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May 14, 2025 - Epoch Times
59:29
How Did Trump Impact the Canadian Election? | Brian Lee Crowley
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Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now.
I have seen a lot of my compatriots, you know, running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying, "Oh my God, Donald Trump is a madman.
You can't understand what he's doing.
There's no rhyme or reason to it." I looked at what Donald Trump was doing and I thought, "Okay, I don't have to like it." But if the question is, "Can I understand it?" The answer is yes.
Brian Lee Crowley is the founder and managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
A major Canadian think tank whose work is often cited by the Canadian Parliament.
What exactly is the difference between Canada and America?
It's not that it's difficult to answer because there aren't differences.
It's difficult to answer because the differences are subtle and hard to express.
In this episode, we dive into the recent election in Canada, Trump's comments about Canada as America's 51st state, and what the future of U.S.-Canada relations may look like.
Canada exports 50% of everything made in the private sector.
And the vast bulk of that, like 90%, goes to the United States.
By contrast, you know, foreign trade or international trade only represents barely 25% of the American economy.
So while for Canada, the relationship with the United States is existential, for America, the relationship with Canada is convenient, nice, not existential.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yannick Kelly.
Brian Lee Crowley, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Jan, thanks so much for having me.
I suppose I should call it Canadian Thought Leaders.
Well, that'd be a good choice.
So what happened with the Canadian election and what did US President Donald Trump have to do with it?
Very interesting question, Jan.
Several things happened to change politics in Canada quite radically in a very short time.
One was that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Who had become deeply unpopular, suddenly left.
He was basically forced out by his party.
Second, Donald Trump came to power in Washington.
And as a result of these changes, the assumption everybody had made that Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party were going to waltz into power sort of unopposed, suddenly came crashing down, partly because...
There was now a new leader of the Liberal Party.
He had a completely different profile than Justin Trudeau.
Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of Canada, governor of the Bank of England.
Someone who seemed to be, to a lot of people, a calm, competent, technocratic kind of leader.
And that seemed to, I think, a number of Canadians the perfect response.
To Donald Trump, who started talking about Canada as the 51st state and how happy America would be to annex Canada.
And this makes Canadians deeply nervous.
You know, one of the important reasons why Canada exists as a country is because at several points in our history, we kind of asked ourselves, do we want to be Americans?
And the answer was no.
Yes, we're a new world country.
You know, we share many characteristics with America, but we're not Americans.
We want to have our own model of a new world society that's different from Europe, different from the old countries, but that has the same values, freedom and enterprise and all those other things just as much as America does.
It comes to different conclusions about the role of government, the pursuit of the common good, etc.
So, in that context, Donald Trump's musings about making Canada the 51st state and so on, and how Canada has nothing constructive or useful to offer the United States, made many Canadians deeply anxious.
And I think Mark Carney stepped into that situation and said, I'm the guy who can represent Canada in an effective way vis-a-vis Donald Trump.
And Canadians, not in large numbers, but enough Canadians accepted that argument that he just squeaked past the Conservatives, you know, 43% of the popular vote for Liberals.
Almost 42 for the Conservatives.
Not much in the difference, but enough to win enough seats to form a government.
For a while, it seemed like it was almost based on the polling, right?
It seemed like it would almost be a blowout for the Liberals.
But then that shifted too, and I find that really interesting.
Do you have thoughts on that?
Yes.
So I think the early stages of the campaign...
Donald Trump, I think, drove the anxiety levels of Canadians who cared about these issues to unprecedented heights.
And the issues that had previously been the ones that we thought were going to dominate in the election campaign in Canada, cost of living, efficiency of government and so on, levels of taxation.
These things started to come back to the fore.
Ultimately, what happened was the Liberals went from being just streets ahead in the polls to almost level pegging with the Conservatives.
And it was in that state of public opinion that the voting actually happened.
I've spent the last however many months explaining to Americans in Washington, D.C. that Canadians have this kind of...
Oppositional identity.
And I think what you said kind of explains it a little bit.
There's an element of the Canadian identity, which is clearly, I am not American.
And I remember that growing up in Canada as well.
It was very distinctive and very important, actually.
And only later did I realize that that seemed odd to have an oppositional identity.
But Prime Minister Trudeau Famously described Canada as a post-national state.
Seeing what we saw, I guess that kind of proves that it's not.
