Canada's just not that into you

500 days of bummer

You’ve probably been hearing the phrase “First Hundred Days” or something like it a lot lately. It refers to the first 100 days of a president’s term, usually their first. It goes back to FDR in 1933 and has been a media and political junkie obsession ever since. There is nothing scientific about the number 100, but it’s generally the period when a president is the most popular and has the most influence.

As is always the case during the end of the first 100 days, there are plenty of articles and takes written about what happened. I basically did that two weeks ago and will spare you all from that here. It has been a consequential period, but in a different way than it is for most presidents. Trump has moved at a quick pace, but everything of any consequence he’s done has been by executive action. The first 100 days are when presidents try to get as much legislation passed or close to passing as they can. Trump has signed only a few pieces of legislation, none of which were significant.

Just because he’s barely signed any legislation doesn’t mean he hasn’t been the most successful president of all time. According to Pam Bondi, in just 100 days, he saved 258 million Americans from dying from fentanyl. The day before she said he saved 119 million lives. That means in just one day he saved 139 million people from certain death!

Nobody should ever doubt the power of Dear Leader. I can’t believe there are people out there who question his infallibility. I find their lack of faith disturbing.

I have been writing plenty about how Trump being in charge again will be a boon for Democrats’ electoral prospects. Judging from the events of Monday and yesterday, it looks like they aren’t the only ones. Don’t ever let anyone tell you Trump isn’t a miracle worker. He managed to almost single-handedly bring back the Liberal Party of Canada from the dead.

As recently as January, the Conservative Party of Canada was poised to win in a landslide. Within a month, things had changed dramatically. Justin Trudeau, the LPC leader and prime minister, stepped down and was replaced by Mark Carney. The bigger and more important development was Trump declaring economic war on Canada. Between his imposing tariffs on it and talking about it becoming part of the US, he turned the election from a referendum on Trudeau into a referendum on him.

Canada had its election on Monday and the LPC will have 169 seats, just short of the 172 needed for a majority. That’s an increase from the 152 seats it had before. Its share of the vote was 43.7%, ahead of the CPC’s share, which was 41.3%. Just three months ago, the LPC was down in the polls by 20 points to the CPC.

In the US, we associate the color red with the Republican Party and blue with the Democratic Party. In Canada, as well as Australia and the UK, it’s the opposite. Blue is associated with the center-right parties and red with the center-left parties. God bless America. From metric systems to political colors, we do things our way.

Since becoming prime minister and calling an election, Carney has made fighting against Trump his main goal. His aim is to reduce Canada’s dependence on the US and to find other trading partners. Canada’s economy is heavily dependent on the US for exports and so it will be a big undertaking. Part of Trump’s reasoning in attacking Canada, if you want to be charitable and call it that, was that because it relied so much more on the US than vice-versa it would have no choice but to give in to his demands. Carney campaigned on not doing that and won.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that many countries’ domestic political incentives might be to defy Trump even if it comes at a cost. Canada is one piece of evidence for that, but not the only one that happened during the last week. Yesterday, Australia had its election and the incumbent Labor Party (center-left) will remain in charge. It had been trailing the opposition Liberal and National parties (both are center-right) in polls before Trump became a big part of the campaign.¹

Unlike almost all other foreign leaders, I had heard of Carney before he became prime minister. He was previously the head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, both countries’ equivalents of the Fed. During that time, he dealt with the aftermath of the financial crisis and Brexit. As far as I can tell, he seems to have gotten good reviews for his performance.

I know very little about monetary policy, but since the financial crisis I have a great amount of sympathy for central bankers. They have a job that’s impossible to get exactly right, can be undermined by forces beyond their control and is thankless. If they do things right, nobody notices, but if they mess up they get buried alive.

I remember how much vitriol Ben Bernanke was subjected to. I have no opinion on how successful his post-financial crisis efforts were, but he was vilified like few others were at the time. Rick Perry all but accused him of treason and said he would “treat him ugly.” Jay Powell hasn’t been subject to that kind of hostility, but has still had to deal with armchair warriors criticizing his every move and bad faith actors accusing him of all kinds of awful things.

