Trump’s threats of tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico have wreaked havoc on US relations with its closest trade partners. While the tariffs against Canada and Mexico have been deferred by a month, lasting damage has likely been done to US relations with the only countries with which it shares land borders. The fallout of the trade spat is already remaking Canadian politics, with many wondering whether the dispute has truly ended given Trump’s repeated calls for the US to annex its northern neighbor. How will all of this shape Canada’s already tumultuous political situation, with Justin Trudeau having just announced that he was stepping down as the country’s Prime Minister, with a high-stakes national election in October looming, and with Canada taking its own rightward political turn led by Pierre Poilievre? What impact will these trade wars have on working people across North America, and how can we fuse our common struggles across borders? 

Andrea Houston of Ricochet Media, Desmond Cole of The Breach, and independent journalist and founder of On The Line Media Samira Mohyeddin join The Real News for a cross-border discussion on US-Canadian relations, and the urgent need to build solidarity among US and Canadian workers in the face of Trump’s destabilizing agenda.

Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley

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Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

President Donald Trump sparked waves of panic, confusion, disbelief, betrayal, and anger this weekend after announcing on Saturday that he would be imposing 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, and a lower 10% tariff on Canadian oil, natural gas, and electricity. Trump’s announcement also included new 10% tariffs on Chinese goods.

Now, these are in addition to existing tariffs on Chinese products, and already two thirds of all US trade with China is around under 20% tariffs, which Trump imposed during his first term. And the Biden administration actually raised tariff rates to 100% on electric vehicles, 50% on solar cells, and up to 25% on select products like EV batteries, critical minerals, steel, aluminum, and face masks.

Now, Canada and Mexico are the two largest trading partners of the US. China is the third. Together, they account for over 40% of all imports into the US, according to data from the United States International Trade Commission.

Now, tariffs are taxes imposed by the government on imported goods, and those taxes are paid to the government by the American buyers of those foreign goods. Often, those higher costs are passed on to the consumer either because prices for the same goods are now higher and businesses just don’t want to eat those costs themselves, or because domestic supply of those goods decreases as a result of the tariffs and the demand in price in the domestic market increases. Either way, the point is that we would feel the brunt of it.

Now, Trump repeatedly waved away concerns that the cost of his tariffs would be borne by regular people already hurting from punishing inflation and an ongoing cost of living crisis. On Friday before announcing the new tariffs. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that tariffs don’t cause inflation, they cause something else. Let’s take a listen.

[CLIP BEGINS]

President Donald Trump:  Tariffs don’t cause inflation. They cause success. They cause big success. So we’re going to have great success. There could be some temporary short-term disruption, and people will understand that…

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  So that short-term disruption is worth it and these tariffs are necessary, according to Trump, in order to correct what he has long called an unfair trade arrangement between the United States and the rest of the world — And to supposedly force America’s neighbors and trading partners to do more to stop illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl into the United States. The White House actually said on Saturday after announcing the tariffs, “The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). […] President Trump is taking bold action to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”

So Trump’s tariffs on all Chinese products already went into effect at midnight on Tuesday, and Beijing quickly hit back. As The New York Times reports, “The Chinese government came back with a series of retaliatory steps, including additional tariffs on liquified natural gas, coal, farm machinery and other products from the United States.” It also said it had “implemented restrictions on the export of certain critical minerals, many of which are used in the production of high-tech products. In addition, Chinese market regulators said they had launched an antimonopoly investigation into Google.”

Now, Canada and Mexico, on the other hand, managed to avoid the same fate as China — For now. At the 11th hour after this whole melodramatic Trumpian spectacle played out into Monday, President Trump spoke with Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum, and Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and agreed to a 30-day pause on his tariff threat. At 5:00 PM on Monday, Trump posted to Truth Social: “I am [very] pleased with this initial outcome, and the Tariffs announced on Saturday will be paused for a 30 day period to see whether or not a final Economic deal with Canada can be structured. FAIRNESS FOR ALL!” he wrote in all caps.

So Trump’s line about reaching a final economic deal with Canada is pretty much a direct sign that this was never just about immigration and fentanyl. And minutes before Trump’s announcement on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau posted himself on the platform X: “I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border. In addition, Canada is making new commitments to appoint a Fentanyl Czar, we will list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada-US Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering. I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million.”

