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CALGARY, Alberta – The Calgary Petroleum Membership is strictly what you’ll count on: darkish wood partitions, tremendous decor, and rugged-looking rich males in jackets with no ties who can most likely purchase the entire West Virginia city the place I stay. That is the place I met up with Gary Mar, a businessman and former authorities official, to see how President Donald Trump’s tariffs are impacting Canadian politics.
Mar served from 2007-2011 as minister-counselor of the Province of Alberta to the US of America, and nonetheless has a hand in nationwide politics.
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I needed to know concerning the surge in assist that the Liberal Get together, which selected Mark Carney as its new chief this week, has skilled since President Trump started launching tariffs, and the way Conservative Get together chief Pierre Poilievre can reply because the Canadian election heats up.
“There are two poll points,” Mar stated. “First, who’s greatest capable of take care of President Trump, and second, who’s greatest capable of run the financial system?” Clearly, the tariff state of affairs, or as Canada calls it, the commerce struggle, colours each of those points.
Columnist David Marcus talks to Canadians about how U.S. tariffs are affecting politics. (Fox Information Digital)
Mar stated the bottom line is “to know Trump’s motives for the tariffs,” and he supplied 4 prospects: Improve U.S. manufacturing, generate income for tax cuts, steadiness the commerce deficit, and/or create leverage for non-trade points, on this case fentanyl coming over the Canadian border.
As a former diplomat, Gary discovered the fourth use of tariffs most objectionable, however what he was actually asking was, what does Trump need or want from Canada to make this cease? Within the absence of a solution to this query, Poilievre is in a dicey state of affairs.
Ever since Conservative Get together chief supplied assist to the anti-vaccine-mandate trucker protest in Ottawa in 2022, he has been seen in Canada as aligned with Trump. However immediately, Trump is public enemy No. 1, and Poilievre’s social gathering has bled 20 factors within the polls in two months.
Carney and Liberals are already showering the Canadian airwaves with adverts tying Poilievre to the U.S. president.
I requested Mar if Poilievre could be higher off politically immediately if Trump had been to reward or insult him. He didn’t even hesitate, saying “it will be higher if Trump insulted him.”

A number of girls in Calgary had been protesting the Liberal Get together’s assist for letting males who establish as girls serve time in girls’s prisons. However points like this are being drowned out by the tariff state of affairs. (Fox Information Digital)
One way or the other, this Conservative chief and would-be prime minister has to discover a option to be frenemies with Trump, just like the youthful brother who doesn’t take any guff from the older, to point out he can work with Trump whereas additionally defending Canadian honor in opposition to a U.S. president threatening his proud nation’s sovereignty.
It is because everybody in Calgary, together with Mar, has advised me that Canadian nationalism, till lately nearly an anachronism, is at ranges they’ve by no means seen earlier than. Trump’s fixed trolling about making Canada the “51st state” is undoubtedly one other issue.
The election, at soonest, will happen someday in April. If the tariff difficulty is resolved shortly, it’ll free Poilievre as much as marketing campaign on the problems he desires to give attention to, and I ran smack into considered one of them unintentionally in Calgary on Sunday.
As I turned the nook amid a morning constitutional, I noticed about 40 or 50 principally girls, with indicators demanding Canada not enable organic males in girls’s prisons. There I spoke with Heather Mason, who was incarcerated when the coverage permitting males was launched.
Mason, and the entire different girls there, had a transparent message: “It has to cease.” Poilievre agrees, and has publicly acknowledged he’ll ban males from girls’s prisons.
These are the sorts of points that conservatives in Canada, like their cousins to the south, wish to give attention to. However with tariffs sucking all of the information oxygen out of the media, they’ll’t.
To make sure, Trump’s job is to not win elections for conservatives in Canada, it’s to do what’s in the perfect curiosity of the American individuals. However certainly, on some degree, America’s curiosity is tied to , functioning relationship with our closest buying and selling associate to the north.
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The scuttlebutt within the Nice White North is that Liberals desire a new election ASAP. They really feel like they’ve the mojo, so the earlier, the higher. Politically they need this commerce struggle, as they put it, raging as Canadians forged their ballots.
“There are two issues that enhance Canadian nationalism, struggle and sports activities, and we now have each,” Mar quipped, referring to the “commerce struggle,” and the USA vs Canada hockey rivalry’s revival.
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In that type of surroundings, Poilievre might must punch again at Trump, however in a pleasant approach, the best way brothers do. However that may be a very tremendous line to stroll. How he manages that problem might outline U.S. Canadian relations for a really very long time to come back.
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