Because whatever those embers of Canadian nationalism that existed still, they came roaring back in the last few months, even as it is this kind of oppositional identity.
It's a very difficult question to answer.
What exactly is the difference between Canada and America, or Canadians and Americans.
And it's not that it's difficult to answer because there aren't differences.
It's difficult to answer because the differences are subtle and hard to express.
I always like to go back to the difference between the founding documents of Canada and the United States.
In the United States, you have a society in which, in this...
Wonderful, immortal phrase.
People are free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Those were not the values that we chose to highlight when we wrote down in our Constitution what it was that we were about.
We chose to talk instead about peace, order, and good government.
And you see, I think those phrases actually...
Summarize in a shorthand way some slightly different angles on, you know, what's the purpose of government?
How do people fit into a larger society?
What are we trying to do together?
Remember that America broke away through a violent revolution from the Crown and the United Kingdom, from Great Britain.
Canadians never experienced that.
In fact, people often talk about the 13 colonies, forgetting that there were actually 16 colonies, 13 of whom rebelled and three of whom remained loyal to the Crown.
So even back at the time of the Revolution, there were parts of what became Canada who said, yeah, that's not the route we want to go.
We tend to be people who believe more in...
The quiet, thoughtful evolution of institutions rather than liking this idea of, oh, you know, if you don't like what you've got now, a radical break, start again, reinvent.
That seems to us a very American way of thinking about things.
I don't say that in a critical way.
I'm a great admirer of America.
But Canada has chosen an evolutionary path.
In which we put a little more emphasis on the idea of the common good.
A little less emphasis on the idea of individual liberty as the be-all and end-all.
We're great believers in individual freedom.
But we don't think that individual freedom is the entire answer to the purpose of Canada.
We think individual freedom in the context of An ordered society that believes that we collectively can do things together that individually we would find difficult.
From the outside, those differences don't appear very great.
You know, Europeans come to Canada and they say, "Why are you so fussed about not being thought Americans?" But from the inside, the differences to us are Quite obvious.
And without in any way feeling that it means that we're superior to America, it does make us feel that we've chosen a slightly different path in North America.
And it's one, you know, that our ancestors fought and suffered and paid for and that we have inherited.
And it's ours.
And that matters to us.
In some of your recent writings, you've gone to great pains to try to explain the way of thinking or the approach of U.S. President Trump and the Trump administration.
Reading this, I thought to myself, I think you understand it better than probably a lot of Americans.
Obviously not a majority of Americans, but some.
I wanted you to kind of reprise that for me a little bit here.
One of the reasons I've been thinking about this is precisely because Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now.
And I have seen a lot of my compatriots You know, running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying, oh my god, Donald Trump is a madman.
You can't understand what he's doing.
There's no rhyme or reason to it.
And I looked at what Donald Trump was doing and I thought, okay, I don't have to like it.
That's a separate question.
But if the question is, can I understand it?
The answer is yes.
There were three sort of major themes that kind of leapt out at me.
One is that Donald Trump believes in his guts that America is the top nation in the world.
It's the most important country.
It's the one that sets the stage for almost every other important relationship, alliance, you know, trading relationship.
He feels that America has gone through a period of decline, has lost some of that top nation status.
It's being challenged by some other countries.
And I believe that he sees it as his role as president to restore America to this top nation status.
Now I mentioned that, so that's number one, I mentioned that there are countries that are challenging.
American in this top nation status.
And of course, the one that comes immediately to mind is China.
And I believe that Donald Trump has in the back of his mind, in almost every issue that he wrestles with, whether it's trade or defense or national security or even the drug trade, fentanyl, etc., etc., he has in the back of his mind, China is our great rival.
China is our competitor and China is using many of these issues that America must wrestle with as sticks to beat America with.
I mentioned the drug trade.
I think it's a beautiful example of that.
Clearly, China has a political strategy behind its trading relationship with the United States in a way that most other Western countries would not.
They don't mix trade and politics the way that China does.
And so, given his preoccupation with returning America to the top nation status, to removing any ambiguity about that, and to his sense that top nation status must mean a muscular response to China,
the third thing I add to that is that Trump believes that as America has failed to live up to its responsibilities to be top nation.
There are certain parts of American society that have suffered as a result.
And the kind of people we're talking about, of course, are the ones who were immortalized in J.D. Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy, the kind of people he grew up with, the communities that he knew.
Sometimes referred to as the Rust Belt or the Flyover States or however you like to think about it.