So what does this deal with Canada to avoid this week’s tariffs actually mean in practice? What deals are going to be struck, and what concessions are going to be extracted in the future under Trump’s tariff threats? What the hell is going on, and what does this all look like from the Canada side? How will all of this shape Canada’s already tumultuous political situation, with Trudeau having just announced that he was stepping down as the country’s prime minister, with Canada now facing its own high-stakes election in October? And with the country, like many around the world, taking its own hard right turn — And with a very Trump-like, but also very uniquely Canadian, far-right figure ascending in Pierre Poilievre? What impact will these trade wars have on working people across North America, and how can we help each other understand what’s happening with an international perspective? And how can we fuse our common struggles across borders?

We’re going to dig into all of this today, and I really could not be more honored and excited to have this incredible panel of journalists, media makers, colleagues, and collaborators joining us today from across the border in Canada.

Joining us today, we’ve got Samira Mohyeddin. Samira is a journalist and broadcaster and founder of On The Line Media. We’ve got Desmond Cole. Desmond is a journalist based in Toronto, and he is currently working with The Breach, an independent media outlet in Canada. He is also the author of the bestselling 2020 book The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power. And last but certainly not least, we’ve got Andrea Houston, who has spent more than two decades as a journalist, human rights advocate, and journalism instructor. Andrea is currently the managing editor of Ricochet Media in Canada. She is also an instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University School of Journalism, where she developed and teaches Canada’s first ever queer media course.

So Samira, Andrea, Desmond, thank you all so much for joining me on The Real News today. It’s been a hell of a week, but I’m so grateful to have you all here.

Desmond Cole:  Thank you.

Andrea Houston:  Thanks for having us

Maximillian Alvarez:  As always, I wish it was under better circumstances, but I could not think of a better panel to help us dig in to all of this.

Before we really dig into the real meat and potatoes of the deal that was struck this week and what this all means moving forward, I want to do a quick round around the table, and take us back to this weekend. I want to ask what this all looked like and felt like from where you guys are sitting. Because after Trump’s announcement on Saturday, like he was squeezing lighter fuel onto a barbecue, Trump escalated fears about what’s behind this massive impending trade war with Canada when he posted on Sunday on Truth Social: “We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason,” Trump says. “We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and we have more Lumber than we could ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND,” he writes in all caps, “NO TARIFFS!”

So Samira, Desmond, Andrea, what do you see when you see our president posting batshit stuff like this? Walk us through what this weekend was like for you. Samira, let’s start with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  It’s just full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Canada’s not going to become the 51st state. It’s just absurd. We do, just on a daily basis, there’s about $3.6 billion worth of trade coming across the borders. So America needs Canada just as much as Canada needs America.

What I can say, though, is that what’s really interesting is seeing this Canadian nationalism, because we’re not really rah rah rah, sis boom bah type people here. We’re quite muted in our patriotism. So there’s a lot of buy local happening, grocery stores putting up signs showing you exactly what is and isn’t Canadian — These are Peruvian grapes that I’m enjoying. So that’s been really interesting to watch.

I didn’t go through the weekend thinking, oh my God, the tariffs are coming. That is not something that scares me, but I’m seeing the ripple effects of the politicians here and how they’re responding. Like our premier here in Ontario manufactured hats saying “Canada is not for sale”. all the politicians are finding ways so that they could flex their patriotic muscles. That has been really interesting to watch for me.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, it’s like truly the Trumpian age where everything is a branding opportunity, for Christ’s sake. Andrea, what about you [laughs]? And then Desmond, let’s go to you.

Andrea Houston:  I think for me, like Samira, I was less focused on the tariffs and more focused on some of the other announcements that were coming out that were absolutely gut wrenching and sickening and heartbreaking all at once. What we’re seeing right now is a fire hose of news. We’re just seeing constant bad announcements, bad decisions, and executive orders meant to confuse and overwhelm us.

So what I was really focused on was the USAID cuts and the loss of foreign aid and the impacts of that, the devastating loss of life that we’re going to see. I sit on the board of a small NGO in Uganda, an LGBTQ NGO in Uganda, and it’s just one of many that will likely see the impacts of this. Everything from HIV-positive people not getting their meds, which could result in a generation of babies being born who are HIV positive because their mothers didn’t get the medication for even a pause. That is the devastation that this can have. That is really what I was focusing on and absolutely in pain over, what this is going to have on a global stage.

