“We’re all team Canada.”
What a noble sentiment, a warm and fuzzy maple refrain. No matter our age, the resonant ping of nostalgia for Team Canada moments—Paul Henderson, Sidney Crosby, Ben Johnson (briefly)—all stiffen our spines and make us feel something proud and unifying. How can we not wrap ourselves in this powerful call to action as we head, once more, into the breach of tough cross-border trade negotiations with a new Trump administration?
For starters, it’s a trite and irritating motte and bailey, and one deployed explicitly on that basis by an enormous number of official and serious people. Like much of what’s broken with this country, it leans on hollow emotion to paper over a fundamentally nebulous if not empty premise. It’s an anti-idea, masquerading as something profound, and it should be treated as such.
It’s worth noting that, properly defined, a unified Canada-first approach to this trade negotiation would be valuable. But as it is being used in our discourse today, the deployment of “Team Canada” should be a warning bell, alerting readers that someone is about to conflate two unrelated concepts so they can bully one group of people into shutting up.
Unfortunately, the Team Canada proselytizers—particularly at the federal level and in our state-funded media—are not advocating for unifying our negotiating position across the country with a strong plan that maximizes our advantages or resources.
What they are advocating for, through tortured metaphors like “wearing the C” and “being on the ice,” is that any domestic political disagreements should be stuffed into a closet until the tariff threat is resolved.
The trouble with this argument is that it fundamentally conflates two completely separate ideas—and does so intentionally. On one hand, there is the principle that political leaders should advocate for what is in the best interest of Canada. On the other hand, there is the view that any criticism of the current government or its policies undermines the first principle.
This is clearly false. Those are distinct ideas, and when they are conflated they create a false binary. That conflation does this country a disservice, both broadly and with respect to this specific negotiation.
From immigration to crime to resource development to defence and beyond, the Trudeau government’s ineptitude on these files has not only been to the detriment of Canadians here at home, but it has squandered our advantages in ways that are hurting our negotiating position with America now.
Trump wants a secure border? Our immigration system is overwhelmed and out of control, and our historical pro-immigration consensus risks crumbling.
Trump is worried about crime and drugs infiltrating America? The Trudeau government has essentially legalized crime, and as a result, both crime and disorder are surging in Canada. Despite many serious people eye-rolling away our role in the global fentanyl trade, there is growing evidence we have a serious problem, while we’ve also become a transnational hub for money laundering.
Trump wants to undermine our energy sector? Well, Trudeau and co. beat him to the punch, spending nearly a decade trying to destroy our most productive sector, leaving us less prosperous overall, with fewer options at hand to pivot away from the American market, and fewer resource options to offer up in a negotiation.
The Americans want broader access to critical minerals and other natural resources as they pivot away from China? The Trudeau Liberals let these immensely valuable bargaining chips go undeveloped or intentionally tied them up in reams of red tape. We cannot bargain with what we don’t have, and the Trudeau government has done everything possible to ensure this essential bargaining chip is removed from our stack.
That’s all before we get to the issue of Canada’s defence spending. It strains even the most optimistic imagination that any American administration would take seriously or believe any commitment from Team Trudeau on defence spending or NATO. This is a problem because a credible Canadian response on this issue is a central grievance of the incoming administration.
The gaps in NATO spending pale in comparison to the gaps between Team Trudeau and the incoming American administration on other issues of international import, like the threats facing Israel. While Canada is using its largely irrelevant seat at the ever more irrelevant UN to attack Israel and the prime minister is declaring he’d arrest the leaders of Israel if they came to Canada (which is insane), the incoming U.S. administration is staunchly pro-Israel. The collection of unprincipled potential Trudeau successors who are vying for diaspora votes by upping the ante on hostility to Israel may be benefitting their own narrow interests, or even Team Liberal interests, but arguing the ratchet of ever-more unhinged hostility to Israel is in Canada’s interest boggles the mind.
And, perhaps most damaging of all, the government has vandalized our budget as the economy grows weaker and weaker, leaving us sitting ducks with fewer and fewer ways to weather this brewing storm. As Hub poobahs Sean Speer and Rudyard Griffiths outlined this past weekend, the most powerful offensive step Canada could take in this trade battle is to make our country a more attractive market for investment and growth. Trudeau has done the opposite, and we now find ourselves entering this negotiation from a position of shocking weakness.
These issues are essential in this negotiation. Pointing them out and pushing to fix them doesn’t undermine our negotiation with the Americans. On the contrary, being clear-eyed about what needs to be done to fix our present state is essential for establishing the strongest possible bargaining position, and helps clarify for ourselves which “concessions” are things we can and should be doing already.
What is so grating about those who want to conflate the worthy goals of a unified Canada-first negotiating strategy with the silencing of any criticism of Team Trudeau is that jettisoning the latter is the best strategy for achieving the goals of the former.
The current Canadian federal government is weak and flailing. A complex trade negotiation with the United States would be best served by replacing this government that lacks respect both at home and abroad and has consistently delivered pain and chaos across basically every file our neighbours to the south care about.
Even if you disagree with every premise put forward by the incoming Trump administration, much of which is incorrect or unfair with regard to Canada, it remains true that circling the wagons around the failed and flailing Trudeau government would be a preposterously dumb way to serve Canada’s interests.
Every provincial leader knows and believes this. They have been clear that they see no coherent plan emanating from the government in Ottawa. The browbeating from Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland, and the media they fund to silence deserved criticism of their universal and mounting failures will not deliver a better outcome for Canadians.
The solution to building a united and credible negotiating position is actually the same as the solution for so many of our domestic policy issues: firing the current government and replacing it with a new administration that has a plan to solve the litany of policy failures Trudeau will leave behind.
The Canadian people deserve the opportunity to have their voices heard on this and so many issues facing the country. It’s long past time to let them make their choice, so Canada can actually have the chance of success in what will be a challenging negotiation with the largest economic and military power in the history of the world, and our most important ally and trading partner.
If anyone is undermining the Team Canada approach, it is Team Trudeau and their self-sabotaging policies that have left this country in such a weakened state, not those who are attempting to call them out.
