Canadian workers are fighting efforts by billionaires on both sides of the border who are trying to destroy their livelihoods through U.S. president Donald Trump’s tariff war. 

Last week in Windsor, Members of UNIFOR launched a factory blockade because the company was trying to ship machines into the United States to evade tariffs.

The workers scored an immediate — if still tentative — victory. Because of their wildcat protest, “the company agreed to unload the tools and dies off the truck… They’ve put the dies back on the shop floor. The union and employer will sit down and discuss multiple solutions.”

Throughout this fight, the workers have had one consistent political ally in the NDP. Leader Jagmeet Singh has made a bold proposal that would make it illegal for companies to ship machinery out of the country, at least in cases where the company has benefitted from taxpayer subsidies. As Singh put it: 

“We invested massively in the automotive sector. I don’t want anyone in the automotive sector in the States to think that they can now strip these factories of that equipment,” said Singh. “We’re going to use every tool possible, to make it illegal to take this equipment out of our country.”

But sadly, Liberal leader Mark Carney and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre have not made such a commitment. Rather, they have made it clear they will ultimately defer to Canada’s elite and Trump himself. 

We should be clear: Poilievre agrees in large part with the politics of Trumpism, and is making a pivot now as it has hurt him in the polls to be associated with a “maple MAGA” brand. Many top Conservatives, including key Poilievre staffers, allies, and Members of Parliament, have been caught wearing Make America Great Again hats and attending lavish events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Further, many conservative outlets justified Trump’s rationale for tariffs on Canada, suggesting he had a point about illegal activity flowing from Canada border into the USA. In fact, the opposite is true. CBC news explains for example that a majority of crime guns seized in the GTA are from the USA. 

People in Poilievre’s movement often publicly backed Trump, until they realized he was an autocrat who doesn’t give a damn about the success of Canadian Conservatives. Now, he’s reduced to begging Trump for mercy as he sinks his campaign.  

But what makes Poilievre’s deference to Trump fascinating are the places where it overlaps with Carney’s weak opposition. As I explained in my previous Ricochet column, both Carney and Poilievre have used Trump’s aggression as an excuse to take hard-right turns on economics. Carney, for example, has justified cancelling the capital gains hike for millionaires and billionaires by suggesting that we must copy Trump’s pro-billionaire policies to spur investment. Poilievre agrees with this, and has proposed his own suite of capital gains cuts. 

Both men are also giving massive tax cuts that will benefit high income earners above all, again with the justification that this is to fight Trump. It is only the NDP’s tax plan that doesn’t benefit the 1%. In effect, the Carney-Poilievre coalition is making a trickle-down economics argument that would make Ronald Reagan proud: that Canadian workers must subsidize the wealthy, in the faint hope that — one day perhaps — the wealth will trickle down upon the ungrateful peasantry.  

Additionally, we’ve seen both Poilievre and Carney use Trump to rationalize denying benefits to working-class Canadians. On Pharmacare, for instance, both men are striking a shockingly similar tone. While Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and the NDP built a clear — if still far too slow — roadmap towards universal drug coverage, Mark and Pierre have stalled progress, promising not to cut pharmacare, but also not expand it as this time. As the Canadian Labour Congress put it: Mark Carney is “siding with Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives instead of standing with Canadians.”

This all shows that the Liberals and Conservatives won’t actually oppose Trump when and where it counts because fighting Trump is also about fighting Trumpism. And Trumpism isn’t simply tariffs and annexation talk. Trumpism is an attack on basic social programs and public healthcare, as evidenced by his assault on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. 

Indeed, one critical error for the NDP has been a failure to centre the need for electoral reform, specifically a system of proportional representation. As I argued in Canadian Dimension earlier this year, the Liberal Party betrayed Canadians by breaking their electoral reform promise, keeping the undemocratic First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system that gives outsized influence to right-wing forces. But while the NDP does indeed support electoral reform, they have failed to make it a touchstone issue, explaining how a proportional system could be a bulwark against Trump. If we want to build a Canada that is clearly distinct from the United States, ditching the broken FPTP system is a critical early step.  

Still, if Poilievre and Carney’s parties — the ones who benefit from our broken electoral model — really wanted to punch back against MAGA fascism, they would boldly expand the programs Trump would destroy if Canada was conquered. You don’t fight Trump by bending the knee to his trickle-down capitalist ideology; you fight him by making Canada a place Trump would hate to live. 

As long as Liberals and Conservatives bow to billionaires like Trump, we’ll never achieve that. 

Christo Aivalis is a political commentator and historian, holding a PhD in Canadian History from Queen’s University. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, The Breach, Canadian Dimension, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, and the Washington Post.