We are seeing an unelected, unaccountable non-American who is directing some of the most important political [people] in the world and how it impacts the lives of everyday people, not just in America, but around the world. He’s even called USAID evil. This impacts 25 million people who are living with AIDS around the world, HIV/AIDS, who are suddenly, without warning, cut off from life-saving medications. This is nothing short of a crime against humanity.

Honestly, all of this has been, in many ways, predicted. This is all playing out very much in how, at least, I have been saying it’s going to play out. And many people that I’ve gone to parties with have heard me talking like, we’re going to see a dictator probably rise in North America. Trump is going to come back. Trump is going to win again. To me, this is not shocking. All of this, watching the history of especially the last 10 years, shows that this has all been written out for us. We’ve seen the patterns of this. So it’s really surprising to me how so many Americans seem really blindsided by all of this. This is an assault on democracy by far-right extremists, and I think the only way we have to fight against it is doing exactly what we’re doing right now, is talking in very frank terms about what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a dictatorship rise.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that was beautifully, powerfully put.

Desmond, how about you, man? What was this weekend like for you? What are you seeing when you’re seeing all this shit?

Desmond Cole:  Thanks for the invitation, Max, and it’s really great to be here with Samira and with Andrea.

The circus is back in town, isn’t it? Here we are. I think that the game of people like Donald Trump is to suck all the energy from the room, is to try and force everybody to pay attention only to them. Nothing exists except what they want. Trade is no good because trade benefits two sides instead of only the United States. Me, me, me, he baby trying to grab every toy at the same time. We’ve known what this is about and we’ve seen it before. I find it exhausting.

So it’s not about pretending it’s not happening and tuning it out, but I have been trying, since last weekend, to think about what are the things that are going to be missed in the wake of this crisis? What are we, on a domestic level in Canada, marginalizing while we turn so much energy and attention towards this threat of tariffs?

We have a provincial election happening in Ontario right now. Our premier, Doug Ford, wanted, initially, to have an election early — You can call your own elections here in the parliamentary system of Ontario and of Canada — So Doug Ford chose to decide to have an election earlier than the end of his term, and he wanted to run against Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, because Justin Trudeau is very unpopular and very weak right now. So Ford’s idea was, I’m going to have an election and I’m going to campaign against this other guy in another jurisdiction who will make me look strong by comparison.

Then, of course, Justin Trudeau announced that he was resigning, so now you can’t campaign against him anymore. What do you do? And here comes Trump, and here comes the tariff threat. And so Doug Ford says, ah, I’ll just pivot to running against the president of another country, and I’ll talk about how I’m going to keep you safe from him and all of the threats that he poses to business and to our economy.

And it’s working out quite well, I have to say, strategically, for Doug Ford. The only problem is that we have a dramatically underfunded healthcare system in Ontario that’s been devastated by COVID and no one’s talking about it. We have, I don’t even want to call it a housing crisis because the housing situation in Ontario is happening on purpose to the benefit of landlords and developers, but against the interests of, particularly, tenants. We have an explosion of homeless people, of tents popping up in every town and city across the province of Ontario because people cannot afford to pay rent anymore. These things are becoming secondary to how do we fight Trump? How do we all fight Trump? Even if the premier, for example, doesn’t negotiate directly with Trump on a daily basis, and that’s not his job, it’s still all funneling down towards this conversation.

We’re also seeing things like Pierre Poillievre has been mentioned, the Conservative leader who wants to take over for Justin Trudeau, and we’ll probably be having an election at the federal level shortly. That conversation has shifted as well because Pierre Poilievre for, what, two years now, has been telling us that the next election in Canada was going to be about whether or not we have a carbon tax, and he can’t do that anymore because this conversation about tariffs and protecting ourselves from America has become so dominant that it’s like if you don’t play into that paradigm now, you’re not really talking about anything.