Carney has spent his private sector career in the financial sector. His public sector career has been in central banking. He has never been in an elected position until now.

You really have to hand it to Trump. Canadians are the most friendly people on earth and he managed to get them to hate us. That’s something no other president could ever dream of accomplishing and he did it in less than a month. Beat that, FDR.

It’s been amusing listening to Trump talk about making Canada part of the US. If that happened it would be a manna from heaven for Democrats. Canada has a population of around 41 million, which would make it the biggest state. It would probably have ~55 electoral votes, ~53 House seats and, of course, two senate seats.

The US is the most right-wing developed country. Canada’s politics are well to the left of ours. Even though the center-right party there is called conservative, it’s very different from the Republican Party. For example, abortion is legal in Canada and nobody is trying to ban it. Canada also has a national health insurance system and nobody wants to dismantle it. What is called conservative there could easily pass for center-left here.

If Canada became part of the US, it would give Democrats a lock on the electoral college and House plus an extra two Senate seats. If each Canadian province became its own state it would give Democrats a lock on the Senate. Congress and the White House would be under Democratic control indefinitely unless Republicans moderated substantially on a whole host of issues. Canada, if you’re listening, you should reconsider your opposition.

The US and Canada are very different

Since Canada’s election, and even before, there have been some hot takes about what Democrats can learn from the LPC’s comeback. Normally, the hot takes from Democrats that I like to pour cold water on come from the left, but this time they’re from the more centrist wing of the party. There may be a few superficial similarities between the LPC and the situation Democrats are in, but that’s it. The US and Canada are different countries with different political cultures and systems. Comparing the two isn’t apples-to-apples.

The US has a presidential system while almost all developed countries, including Canada, have a parliamentary system.² For a brief introduction into how Canada’s system works, see here. Right off the bat, any comparison between two countries with a presidential and parliamentary system doesn’t work. They’re completely different things, they operate in different ways and create different coalitions and incentives.

To give one example of how different the two systems are, in Canada’s election, the CPC leader, Pierre Poilievre, lost his seat in parliament.³ In parliamentary systems, people vote for parties, not individuals. Even though he lost his seat, he will still be a member of parliament. That’s because another MP in another riding (that’s what they call districts there) stepped down so he could be its representative.

The riding where Poilievre served as its MP is in Ontario. The riding where he will now be the MP because the CPC won it is in Alberta. Because parliamentary systems elect parties to represent districts, anyone can become an MP. That’s not how it works in the US. When someone is elected to Congress, they’re in that seat for their term unless they die or resign. If that happens in the House, their seat is vacant until a special election is held. For Senators, the governor of their state appoints a replacement and then they are up in the next election year.

One feature a parliamentary system has is because parties are in charge and not individuals, an unpopular leader can be forced out or resign and be replaced quickly. We’ve seen that a lot in the UK since 2016 and it happened in Canada this year. Trudeau was very unpopular and was dragging down the LPC. He resigned and LPC members had an election for who would be their leader and the country’s prime minister.⁴ They picked Carney, who was not an MP.

In the US, if a president is unpopular, they can’t be removed by their party. What happened last year with Biden was unprecedented⁵ and only happened because of his condition, not because of his poll numbers. Even in that situation, the Democratic Party had no formal mechanism for removing him. He bowed out in large because of pressure from key actors in his party, especially Nancy Pelosi, but he could have refused to and been nominated anyway.

That applies to all other races. If someone wins a party primary, the party is stuck with them unless they drop out, which rarely happens. Even if a candidates is toxic, there is no way to force them out. In a parliamentary system, if an MP is like that the party can remove them easily. If someone is campaigning to be the representative of a party in a parliamentary system and they implode, the party can just designate someone else as the future representative should it win.

Canada doesn’t just have a different political system from the US, it has a different political culture. Polarization is higher in the US than it is there. In Canada, crazy extremists exist, but they aren’t in positions of power. There is ideological media there, but it has no equivalent of Fox and never had a Limbaugh-like figure.

