SpankyMcFarland

Trumpism looks like it will outlast the Trump presidency. There’s no guarantee the US will ever be quite the same again.

Winning may be defined differently for the two sides. Ukraine is achieving something highly significant every day any part of its territory stays free of Russian tyranny, and the survival of any Ukrainian resistance anywhere will ultimately doom Russia to defeat. Ukrainians aren’t going to give up on the idea of an independent nation when they know how awful rule from Moscow is.

We have to start somewhere and we now know we can’t trust them.

The direction of the polls favours Carney at the moment. His party is still behind but heading upwards at a good clip. Why not try to capitalize on that, look prime ministerial for a few months while sparring with an incredibly unpopular foreign adversary and then go?

You live in Canada, right? Saying it’s about not ‘liking’ Trump does not in any way describe the crisis he has caused between our two states and the lack of trust that has resulted. Are you even going to address Trump’s outrageous recent behaviour?

I don’t know much about running central banks but I think there’s a little more to it than that. And it’s Mark, with a k. Crypto is a hallmark of traditional conservative prudence?

I’m trying to say what I think is the case, not what I want to happen. I believe PP is more vulnerable than Carney on the Trump issue because his policies and voters align more closely with Trumpism. The populist, PPC-adjacent wing of the party is quite Trumpy in its views. Carney has never flirted with cryptocurrency, for example. Canada is overdue a political change in management but Trump has disrupted the natural cycle. It’s going to be a much harder slog for Poilievre than it would have been in 2024.

Poilievre is vulnerable on the Trump issue. The Liberals clearly believe that because they’ve started those lines already. More fundamentally, a likeability deficit has dogged him for years - now people question whether he can unite the country. He’s got to look more like a PM in a national crisis and less like a snarky attack dog who appeals to angry losers. A word in defence of Carney. Since when did making it into ‘posh’ circles, ie success, become such a liability on the right?

Our fentanyl ‘exports’ to the US are absolutely negligible as I’m sure Trump’s minions know full well if he doesn't. We couldn’t make them smaller in a democracy. The US simply doesn’t want an EU-style arrangement with a common market for goods, political integration and shared sovereignty. I’d like to see more competition in some areas, eg airlines and telecom, but we don’t need the added risk of US retail banks up here and we shouldn’t allow ours to go down there either. Remember what happened in 2008? Donald Trump could put that risk on steroids. On dairy products, as far as I know doesn’t the US already run a large trade surplus with us? Their industry is heavily subsidized and staffed by the same illegal workers Trump claims he wants to send home. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/10/politics/trump-canada-dairy-tariffs-fact-check/index.html As for what Trump wants? Being on TV today seems to be the driving need. Beyond that he has some half-digested bonkers notions about economics and resource management he picked up somewhere along the line.

Come the hour, cometh the man. However, I have a few grumpy quibbles. Carney has an impressive CV in an another line of work, admittedly with a political component of its own. Obviously, I wouldn’t be a PP fan but I would prefer any Canadian PM to have solid experience in the parliamentary field as an MP and minister rather than learning on the job. Given that he’s been thinking about this move for years, he should have taken the trouble to brush up his dodgy French which could be a big vulnerability in the election campaign. Another issue - age. As an older person, I prefer younger candidates for politics, preferably 35-55. I’ll grant that Carney is fit and that Chrétien was effective in his sixties but I would prefer somebody younger who is more in touch with the struggles working people face making a living and buying a home. With all that said, the party has spoken loud and clear. What a landslide.

Canada has to get over its phobia of coalitions. They work well in many countries.

Dropping JT looks like it was a good idea for the Liberals. Of course, the big factor is south of the border and I doubt if even Trump knows what he’s going to do next on the Canada tariff file. I’d say many Liberal MPs feel they now have a fighting chance of hanging onto their seats. Enough to stay in government? Who can say.