I believe that Donald Trump thinks that these people who form, I think, the bedrock of his political support.
Are people who have been forgotten and left behind by an America abandoning its vocation to be top nation, refusing to stand up to China, etc., etc., etc.
And Donald Trump wants to be the tribune of these people.
He wants to be their champion.
Think about a very famous phrase widely associated with Donald Trump.
Drill baby drill.
Okay?
People think that this is just, you know, Trump in one of his macho moods saying, you know, I'm going to preside over a huge expansion of the oil and gas industry.
It's much more than that.
You see, I think Trump has come to understand the extent to which energy...
And particularly oil and gas are tremendously powerful tools.
And back to this theme of restoring America's greatness, returning it to top nation status.
He would look back at the 1970s, for example, when America went through two oil crises, one caused by OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, putting an embargo on oil and gas.
Exports to the United States, which caused, I remember it well, it caused huge queues around gas stations, you know, states brought in 50 mile an hour speed limits in order to make people drive slower and use less gas.
And then there was the Iranian Revolution, which again...
Later in the 70s, terribly disrupted the world oil supply and caused another energy crisis in the United States.
And you might recall that as a result, America had rules about, you know, you couldn't export oil from the United States.
America was very dependent on oil from the Middle East in particular.
And this was a source of great weakness for the United States.
And Donald Trump then sees how the fracking revolution, the huge increase in the amount of oil being produced by the United States, and America's transformation from a net oil consumer to a net oil exporter, in fact, the largest exporter in the world, bigger than anybody else, has...
Fundamentally change the American economy, American national security, and he wants to push that even further.
And he thinks that drill baby drill is in part an industrial strategy.
It's the idea that America should double down on its incredible technological prowess and its ability to produce vast quantities of energy in a cost-effective way.
And not only improve America's national security, but unlock a lot of economic activity that requires access to cheap, reliable energy.
So I think all of these things actually...
He's woven them together in a strategy for America.
And again, you know, agree /disagree.
If you want to understand anything that Donald Trump does, I think if you refer back to these four things: top nation, challenge of China, recovering the promise of America for the people who were left behind, and cheap, plentiful energy is the bedrock of an American economic renaissance, you will understand almost everything that Donald Trump does.
Why is it lost on so many people?
See, I think it's because people get distracted by Donald Trump's tactics and they forget to think about strategy.
Donald Trump is the inheritor of a great American tradition of You know, he's a kind of a Barnum and Bailey figure, isn't he?
And part of what he wants to do, and this goes right back to the art of the deal, you know, I've often believed that people tell you who they are, you should believe them.
And I think Donald Trump has been quite open about who he is.
Donald Trump conceives himself as a great dealmaker.
You know, all of the things that I've described, you know, the relationship with China, the energy renaissance, America's top nation, restoring its trading dominance, all of these things, he sees them all as deals that he can strike.
If you sort of inquire into Donald Trump's Personality, his character, how he goes about making deals.
One of the things that comes through crystal clear is he says, my starting point for any major negotiation is I convince the people I'm negotiating with that I am the craziest man in the room.
If they don't do what I want them to do, I will bring everything crashing down.
And people listen to him and they say, oh my God, he's going to tear everything down.
He's a crazy man.
I actually think what he's doing is he's saying, look up here at this shiny, frightening object I'm waving in your face when he's actually busy doing something quite different.
You know, tariffs would be a...
Good example.
You know, people say, oh, you know, Trump blinked over the tariffs and, you know, one day he's saying there's going to be 100% tariffs.
The next day it's 150% tariffs on China and then something else the next day and then it's suspended.
And they think, well, he doesn't know what he's doing.
Oh, I think he knows exactly what he's doing.
I think he's scaring the pants off the people that he wants to make deals with and bringing them to the table.
Now, you can like it or not like it, but...
I actually find all these people running around saying, oh my God, he's a crazy man.
You can't understand what he's doing.
He's a maniac.
They're actually playing his game.
They're letting him distract them with the shiny object up here and getting caught up in his tactics and forgetting to think about his strategy.
And I think his strategy is quite clear.
It's very, very interesting to me at the moment that...
Prime Minister Carney, of the two candidates, at least all the reports that I've seen, is the one that's more positively inclined towards Communist China than Bolivier.
You've argued that through President Donald Trump's rhetoric, it was almost intentional.
I think you believe it was intentional.