The US is a very low trust country. We have long been less trusting than many other countries, but lately that has gotten much worse. There is much less collective solidarity here than there is in Canada and much less feeling of the need to sacrifice or endure even the slightest inconvenience. For example, in the US, millions refused to take a lifesaving vaccine in 2021 and hundreds of thousands died because of it. Canada had no such problem. Anti-vaxxers exist there, but they are few and far between and are marginalized. I don’t know who its top health officials are, but I guarantee you they don’t think vaccines cause autism.

In light of Trump taking over the Republican Party, election denial has become a thing here. As we all know, Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election and incited a mob to storm the capitol. A vast majority of Republican voters think the 2020 election was stolen. Canada has no equivalent of that.

I’m sure it felt miserable for him to come up short after being ahead by so much for so long, but Poilievre conceded graciously. Nobody from the CPC tried to overturn the results and no mob stormed the capitol. If Poilievre had tried to deny the election’s validity, I’m sure he would not be returning as an MP and his career would be over.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t anything Democrats could learn from the LPC. One thing Carney did was abandon support for a carbon tax, which had proven to be unpopular. Before it became a referendum on Trump, the election was centered around inflation and the cost of living. The carbon tax was a frequent line of attack by the CPC against the LPC and by abandoning it, Carney neutralized the issue.

Abandoning unpopular positions is generally good advice. Trump did it on entitlements, which is a very underrated aspect of his appeal. Had he not done it he would have lost in 2016. Trump has also not taken any action against abortion pills so far. One worry I and many others had was that he would try to make it harder to access them or take them away altogether. He hasn’t done anything like that yet and his head of the FDA has said he doesn’t intend to.

For Democrats, the soonest moving away from unpopular positions will be an option is 2028. Midterms and all other non-presidential elections don’t work like that. Individual candidates in some competitive races will and should differ from most other Democrats on some issues, but the party as a whole is not going to do that. For that to happen, someone will need to be nominated and win in 2028 and bring the rest of those in the party along with them.

What you have to remember is that parties in the US are much weaker than they are in Canada. Parties have official positions on issues and all of its MPs agree with it. When legislation comes up for a vote in parliament, the majority party/coalition’s members all vote for it. If anyone dissents, it’s a huge deal and can lead to a new election being called.

In systems like Canada’s, it’s clear where parties stand on issues. Parties there have official leaders and everyone knows it. If MPs don’t want someone around they won’t be around.

In Canada’s case, since Carney disavowed the carbon tax, that meant the CPC disavowed it and all of its MPs were on the same page. The closest thing we have to that are the platforms each party adopts at their conventions every four years, but they’re entirely symbolic and nobody other than political junkies knows they exist. In Congress, one Democrat can favor something, but that doesn’t bind anyone else. Chuck Schumer can say he believes we should spend all of our money colonizing Pluto, but that doesn’t mean Mark Warner agrees with it.

The Democratic and Republican Parties’ brands are heavily based on perceptions and vibes. That may match reality, but it may not. Brands build up over many decades and are very hard to dislodge. On issues like the social safety net, Democrats have had an advantage for decades while Republicans have enjoyed an advantage on national security.

One thing parties everywhere have in common is their fortunes can be shaped by forces beyond their control. The inflation we saw beginning in 2021 took out incumbent parties all over the world. None of them were the cause of it, but they still suffered for it. By default, opposition parties tended to benefit from anger over it even though they couldn’t do much to end it.

Carney made some smart decisions and Trudeau resigning was a must, but the LPC still would have lost power were it not for Trump’s intervention. In a world where we have President Harris, we have Prime Minister Poilievre. The LPC had no control over what Trump did. He just happened to be hostile towards Canada in a way that radically altered the electoral landscape in its favor. Every LPC supporter should be sending him the nicest thank you note ever written.

