Trump’s Canada Policy Is Hurting His Political Allies

Until very recently, Canadian politics were shifting in U.S. President Donald Trump’s favor.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has had a difficult relationship with Trump in the past, announced in January that he plans to resign. Trudeau’s ruling Liberal Party was on the precipice of collapse, rife with internal conflict and trailing in support. With the incumbent government having overseen high inflation, a decade of low productivity growth, and a notable decline in housing affordability, it was polling at all-time lows. Many Liberal members of Parliament were leaving politics altogether, and a handful of star ministers declined to run for leadership, expecting a loss in the election to follow. Mark Carney, the ex-governor of the Bank of Canada, won the Liberal leadership on March 9, but few would have expected this to be a meaningful victory only months ago.

Meanwhile, across the aisle, the center-right Conservative Party was ascendant. The  party’s populist leader, Pierre Poilievre, echoed a milder version of Trump’s rhetoric to galvanize his base—framing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate as an issue of freedom, maintaining an antagonistic relationship with the mainstream media, and characterizing his platform as being “Canada first.”

Once known as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “attack dog,” Poilievre has crafted a damning narrative of Liberal governance where post-pandemic inflation and unaffordable homes were problems exacerbated by the Liberal Party’s carbon tax policy. Despite University of Calgary researchers finding evidence to the contrary, this pitch was garnering the Conservatives a steady lead in public opinion, and Poilievre’s path to the prime minister’s office seemed clear.

However, Trump’s actions since his Jan. 20 inauguration have cast Canada’s political stakes in a different light. He has unwittingly recentered the Canadian debate around relations with Washington instead of affordability and put the Conservatives back on the defensive—contrary to Trump’s own interests. The U.S. president’s decision to place 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Canada and his repeated insistence that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state has ignited a firestorm of Canadian nationalism and a resurgence of support for the Liberals.

With few concessions to show for it, Trump has thus bolstered the reputation of the governing center left—those who are the least inclined to support his objectives—while leaving his sympathizers scrambling to pivot.

It is not difficult to imagine what the president could have had in Canada had he not antagonized it. Canada’s default policy toward the United States is a deferential one, and Poilievre and his voter base are Trump’s natural allies north of the border.

They are, firstly, by far the most likely to have favorable views of the U.S. president himself. Only a year ago, a Pollara study found that 40 percent of Canadian Conservative Party supporters preferred Trump while 32 percent preferred former U.S. President Joe Biden, in sharp contrast to Canadians overall, who preferred Biden by a wide margin. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, more than 30 percent of Conservative Party supporters said they would prefer Trump to lead Canada over Trudeau, compared to 2 percent of Liberal Party supporters and 3 percent of New Democratic Party supporters.

While comparisons between Poilievre and Trump should come with strong caveats, it is true that their more fervent admirers tend to be similar. Like Trump, Poilievre also draws support from the podcast “manosphere,” with endorsements from commentators such as Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. Even Elon Musk, the tech billionaire-turned-Trump advisor, has voiced his enthusiasm for Poilievre.

On foreign policy specifically, Poilievre and his base are also more aligned with the new U.S. administration. While support for Ukraine is declining to some extent among Canadians in general, this view has gained significantly more traction among conservatives, and only among their ranks is it anywhere near a majority view.

Like Trump’s Republicans, the Canadian Conservative Party has also shown a willingness to compromise on Ukrainian sovereignty, albeit to a lesser degree. Canada’s trade agreement with Ukraine, originally tariff removal on bilateral goods trade, was updated in 2023 to include sections on services and investment flows. The change was meant to be a routine show of solidarity against Russia. The Conservative Party was the only major party to vote against the update, observing the flexibility to do so offered by their base and an opportunity to accuse the Liberals of “imposing a carbon tax on Ukraine,” in the words of MP Michael Kram—something that the Ukrainian Embassy itself refuted.

While the Liberals have avoided taking a position on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, they have at least paid lip service to supporting the court’s process. Poilievre, in contrast, has made clear that he stands with Israel without reservation, which is also in line with Trump’s stance.

However, Trump has upended both Poilievre’s path to power and the positions that he would likely assume if he were to take office.

When Canadian politics were taken in isolation, polls indicated that even under the new Liberal Party leader, Mark Carney, the party did not compare favorably. But the comparisons that Canadians are making now are not between the candidates themselves, but between the candidates and Trump. Eliminating carbon taxes and improving affordability, which the Conservatives had tactfully made the center of the Canadian debate over a year of careful messaging, have taken a back seat to dealing effectively with an aggressive neighbor.