So it has changed the conversations that we’re having here politically, and I don’t think that that’s for the better because while we do have to address the issue of tariffs and our trade situation with the United States, we’ve got a lot of other things going on in this country. We can’t live or die by whether or not we buy fruits and vegetables from our country instead of America, whether we support Galen Weston and corporate billionaires in Canada instead of supporting corporate billionaires in the United States. That’s not going to really materially change things for us.

So I had some fun on Twitter on Sunday memeing about having to give up my Cherry Blasters and Oreos because of this intending trade war. And I do try to have a little bit of fun and lightness with it because I don’t want to talk about this shit. I want to talk about the things that I do as a journalist on a daily basis that relate to immigration, housing, policing, things that are affecting people in their local communities, the rates of welfare and disability. I want to talk about the things that allow people to live a decent life here on the day-to-day. And again, I’m not saying tariffs don’t factor into that, but we cannot eschew the rest of our political responsibilities to fight the president of another country.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a really powerful and poignant point and something that we mentioned on a previous livestream with Medi Hassan and Francesca Fiorentini, and a subject that I spoke with Sara Nelson about, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants. And Sara, let’s not forget, became a household name during the Trump-led government shutdown in 2019 when she called for a general strike to end the shutdown. And within a day the shutdown ended after 35 days, the longest shutdown in US history.

And out of that example, Sara really gave us a poignant lesson that you were articulating there, Desmond, is that we cannot define our struggle solely by how we respond to Trump. We have to have a shared basis of understanding of what we are fighting for as working people, what our needs are and our methods of getting those needs met. It can’t just all be reactive. We have to be moving forward and advancing the clearly defined causes that unite working people across red states, blue states, union, non-union, and even across North America and beyond. If we don’t have that shared basic understanding of what we’re fighting for, then we’re going to be exhausted by the end of year one of the Trump administration because all we’re doing is fighting against what’s coming, and there’s always more coming.

So we’re going to talk about this more as the stream goes on. Before we talk about the details of the trade deal and what this portends moving forward, I want to use a few minutes here to address some of what you guys were already bringing up because we have folks tuning in across the United States and even in Canada — The Real News was actually founded in Canada, so it’s all in the family here. But we know that folks in the US and Canada do not have the shared basis of understanding of what’s going on in Canadian politics right now.

And so I want to just spend a few minutes here clarifying our terms and letting folks know, especially here in the US, what the basic context is. What do they need to understand right now about Canadian politics for the rest of our discussion to make sense? You mentioned Poilievre, we mentioned the upcoming elections and how this is already changing the dynamic. Do we all have a shared understanding of what a tariff is? So let’s take just five to eight minutes here to just clarify any terms that we feel need to be clarified for everything else to make sense. So Samira, let’s start again with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  A tariff is a tax on goods coming from another country. That is what a tariff is. Actually, I’m constantly looking up what a tariff is. But this is not something that just affects Canadians. When you put a tariff on us, it affects Americans. What is so asinine and absurd is that Trump never talks about the fact that the tariff affects the domestic business that buys that product. So American business owners will be just as affected by high tariffs on Canada. That’s the absurdity of what Trump is doing. But that’s never talked about, unfortunately, when he talks about this.

And then at the same time, you’re seeing very different reactions to this imposition of tariffs when it comes, if it comes, from the different political parties here. Poilievre, for instance, has taken this route that many people have talked about before, but which is to reduce the barriers that are here between interprovincial businesses. So we have provinces here in Canada, and there are barriers that they’re pushing to have taken away. For instance, if I’m in Ontario, I can’t get wines from British Columbia because the LCBO has this sort of monopoly on what comes in and what goes out. So that’s the route that Poilievre is taking in pushing back on this. But everyone is wearing a different patriotic hat in looking at how to respond to tariffs.

And then you have Mark Carney, who’s showing himself as being the outsider. He’s supposed to take over. He’s the new running for the Liberal leadership — We have a leadership race here, also, as you said, Trudeau has stepped down. So there is that aspect too. Carney was running the Bank of England. He was running the Bank of Canada before. So everybody is coming at this in a different way.

But I really firmly believe that Trump is just doing this whole tariff thing to divert attention away from, really, a coup that is taking place within America. And I know that some people say, oh, he is just an idiot. I say that at times, but I firmly believe that this is dangerous. I really think that people do need to respond to what is happening and what Trump is doing. And if it’s not taking to the streets, I really think that something needs to happen in the US.