Like the LPC, Democrats can’t control anything Trump does, but they are benefitting from his overreaching and declining popularity. That’s what happened the last time he was in office. At the rate things are going, the midterms will be a blue wave, it’s just a question of how big. Should that happen, it will be heavily because of Trump and not anything Democrats did.

Our constitution was designed to deal with Trump

During the first 100 days, there was a ton of executive action and a lot of judicial action in response. The legislative branch has been almost entirely AWOL. Barely any legislation has been passed and the only significant action that has happened is in the Senate in confirming Trump’s cabinet. Many of his cabinet nominees would have been confirmed regardless, but several of them never would have been were it not for Trump having a stranglehold on the Republican Party.

Specifically, there is no chance in hell the Senate in Trump’s first term would have confirmed Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK and Pete Hegseth. No other president would have nominated people as dangerous, unqualified and unfit as them. What has happened is the Senate has just become a rubber stamp for whoever Trump puts forward. A nominee may withdraw or be pulled, but if they come up for a vote they will not be rejected. In the House, Republicans voted to take away their authority to revoke Trump’s ability to impose tariffs.

The problem with Trump is not that our constitution wasn’t designed to deal with someone like him. It absolutely was. We have three branches of government to separate powers. We have frequent elections and Congress has two houses so power is frequently voted on and even harder to consolidate. The electoral college was created with the idea of being a check on a demagogue who could rally popular support. The thinking was that they would have to find a wide swath of support throughout the country and not just in a few places, which would limit their appeal.

A demagogue would be unlikely to win the presidency, but even if that happened, their power would be limited. Congress would assert its independence and would guard its power jealously. As was famously stated in Federalist No. 51, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” In the worst case scenario, if a president abused their power and clearly violated the law and/or constitution, Congress would impeach and remove them. Had you told someone at the Constitutional Convention about a president like Trump, they probably would have said it would be easy to solve.

What our constitution is not designed to deal with is Congress checking out. It was inconceivable to the framers that Congress would just sit there and do nothing while the president acted as they pleased. In their vision, people would run for Congress as individuals, not as part of a party, and would see themselves as members of Congress first. Their loyalty would be to Congress, not to a party and certainly not to a president. Clearly, that’s not what we have today.

Previously, presidents hesitated to do whatever they wanted because they could be impeached and removed for it. Trump doesn’t have to worry about that at all. The answer to his question of what congressional Republicans will let him get away with is everything. The amount of corruption he engages in on a daily basis alone would have been a death sentence for any of his predecessors. Previous presidents would never have tried to go after law firms and universities like he has because they would lose in court and face serious blowback. Trump doesn’t care about that and doesn’t have to worry about congressional Republicans growing a conscience or a spine.

The judiciary so far is doing what it’s supposed to do. Trump has lost in court more often than not. Still, there is only so much courts can do and we shouldn’t rely on them to save us. The judiciary is supposed to be the least consequential branch and it should be. They’re not elected and shouldn’t have nearly as much power as the other two branches.

Since congressional Republicans will never push back against Trump, the obvious takeaway is they shouldn’t be in charge. I expect Democrats to, at a bare minimum, take back the House in the midterms, but that’s not until November 2026. In the interim, Trump will be able to do whatever he thinks he can get away with. Other than courts, the only barriers he faces are market reactions, which he cares about some, and public opinion, which he may no longer care about.

1. The center-right in Canada and Australia are not problems. The far-right in Europe is a big problem. We should all hope the international backlash to Trump expands to Europe. If he could sink the prospects of Reform, the National Rally and AfD that would go a long way towards bringing stability to the continent and making Putin’s life harder.

2. Some parliamentary systems have districts and others use proportional representation. Canada and the UK both have districts that are first-past-the-post.

3. Technically, he didn’t lose his seat, his party did.

4. Parties in parliamentary systems have formal members who, at least in Canada, can vote on things like electing its leadership. The Democratic and Republican parties don’t have formal memberships of any sort.

5. The closest parallel is when LBJ bowed out of running again in 1968, but that was in March and he had a credible challenger in Kennedy.