On this issue, Carney has presented himself as unflappable, while Poilievre has appeared uncommitted. As the ex-governor of two countries’ central banks, Carney’s technocratic resume and his forceful rebukes of U.S. aggression have contrasted him sharply against both Trump and Poilievre. He has strong anti-populist credentials, having come out against both Brexit and Trump’s tariffs while he was the governor of the Bank of England. The Liberal Party as a whole is capitalizing on anti-Trump sentiment far more effectively than the opposition—and, as a result, has retaken the lead in Ipsos polling for the first time in years.

Canadians across the political spectrum now support trade retaliation and want strong rebukes of Trump’s annexation claims. The Conservatives are thus caught in a bind. Their playbook has been to lay the responsibility for the country’s ills at the feet of the Liberal Party, but circumstances now demand a show of unity. Poilievre’s argument that the Liberals are ultimately to blame for the belligerence from Canada’s southern neighbor has fallen flat.

There is no guarantee that this will ultimately compensate for very real voter fatigue toward the Liberal Party. But even under a Conservative victory in the next election, Canadian public opinion will now be working actively against the U.S. president.

By challenging Canada’s sovereignty and the health of its economy, Trump has jeopardized both the electoral prospects of the Conservative Party and the extent to which it can take a friendly stance toward the United States, even in the event of victory. It is not simply the technocratic principles of policymaking that raise questions about Trump’s approach—even judged within his own internal logic, the president has redefined the scope and focus of Canadian politics in a way that is ill-suited to his goals. Threatening Canada achieves neither Trump’s interests abroad nor the objectives for which the tariffs themselves were designed.

As the United States withdraws support from Ukraine, cuts foreign aid, and emboldens the far right in Europe, the president would have benefited from the support, or at least the complacency, of a country with Canada’s track record for reason. Poilievre cannot mimic the U.S. stance on Ukraine, since ethnic Ukrainians make up nearly a quarter of the population in some core Conservative constituencies, such as the Yorkton-Melville region of Saskatchewan. But as the Canadian right is overall rapidly losing interest in the issue, Poilievre could have remained strategically opposed to supporting Ukraine in specific domains, just as he was on the trade deal in 2023.

Poilievre’s worldview, in which countries ought to take care of themselves and free speech is paramount, jives well with Musk’s and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s appeals to far-right parties in Europe, making the Conservatives far less likely to protest repeated incursions into German or British democracy, for example, or the erosion of support for NATO.

As it stands now, Canadians are watching these issues far more closely than they would have in the absence of aggression, with a far greater sense of kinship with the victims of Trump’s aggression than with Trump himself.

Furthermore, the United States needs strategic resources from Canada to help wind down trade dependence on China. China’s dominant role in critical mineral deposits and processing can only be overturned with a concerted and unified effort from a number of U.S. allies, Canada being chief among them. From lithium and nickel for electric vehicle batteries to gallium for semiconductors, Canada boasts vast mineral deposits and a rapidly improving processing capacity. As of 2024, Canada was already the largest exporter of minerals and metals to the United States, ahead of China. If Trump intends to cut imports from the latter, the U.S. economy and military will demand a replacement.

The Liberals know this, and they were willing to threaten export restrictions on minerals as retaliation. Only in right-leaning circles was this move criticized, with United Conservative Party Alberta Premier Danielle Smith being the only provincial leader to reject a joint statement threatening these export restrictions.

Even if the aim of Trump’s tariffs was truly to stop the 0.2 percent of U.S. fentanyl seizures coming from the northern border, or to reduce the relatively small $60 billion bilateral trade deficit, the U.S. president making these threats privately to Poilievre could have achieved the same outcome—without damaging the goodwill of the populace or affecting the election outcome itself. A Conservative Party government could market these policies as its own ideas and as mutually beneficial, tackling drug trafficking and deepening trade ties.

If the strategy was for the United States to raise taxes to replace income taxes, then the goal should be to increase the quantity of imports, because as it stands, tariffs are nowhere near enough. One way to do this would be to facilitate linking U.S. customers to Canadian exporters, thereby raising the tax base while placating Canadians at the same time. But this is not what Trump has done, nor is it consistent with his aim of reducing the trade deficit.

The fact is that if Trump had not imposed new tariffs or made flippant comments about making Canada the 51st state, he could have had a sympathetic and even ingratiating neighbor to the north. Instead, even if the Conservatives take over, Canadians will expect their leader to stand up for them.

Without even considering the self-destructive nature of tariffs and the sheer unlikelihood of annexation, Trump has thus undermined his own stated objectives.