Hitler was an unabashed Anglophile who admired the British Empire and Manifest Destiny. Bolshevism, however, was near the top of his naughty list. He dreamt of a Nordic Reich stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, free of the ‘inferior’ races. Destroying the Soviet Union was key to this.

If that ever happened we’d have to start looking at the intelligence US social media companies are hoovering up here free of charge and other types of generous cross-border co-operation too.

There’s no need for another Tesla to be sold here while this attack on us continues.

The Palestinians were minding their own business a hundred years ago. There was no Hamas back then when Britain opened the floodgates and let thousands of European immigrants in. That’s the situation we are in now. Israel has a government committed to annexing the West Bank. Its members regularly quote from a holy book as if it’s revealed truth. I’m not sure about that. They elected the current government whose leader has opposed a two state solution all his political life. You wouldn’t start from here. We now have an intractable tribal conflict with both sides convinced of the evil of the other and waving their holy books about as proof. There are many other examples of this, eg Ireland, Sri Lanka and Africa. What’s needed for starters are confidence-building measures. There’s no justification for settlers to be seizing any more Palestinian property in the West Bank, for example, or for dressing up as soldiers and shooting people on sight. Arab countries should grant citizenship to all Palestinian refugees currently in their country - that issue has gone on long enough. If Gaza is destroyed one of the obvious places for homeless people to go would be the West Bank as well as Egypt and other Arab countries. Israel’s bluff should be called on that but the Americans wouldn’t dare to do it.

Living under Russian rule is a catastrophe that Ukrainians have been willing to die to avoid. They understand what it means far better than we do and it’s for future generations that this war is being fought. Putin knows this as well. The prospect of Eastern Slavs living free, prosperous lives in the EU would be a constant rebuke to his ramshackle tyranny.

Poilievre has to stand up to Trump. Really stand up the way he does to everybody domestically. The guy is threatening to take our country away and for that he deserves at least caustic mockery. Otherwise, can we trust a PM Poilievre to really stand up to the PPC wing of his own party?

Trudeau’s done - yesterday’s news. If Poilievre doesn’t want to join him he’d better turn up the heat on Trump. Too much of that strange niceness may mean he never gets there.

Anybody who even flirts with this 51st state stuff is poison to the Tories. We all know how nasty Poilievre can be. He’s got to direct that fire against Trump to show centrists fleeing his party he’s not a closet MAGA-fanboy.

One of Trump’s lackey ‘journalists’ even pretended to take umbrage at Zelenskyy’s lack of a suit. He said he would wear a suit when the war was finished. He could have replied that Churchill didn’t wear a suit when he visited the WH in 1942 and didn’t hold an election either.

In these undignified spectacles foreign politicians might be better off sticking to their own language if they are fortunate to have one. Just answer the questions put to you in Ukrainian and blissfully ignore the rest of the noise. If challenged, say your English isn’t good enough for such a delicate diplomatic task.

Trump kept on emphasizing that various decisions on Ukraine weren’t made by him, implying no necessary continuity between administrations on basic foreign policy. Then he started ranting about the Mueller investigation and Hunter Biden’s laptop. What a sad day for freedom and civilization. Who will trust America again?

Trump behaved like the thug he is supported by his fanatical sidekick Vance. These days you’re better off being an enemy of the US - that way you won’t be shocked when you’re humiliated and extorted by them. From a tactical point of view, Zelenskyy might have been better off pulling a Chrétien, pretending not to understand the translation and replying with something incomprehensible but he was sorely provoked. For Trump on Ukraine, peace in our time means no new invasion before I leave the WH. Zelenskyy was dead right to point out how the US might feel if it ever faced a similar, existential threat. When Chinese drones are hovering overhead the younger ones of our number may have cause to recall those words.

If it were as simple as that it would be reasonable, yes, but a two state solution has been explicitly opposed by many in Israel since its creation. Neither side has managed to achieve a settled consensus across the political spectrum for a peaceful transition to two states.