He wanted to see Carney elected.
But given what you just told me, About his priorities vis-a-vis China, that those two things seem at odds.
Or do they?
For what it's worth, my view is that Donald Trump looks at the rest of the world through an American lens.
The question he asks himself is not how should I understand Mark Carney as a Canadian.
But what is the significance of Mark Carney to me as the leader of America?
When he looks at Mark Carney, he's going to see a guy with a big degree from a fancy university.
He's an international technocrat.
He's been central bank governor in both Canada and the United Kingdom.
He's the quintessential Davos man.
I'm here to tell you, he is everything Donald Trump despises.
And on top of that, he is, as you have properly pointed out, close to China.
The party who represents has been an active promoter of China as an important partner for Canada for many years.
And I think that Donald Trump sees Mark Carney, as the kind of negotiating partner he can get the better of, I think Donald Trump is going to say behind closed doors, look, buddy, there is no alternative for Canada to its relationship with the United States, but America doesn't need Canada very much.
Canada really needs America.
You're going to do what I'm going to tell you, or I am really going to put the boots to you.
And I think that Mark Carney, as some of his own advisers have written, is now that the election is out of the way, and now that he's reaped the political benefits of presenting himself as the guy who can most effectively represent Canada, he's going to make a quiet deal with Donald Trump, which gives Donald Trump pretty much everything he wants, because he doesn't have much alternative.
And I don't think he's going to be very successful in standing up to Donald Trump.
I know he'd like to think he.
He can.
And I don't think he's got a lot of cards in his hand.
And I think Donald Trump likes it just fine that way.
See, I believe, there are many people who don't like this, but I believe it's a profound truth about North America, is that there is a single North American economy.
There are not two There are bits of it that fall under the government of Canada and bits of it that fall under the government of the United States.
That political jurisdiction doesn't make two separate economies.
We have one.
You know, they say that the average North American car, for example, crosses the border something like five or six times as it moves through the production process and goes to different plants in either Canada or the United States because the industry is so integrated.
The industry doesn't think of itself as...
An American industry and a Canadian industry, they think of themselves as a single, combined, continental industry.
Think about the oil industry.
You know, America likes to boast about the fact, quite properly, likes to boast about the fact that it's now exporting 10 million barrels of oil a day.
Largest oil exporter in the world.
What they often forget to mention is that almost half of that is made possible by over 4 million barrels of oil that they import every day from Canada.
If they didn't have access to Canadian oil, they wouldn't be nearly the energy overachiever that they think they are.
Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world, and literally 90% of that production goes to the United States.
In fact, you know, the entire refinery complex on the US Gulf Coast is tooled up to process the kind of oil that Canada exports and can't process much of the oil that is produced by fracking in the United States.
So America fracks, exports that oil, brings oil in from Canada, processes it, and serves American...
And I could multiply the examples over and over.
The point is that Canada is one of the most export-dependent countries in the world.
This is a huge degree of trade reliance.
Literally, 85 to 90% of that goes to the United States.
Again, because we don't exist as a separate economy that only sends finished products to the United States.
We are deeply intertwined in these complex production processes.
I'll just add, I have a particular example because in my LinkedIn feeds, an old classmate of mine from high school represents Canadian auto parts makers.
And he's scored some wins because these Canadian auto parts are very important to American manufacturing of autos.
Is this Flavio Volpe?
That's right.
You see, most people in their minds, when they think about trade, they think, okay, France produces wine and Japan produces cars and France sends wine to Japan in exchange for cars.
This is not at all the relationship that Canada and the United States have.
There's nothing like it.
Roughly 60% of the trade across the border is actually what they call intra-firm trade.
In other words, it's taking place between parts of the same company.
They do some part of their production process in Canada, then they send that to another part of their production process in the United States, and it may come back to this idea that cars cross the border four, five, six times while they're being made, and you can multiply this across many.
So the idea that, you know, I hear this rubbish all the time about Canadians saying, oh, you know, we should uncouple from the United States and we should, you know, we shouldn't give up our sovereignty as if, oh, instead of sending our car parts to the United States, we're going to send them to Europe or Japan or whatever.
And, you know, my reaction to that is you obviously know nothing about how cars are made.
You know, the idea that I hear sometimes people say, oh, well, you know, we should reduce our dependence on the United States and join the European Union.
I think, what?
