noticed that Musk’s “CyberTruck” is basically a return to the standards of the 1950s, where looks and mass were the solution to things, and well if you got in a crash, good luck to you. 

Democrats need to realize that what is being installed in Washington is not “a neighbourly disagreement”, it’s closer to the arrangement that Putin has with his oligarchs than it is to any kind of recognizable democracy.  _IF_ there is any kind of election in 2028, it will not in any way be a “fair” election - it will be an election where every kind of cheating will be rampant - all in the name of ensuring that whoever is elected will be a willing accomplice to Trump.

If you think I’m joking, just remember that in the days following his loss in 2020, Trump was calling up governors and other state level officials demanding that they twist the results in his favour.  You think that’s gone away?  I don’t.  

Senator Fetterman argued that going after Trump for his conduct “didn’t work”.  Democrats DIDN’T go after Trump for his conduct.  They were too busy worrying about alienating Trump’s supporters.  Trump’s supporters are the people who needed to have the stinking pile of Trump’s misdeeds dumped on their front lawns at every turn.

Democrats LET Trump win by not calling out his misdeeds at every fucking turn.  While he was playing duck and weave to avoid being held criminally responsible for his actions, what were Democrats saying?  NOTHING.  They held their tongues - on the basis of “it’s before the courts”.  Yes, it’s before the courts - that is true.  That doesn’t stop the Democrats from calling it out for what it is.  Trump had no regard for the rule of law - in fact his game playing itself demonstrated that.  

Trump said during the campaign “you won’t have to vote again”.  Did the Democrats take that and run with it?  Nope.  They sat there worrying about offending his supporters.  

Democrats have themselves tied in knots over the idea that if they take a hard line on something, they’re going to “offend” their opponents. The Democrats are worried about offending someone if they complain about DEI, Critical Race Theory (CRT), or Gender Ideology.  Most of Trump’s supporters haven’t read a book in decades - they have no idea what these things are. The comeback for all of them is “So, you support oppression and discrimination against those you don’t understand?” 

A guy like Trump will weaponize everything in sight.  Democrats need to realize that it doesn’t matter what they say, a chronic liar will always find a way to turn it around on them.  They need to take a hard line and call Trump’s actions and words out at every turn. Not “oh, he’s just exaggerating”, or “it sounds bad, but he probably won’t do it”.  No.  If he says it, assume he’s going to do it in the most detrimental way possible and hammer him with it.  

In the legislature, use every legislative delaying tactic you can find - don’t worry about being painted as obstructionist - the GOP has been doing exactly that at every turn since Obama was elected in 2008.  Every stunt they have used, you can use too.  

Get mad. Show some emotion. This isn’t a dispute over the height of the hedge.  It’s far worse than that - and Americans deserve far better than the half-assed “well… maybe his supporters have a point” nonsense we’ve been getting.  His supporters don’t “have a point” - they’re either just as conniving and malicious as Trump himself, or they’re willing fools conned into believing Trump’s version of “The Big Lie”.  

Nothing less than democracy and freedom are on the line now.  It’s time for the Democrats and other parties in other countries to wake up to that reality and play hardball. 

What If Trump's Health Is Failing?

There's a bundle posts on YouTube and other places on the Internet speculating wildly about Trump's health, and whether or not he will live through the entirety of his second term as President of the United States.  I get it - he's such an awful person that any little straw of hope is better than nothing.  

But, frankly it doesn't matter, and here's why.  It's no longer about Trump - at this point, he's the pitch man and that's about it.  He'll do what others tell him to do as long as someone funnels another million into his bank accounts somewhere that it can't be touched - and that kind of transactional stupidity is straight up oligarchy. 

Look at Trump's nomination for various cabinet and other high in the government positions.  They are all obscenely wealthy, and frankly utterly unqualified for the positions they hold.  There are so many probably and overt conflicts of interest in these appointments it's bonkers.  Then we get to the half dozen or so utterly looney appointments like RFK Jr. - a man whose cheese slid off his cracker a long time ago. 

Most of these people are the types who think along the lines Ayn Rand did - if you aren't ridiculously wealthy, you are a parasite leeching off other "more productive people".  The reality is, of course, quite the opposite - most of these people got ridiculously wealthy by a combination of family wealth, scamming the hell out of people, and lastly off the backs of honest workers that they see as patsies for their schemes. 

Trump's cabinet is a veritable "rogues gallery" of people who are setting up for a smash-and-grab theft on a scale that the world hasn't seen since Putin and his oligarchs pushed Yeltsin out of office.  They aren't moving to make a "smaller, more efficient government", they're going to break it up and sell it to themselves.  The level of self-dealing that is going to happen will be stunning, and every one of them will walk away with their wallets bulging just a little more than they already do - and you the taxpayer will be paying more in fees as they try to monetize every single transaction.

Now, let's say Trump falls over dead tomorrow.  JD Vance steps in and takes over as President.  Do you think Vance is going to do anything to slow down what has already begun?  The odds are very good he won't - as long as the oligarchs pass a few million each to keep their posts.  

What we have been witnessing since January 20 is the installation of what will become an oligarchy government.  Even if there is an election in 2028, it will be at best a show process, and there may be a turnover in the cabinet, but by then the senior layers of the bureaucracy will one way or another be beholden to the oligarchs either through direct ownership of government agencies as "free enterprise businesses", or plain old corruption. 

Trump is an old man now - he will be Theodin to Musk's Grima Wormtongue.  Whether he survives or not really doesn't matter.  

