POSTED: MAY 1, 2025
A lot can happen in one hundred days. Apparently if you are an American President you can:
- continue to support a war criminal in the middle east;
- continue to support a war criminal in Russia;
- round up a variety of people you think don’t belong in the country and send them to prisons in other countries;
- propose taking over with force a sovereign country in Central America;
- rename an international body of water;
- threaten to invade a remote island in the North Atlantic because it is strategic to your plans;
- terminate large swaths of Federal civil servants with no regard to employment contracts, tenure, or equity, and even eliminate entire departments of government including one department that has had so much positive outreach in the world in softening the hard edge of so powerful a country;
- threaten former allies and major trading partners around the world;
- impose unrealistic tariffs on both democratic and non- democratic states without regard for the impact on world stability or the very livelihood of many of your own citizens;
- execute many of these plans with the assistance of a private citizen who benefits financially from much of the decisions made;
- ignore the rule of law and the institutions created to enforce it.
And what is even more amazing is you can do these things with virtually no opposition from the elected representatives who are actually charged with making most of these decisions. It is one thing for domestic political opponents to not be able to stop these actions but inconceivable that these actions can be taken without at least some of the members of the majority party stepping up to do the right thing.
One hundred days is a very short time to do such damage. The decades of positive work done on so many fronts can be eliminated with the stroke of a sharpie.
Being on this planet gives me a stake in this war he is waging, but being a Canadian also makes me an active combatant. The trade war waged on Canada is already devastating for both economies, but longer term it will be worse for Canada.
The rhetoric surrounding the taking over of Canada by economic force however has rallied the country like never before. I am seventy-one, and it’s the first time I have seen supporters of all political stripes uniting to this extent.
In that same one hundred days, in Canada we have seen the Prime Minister step down, a leadership convention, leading to a new Prime Minister, and a federal election occur over just several weeks. We also witnessed the early front-runner in that election who patterned himself partially off the American President, go from twenty percent ahead in the polls to his party not winning the election and not even winning his own seat in the House of Commons.
Mark Carney is the adult in the room. He is the adult in any room he is in and a very smart, disciplined, ethical person, who has the support to take on this battle. It is an unfortunate truth however that he can not solve the problems created by Trump, but he can work to rethink the Canadian economy to catch up with the Canadian psyche. That psyche is very much elbows up. We are scared, feel betrayed, but like the Ukrainians are gearing up for the fight.
Let the games begin.
Django