Like, are you seriously suggesting that this deep economic integration between Canada and the United States that has been built up literally over centuries can overnight somehow be cut apart with a pair of scissors and will have exactly the same relationship tomorrow with...
The European Union?
This is just nonsensical.
So, the reason we're having this conversation, as you said, so why is it that Donald Trump has all the cards?
Right, because so far we've been talking about how Canada is actually kind of important to the US in all these ways, right?
So, what about the other side, the big piece, I guess?
So, I've talked about the fact that, okay, Canada exports 50% of everything made in the private sector.
And the vast bulk of that, like 90%, goes to the United States.
But the United States, by contrast, you know, foreign trade or international trade only represents barely 25% of the American economy, and that's diversified across all of its trade partners.
So while for Canada, the relationship with the United States is existential, for America, the relationship with Canada is convenient.
Nice.
Not existential.
Not existential.
So when Donald Trump says we don't get anything useful from Canada, he's talking rubbish.
If he had said instead, we like our relationship with Canada, we get some nice things from Canada, but, you know, we could get them from somewhere else.
It would be slightly inconvenient for us to have to do that, but we could do it.
If he'd said that, he would have been saying the truth.
But then again, isn't he starting with his negotiating position here that you described earlier, with the extreme negotiating position?
Of course, I didn't mean to say that somehow it was surprising that Donald Trump was not saying the truth.
This is part of his negotiating tactic, right?
He knows Canada's vulnerability to the United States, and he knows that for Canada there is no realistic alternative.
And he's basically signaling to Canadians he knows this, and he's going to...
We have high expectations of any negotiations that will take place between Canada and the United States over, you know, the nature of our trade and other relationships.
Let me put it a different way.
Canada has, I think it is fair to say, Been failing to keep up its end of the bargain with the United States.
Its end of the bargain being, you know, we will be a reliable ally on defense.
We have not been a reliable ally on defense.
That we will be the country that will look after the Arctic flank of North America.
We have not been looking after the Arctic flank of North America.
That we will be, you know, enforcing the rule of law in Canada and ensuring that Canada cannot be used as a launching pad.
For, you know, drug trade with the United States.
I think he exaggerates to some extent the degree to which this happens.
But there's no doubt that Canada is part of the international network that is flooding the United States with fentanyl.
By the way, I think the biggest role that we play in that is that we have become a haven for money laundering for the people who are actually behind the drug trade, which is mostly China.
And so those are just a few examples of ways in which I think America is entitled to say to Canada, you've not been holding up your end of the bargain.
And that's one of the reasons why...
I have been urging people on both sides of the border to think about what I call a grand bargain between Canada and the United States.
Let's not get caught in the weeds on the trade relationship.
It's very important.
Let's make sure we get that right.
But, you know, there's border management issues, there's defense issues, there's national security issues, you know, drug trade issues, organized crime issues, all of which.
Touch on the Canada-U.S.
relationship.
And we should sit down with Donald Trump.
He's the great dealmaker.
Say to him, "Mr.
Trump, we are prepared to negotiate across this whole range of issues and to help define a grand bargain." That will be in Canada's interest.
We're not here to sell out Canada's interest, but that you will be able to sell to Americans as a great deal that you have negotiated on their behalf and that is in their interests.
And I think there's a lot of scope to do that.
I'm just thinking to myself this morning, Sam Cooper has an article talking about how The Canadian authorities are refusing or did at one point refuse to cooperate with the DEA around car fentanyl production.
Cleo Pascal on this show some time ago, a fellow Canadian over at FDD, she's described Canada as a kind of a net security detractor for the United States at the moment, as you alluded to.
And so Canada is essentially deeply reliant on the U.S. for its security.
At the moment.
In my view, this is something that the current administration in the US wants to get in order for those relationships to make sense.
I'm curious about your thoughts on this.
Canada was a founding member of NATO, the North American Treaty Organization.
The purpose of NATO was to Protect the liberal democracies from external threats in the post-war world where Germany and France were a smoking ruin.
Britain had been destroyed by the war effort.
America was rich and powerful.
And was willing to put that wealth and power on the line to make sure that, you know, the liberal democracies, particularly in Europe, could not be bullied and taken over by particularly the Soviet Union.
Now, that was a long time ago.
NATO was founded.
I think I'm right in saying 49. And part of Donald Trump's whole approach to the rest of the world is to say, look, all of our so-called allies, and I'm using his language, have been free riding on America's defense effort.