“Archbishop Bannon” versus “Unelected President Musk”

 If you had any illusions about MAGA having taken on cult-like traits, you only need to read some of Bannon’s statements in this article.

He instructed Musk to “sit back and study” to understand MAGA’s - and what supporters believed was Trump’s - America First stance to keep U.S. jobs for Americans.

“They’re recent converts,” Bannon saidTuesday on his War Roompodcast, referring to Musk and other tech-world Trump supporters.

“We love converts,” Bannon noted. “But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.”

This is Bannon putting himself in the place of being the high priest of MAGA, and setting up for quite the “palace power struggle” once Trump is sworn into office.  Interesting stuff.  

While it’s been clear for quite some time that MAGA is very cult-like, deliberately avoiding facts for whatever conspiracy theory of the day has been ladled out to them through the disinformation networks.  The idea that Trump has been “persecuted” by the Biden administration because of the criminal prosecutions that stem from his actions both before becoming President in 2016, and leading up to the Jan 6 storming of the capitol.  

Bannon talking about “new converts” is very interesting all by itself - speaking quite directly to the quasi-religious nature of MAGA as a system of beliefs.  I might disagree that there is anything systemic about MAGA beliefs, but then Bannon goes on to talk about “studying” the faith for “many years”.  That itself is also very intriguing language.  

MAGA is, at best a collection of conspiracy theories and counter-factual narratives - it hardly has a coherent narrative that one would expect from a formal religion.  However, Bannon seems to be positioning himself as the “Speaker for MAGA” in Trump’s circle - and that all by itself is interesting.  Clearly he sees himself in the role of the cleric at the shoulder of the king, advising the king on how to keep the peasants happy.  

To the extent that he can do that, it makes Bannon potentially quite politically powerful - and certainly a rival to players like Musk and Ramaswamy in the Trump White House.  However, it’s also a dangerous conceit for Bannon to think that a volatile rabble like MAGA is going to obey his word.  The issue will come to a head when Trump and Bannon disagree on something that Musk / Ramaswamy want to do.  

At its most fundamental level, MAGA is about self interest and deifying ignorance and feelings over knowledge and evidence.  Musk is ultimately about his own self-interest, but his self-interest is not going to align with that of most individual MAGA followers - the ones who currently believe Bannon - but will they believe Bannon when Trump aligns himself with Musk?  Or will they pivot to following Trump’s word?  

Bannon might be the high priest, but Trump is their putative saviour … 

The Collapse Of The American Empire

The United States is giving us a real-time view into the collapse of an empire.  The 2024 election cycle will determine whether the final failures happen quickly (and soon), or if there will be a slower series of failings that will eventually render the current American Republic neutered. 

Precisely when the collapse begins is a matter of opinion.  I think arguments can be made that point to either the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the election of George W. Bush in 2000, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  I don’t intend to spend this post making and evaluating those arguments.  Suffice it to say that each of those elections resulted in governments that played a significant role in setting the stage for where we are today.

Where are things today?  Well … we live in an era where evidence based decision making has been supplanted by conspiracy theories and often outright lies.  Conspiracy theories and their proponents are no longer the disheveled guy roaming the streets muttering to themselves. Instead, they are widely disseminated.  News media - the so called “fourth estate of democracy” - is dominated by commercial partisan interests.  

Then there is the political discourse.  What used to be a discussion from different perspectives which could eventually converge on some kind of middle ground has become a polarized “us versus them” war zone.  Trust has been destroyed on both sides of the partisan aisle.  People in the legislatures don’t see each other as colleagues, they see each other as rivals.  

Then we come to the leadership candidates. The United States has come to be governed primarily by old, white, men.  Look at the two candidates running in 2024.  We have an incumbent who is over 80 today, and his rival is well into his 70s. Seriously - when did the US presidency become a geritocracy?  Surely there are hundreds, if not thousands of potential candidates who are a good 20-30 years younger around, yet the parties are coalescing around two people who should be looking to retire and enjoy their last years? I’m not saying that older people don’t have things to contribute, but seriously, there comes a time to step aside and let younger people lead.  

Instead, we have a cult built around the utterly insane ravings of Donald Trump, and well - I’m not entirely sure about Biden - he’s basically “not Trump” in this race.  That’s how bad it is. 
From a “direction of the government” we literally have either “status quo”, or “burn it all to the ground” (the latter driven by conspiracy theories and wild rhetoric to whip up a mob).  There is no “middle ground” here.  Trump convinced his followers that the 2020 election was “stolen from him”, and that the entire apparatus of government is corrupted.  Biden has to find ways to fight that, and I have no idea what that’s going to look like. 

There’s basically 3 possible outcomes for the 2024 election:  

1). Biden wins a narrow victory again.

In this scenario,  I think you will see Trump ramp up the “electoral fraud” rhetoric to his followers.  We’ll see another round of unrest coming up to Biden being inaugurated into his second term.  It will be messy, but ultimately sets the US on a slower path to the collapse of the Republic.  It is possible that during that time, the Democrats will be able to groom a decent successor to Biden who isn’t in their 70s or 80s.  If they do not, then whatever is leading the GOP after 2024 is going to win in 2028.  

2). One of the two contenders dies or is incapacitated during the campaign

Age is a nasty thing this way.  Both candidates are of an age where any number of things could render them unable to finish the campaign, effectively handing a free win to their challenger.  It’s a rare occurrence, but given the ages of the contenders this time, one we have to be prepared to consider.  

3).  Trump Wins

This is the scenario that is far more likely to collapse the Republic very quickly, and in fact is the scenario I will spend most of this post writing about.