You know, 70 years after the founding of NATO, basically, they're still...
Contributing only a fraction to their collective defense that America is contributing.
And Canada, one of those founding members of NATO, is one of the worst laggards.
You know, we sign up for a treaty that, in Article 5, commits all the members of the Alliance to the proposition that if a member of the Alliance is invaded by another country...
It will be regarded as an attack on all of those countries, and everyone will come to the defense of the country so attacked.
Article 5, by the way, has only been invoked once, and that was when America asked its allies to help them invade Afghanistan because they had been the launching pad for 9-11.
Back to Canada.
You know, NATO several years ago said, look, you know, America is correct that, you know, the other allies are, you know, not living up to their obligations and we need to fix this.
And so NATO made a formal declaration that the target for all the NATO members in terms of defense spending.
That all of them were expected to spend a minimum of 2% of their GDP.
So 2% of their national wealth generated every year should be spent on defense.
Canada is like down around 1.3 where we're one of the two or three worst performing members of the NATO alliance.
And in private meetings, you know, our previous Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said explicitly, it's been reported in the media, said explicitly to his NATO partners, we're never going to reach 2%.
Don't expect us to do this.
You know, he paid lip service to it in public, but he made it very clear that Canada had other things to do with its money.
Well, George W. Bush...
And Barack Obama, and Trump won, and Joe Biden, all of them, Democrat, Republican, doesn't matter, they all said to the NATO alliance, "You guys have got to do a better job on defense spending." Almost everybody else in the alliance has made some progress.
Some countries have done really way more than was asked for, and they're mostly countries close to Russia because they're frightened to death of Russia, Poland and the Baltic Republics and so on.
And Canada has just stood back and said, sorry, we have other things we want to do with that money.
So they wanted all the benefits of...
The US needs to protect Canada, from my viewpoint, even if there was no NATO.
This is a fair point.
America would never allow another country to invade Canada because next stop would be America, wouldn't it?
Can I just build on that just for a sec?
To me, this extensive deep infiltration of Canada I completely agree.
And while I personally am skeptical that the current government of Canada will take a hard line on China, I am very hopeful that America should, I think, quite properly say, and by the way, you cannot be a backdoor of access for the Chinese to America.
That's a perfectly legitimate thing for America to ask for.
That will be a tough pill for the Liberal Party of Canada to swallow because they have...
You know, to a considerable extent, hitched their wagon to China as a rising power.
But I really think, for all the reasons that we've talked about, Canada's profound vulnerability to hostility from America, China's complete inability to step in and be, for us, what America is, in terms of...
A trade partner, a security partner, a defense partner.
And also, I might add, being a totalitarian state that is actively eradicating entire groups of its own people.
On almost every level, China is a, in my view, a poor partner for Canada.
You know, it wants Canada's resources but is not the least bit interested in any kind of more serious Canadian manufacturers or processed goods.
You know, people complain about our relationship with the United States because they think it's all about natural resources.
I don't think that's correct, but people say it.
If we were to deepen our relationship with China, I'm here to tell you that China would only care about us as a storehouse of natural resources that they would be able to dominate.
So in every way, China is a poor, indeed not just a poor substitute, a completely impossible.
substitute for our relationship with the United States.
And if the United States puts it in the starkest possible terms, look, you can either have a close relationship with the United States, which seems to be something you want and is clearly in your interest,
What do you think about This is a very interesting example of, I think, people being distracted by Trumpian tactics and not thinking carefully enough about Trumpian strategy.
You know, Trump makes a lot of noise about annexing Greenland or buying it from Denmark, just like he makes a lot of noise about Canada as a 51st state.
What he's doing, in my view, is he is softening up both the Danes and the Greenlanders for negotiation over what it is that Donald Trump really needs from Greenland.
America's had a relationship with Greenland for years.
They've got, you know, military bases and all.
If Trump wants more of that, which I believe he does, I think Greenland is perfectly willing to give him that.
What he's doing is he's softening them up with the threat of annexation, back to this idea that he loves to scare his negotiating partners before they ever get to the table.
And so when he gets to the table and he says, well, actually, what I really want is I want five...
I'm just picking numbers out of the air.
I want five military bases in Greenland.
I want you to cut all ties with China.
I want...
Greenland to be, you know, sort of an unsinkable aircraft carrier in a critical passage connecting the Arctic to the Atlantic, etc., etc., etc.
And the Greenlanders will say, yes, where do we sign?
I think that's what he's after in his meanderings about Greenland and I think he'll get it.
You know, is it necessary for him to go through all this stuff about, you know, I'm going to buy Greenland.
This is how Trump does business.
I want to talk before we actually finish a little bit about your book, Gardeners vs.
Designers.
So tell me about that.
Well, you know, I don't want to talk about it in the abstract.
Let me talk about...
Something quite concrete.
Because, you know, the idea behind gardeners versus designers is there's two ways to think about the world.
There's two ways to organize ourselves as communities and organize ourselves, you know, to achieve our goals.
One way of doing it is...
Is to put the technocrats in charge, you know, the civil servants, the people who have fancy university degrees and who study things, you know, as a guy once knew, he said, you're one of these people who knows everything about the left side of the tsetse fly and nothing about the right side of the tsetse fly.
So, you know, all these people who have all these fancy degrees and study the world and know everything about all the statistical representations you can make of our economic activity and so on.
So that's one way of, you know, organizing.
You put those people in charge and say, okay, you tell us what to do because you're the smart people.
You know how to organize things.
And a lot of people think that, you see, there's no alternative to that.
But what I was trying to get at in gardeners versus designers is there's actually...
A far better alternative, a far more effective one.
And let me give you a concrete example.
A fellow I knew, a late professor of political thought at a university in the UK, Norman Berry, he said, look, there were two universities in the Midwest in the United States, founded at about the same time.
And at one of them, You know, these kind of designer people, you know, the smart people with university degrees that I talked about, they designed the campus so that it looked beautiful from 30,000 feet, all these fancy symmetrical pathways and everything.
The only problem was that these fancy symmetrical pathways didn't lead students to the places they needed to go, and so they were always tramping across the lawn to get to where they wanted to go.
And this made ugly pathways in the lawn.
And so the students and the administrators were always fighting over this.
He said at the other university, they did something completely different.
They said, hmm, why don't we find out where people actually want to go first?
And then we'll landscape around that.
That's exactly what they did.
They didn't bother landscaping for a couple of years.
They just let people go where they needed to go, you know?
And so people in there walking around the campus marked out those pathways that were most effective in getting them from the university residents to the bookstore to their classroom and to the student union and so on.
And then, you know, the university administrators came along afterwards and simply paved over.
The pathways that the students had designed for themselves.
They didn't need some fancy authority with university degrees and reams of statistics to tell them what they wanted to do and how to do it.
And so in that university, the students and the administration, at least on this question, Coexisted quite happily.
You know, believe me, social order is necessary for all of us to succeed.
You know, if you don't have police and courts and contracts and all these other things, you know, you won't have economic success, you won't be able to own a house and not have it, you know, vandalized, and you won't be able to have a car because it'll be stolen.
So you need all of these things.
Absolutely.
The question is, are we going to be the kind of society in which people at the top tell us how to behave, tell us where to invest our money, tell us what kind of jobs we want, tell us what kind of university degrees we should have, tell us, you know, what kind of cities we want to live in, etc., etc.
Are we going to be the kind of society in which people make those decisions for themselves and then the role of...
You know, the people in charge is to come along and say, okay, how can we support you in the decisions that you've made?
And that's really the essence of this contrast I'm drawing between gardeners and designers.
I mean, it's such a foundational issue.
And I think, you know, this question is really what I've been, I don't know, looking at from all sorts of different vantage points over the last, you know, five, six years.
And, you know, COVID.
The whole way that we responded to it as various societies or elements of society was kind of the case in point.
Yes, I completely agree.
I thought COVID was the high-water mark of the designer approach to things.
People sort of handed over to these smart people, you know, with their Briefcases and reams of statistics and so on.
Huge amount of control over their lives.
And I was quite fascinated to see how many people were willing to hand over control of their lives to these people.
And don't get me wrong, it's not that I thought that...
You know, we shouldn't have had public health experts and we shouldn't have been debating what the right answer or how we as a society should organize ourselves in response to COVID.
It's not that.
What I'm saying is, you know, the fact that there were experts...
It doesn't mean that the experiences that the rest of us had and the knowledge we had about our own lives and how we could organize ourselves to carry out our activities and still protect ourselves with COVID, all of that was treated as irrelevant and useless.
And the only thing that mattered was these, you know, high-powered people with fancy degrees.
And what's interesting is, you know, we were told, well, we must defer to the experts.
In public health, because otherwise we'll be endangering everybody.
But then, surely people realize that, well, okay, but then all these...
People in different countries who supposedly were the great experts actually recommended different things in different places and at different times.
At one point, you know, masks are completely useless.
They won't do anything for you.
And then, you know, a couple of weeks later, oh my God, everybody's got to wear a mask or they should be arrested.
The idea that there was some obvious, expert, single answer.
To what we should do about COVID was completely disproven by the COVID experience.
A friend of mine is the head of a very large car parts manufacturer in Canada.
And he said, you know, the thing was, we understood in our particular industry how to protect our workers from the danger of catching COVID.
And we could have still carried on our economic activities, but nobody was interested.
Nobody wanted to go to the trouble of saying to us, okay, show us how you can protect your workers.
We're not going to tell you how to do it.
You show us that you can do it effectively, and we won't interfere with you.
You carry on doing your thing during COVID.
But no, we couldn't do that.
We couldn't trust anybody.
To take the knowledge that was obvious to us all about the dangers of COVID and how it was transmitted and how you protected yourself, we couldn't trust people to organize themselves intelligently in order to be able to carry on their activities and protect themselves from COVID.
No, no.
We all had to be locked in our houses for months at a time and forbidden, in some cases, you know, from going to the park.
Because, you know, these experts knew everything and we knew nothing.
And I hope, in retrospect, that people have come to understand that while expertise has its place, and I'm not in any way saying that we should ignore experts and that they have nothing to teach us, I'm saying that...
We must still retain the ability to apply our own intelligence and experience to what experts want to tell us, and we are the ones who should have the final say about how we live our lives and not the experts.
As we finish up, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute is probably one of my favorite think tanks.
I've, over the years...
I keep coming across reports coming out of it, speakers.
I see it on people's resumes who I'm interested in, who I admire.
Just very briefly, as we actually finish, just tell me a little bit about it.
Well, you know, I had a fancy job here in Ottawa a few years ago as what's called the Clifford Clark Visiting Economist at the Ministry of Finance.
And so that person is brought in from the outside as the sort of one man or one woman in-house economic policy think tank and gadfly for the entire federal government.
It's quite an interesting position.
After I'd been in this job for two years, and it's a limited appointment, two years, so I was about to go home.
And I said, well, what have I learned from my experience here?
And answer number one, I learned that Ottawa is in a terrible mess.
You know, spending out of control, programs that don't achieve anything, nobody in charge.
And I said, okay, but what can I do about that?
And it occurred to me that Ottawa was the only G7 capital that didn't have a national think tank in the capital talking about national policy issues to national policymakers, the national media, and the national electorate.
I thought this was a huge hole in our democratic infrastructure.
And I set out to fill it because I'm a think tanker.
That's kind of shocking, given where I come from, where there's a lot of think tanks.
At last count in Washington, there were 400 think tanks.
And I'm glad you mentioned Washington because...
In setting out to do this, I was inspired by what I call the full-service think tanks in Washington.
You know, there's a bunch of very specialized think tanks.
Think about health care, defense policy, national security.
But there's a handful of them that try to think about everything Washington does.
Heritage, Cato, Brookings, Woodrow Wilson, AEI.
And I was inspired by them.
To try and create something analogous in Ottawa.
And the Macdonald-Laurie Institute is that creation.
It is a gardener creation, by the way.
It grew out of our experience with, you know, the problems of the federal government, what was going on in other countries, and...
You know, we just a few weeks ago celebrated our 15th anniversary.
We're the most mentioned think tank in the Canadian Parliament.
We've been blacklisted by the Kremlin.
I think a dozen of our senior fellows have been sanctioned by the Kremlin.
We've been denounced by Beijing.
The ambassador from China here regularly tells everybody not to pay any attention to us, which I regard as great.
So it has grown enormously in what I think of as a relatively short period of time and become rather a fixture, not only in Canada, but we've now opened our own branch office in Washington to talk about the Canada-US relationship, the Centre for North American Prosperity and Security.
Which is a long, ugly name, which gives the fabulous acronym of synapse.
And I think that this has really proven the concept that I had at the very beginning, that there was this big hole in Ottawa that needed filling.
Wonderful.
Well, Brian Lee Crowley, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
All the pleasure was mine.
Thank you all for joining Brian Lee Crowley and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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