And I hope this is a bit of a wake-up call, not only for people in the United States, but for people in Canada. I have a lot of friends in the food industry, for instance, who for years have been talking about us producing, being more self-reliant in terms of production of food products in supply chains. I firmly believe that this needs to be a bit of a wake-up call for all of us.

Maximillian Alvarez:  It’s pretty wild to be having this conversation while an unelected oligarch and the richest man in the world and his technofascist Silicon Valley broligarchs who are cheering it all on are storming my government an hour away. But what we’re trying to do on these streams is channel our focus. Our focus is a form of resistance. As we said, if we’re all frenetically responding to the endless bad news that’s coming, we can’t stay focused on a given thing. And so of course we are focusing today on Trump’s trade war, the tariffs, the relationship between the US and Canada. But we can’t ignore the fact that that conversation is happening in a context where the corporate-led coup is happening as we speak. So we’re trying to balance those two things, of course. But yeah, I really appreciate you underlying that point.

Samira Mohyeddin:  I’m only saying that because I keep thinking of what Andrea said about the global implications of this beyond Canada and the US. She brought up USAID, for instance. It’s not just Trump. You saw Marco Rubio today, Elon Musk yesterday saying they’re thieves. This is very dangerous, and this is how fascism starts. These little trickles keep coming at you until [they’re] a massive wave and you don’t even know what to focus on because there’s so much coming at you all the time.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And with all that, it’s even easier to lose, again, the context we need to understand any given subject like the tariffs here. And so in that vein, are there more points here that folks watching in the US need to understand about the rise of Poilievre, the rightward turn, and the key political issues in Canada right now that we should get out on the table before we dig into the deal that was struck this week?

Desmond Cole:  Well, can I try a couple of things, maybe, in terms of myth busting. Trump has been saying repeatedly that there is all of this fentanyl, particularly, flowing from Canada into the United States. The numbers that we have here in Canada is that between 2023, October, and September, 2024, the United States seized 19-and-a-half kilograms of fentanyl coming across the border from Canada. Fentanyl, we know, is one of the most potent drugs out there, so 19-and-a-half kilograms of fentanyl can certainly do a lot of damage, but I could fit 19-and-a-half kilos of fentanyl on the desk that I’m sitting in front of.

If you compare that with Mexico, US border agents seized about nine-and-a-half thousand kilograms of fentanyl from the Mexico-US border. I don’t think I could fit that on this desk — And that’s not to scapegoat Mexico, by the way, because most of the drugs coming in the United States are coming through ports and places that are just normal business areas. They’re coming on planes. The idea that this is just a strictly border issue is a complete fabrication of Trump. He has also —

Maximillian Alvarez:  And smuggled in by Americans [laughs].

Desmond Cole:  Sure, of course.

But Trump also says there’s all these people pouring into the United States. He loves the specter of so-called, as he wants to say, illegal people. I reject that term out of hand. We’re talking a lot about goods being able to move across borders. People ought to be able to move across borders freely as well. But again, it’s just a myth that there are all of these people entering the United States from Canada without any kind of permissions or visas or supervision.

What’s actually happening, and has been happening throughout the Trump administration for a long time, but particularly during Trump, is that when he does these anti-immigrant fearmongerings, when he says he’s going to get ICE to deport 20 million people, they actually come to Canada, they come to our country. It’s the opposite of what he’s saying. So that’s another maybe important thing for an American audience to know. And again, I’m not saying that because I want to demonize anyone crossing any borders. I’m just trying to tell people what the facts of the real conversation here are.

And maybe a final thing for people to think about is this idea of trade between two countries. Trump says that there’s a huge trade deficit between Canada and the United States, meaning that services and goods go across the border both ways, as Samira was saying. But basically, the United States exports more goods to us in Canada than it receives back the other way. And for Trump, that’s a huge problem.

Like… Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m getting it backwards already, see, because I’m not an economist, the trade deficit is — I had to even write notes because it’s not like I talk about this stuff every day — But basically there’s an imbalance in how much the united exports to Canada versus how much it imports, and Trump thinks that that’s really bad. The only thing is when you buy goods from another country, you get the goods. It’s a trade. That’s the whole idea. So this idea that Canada is somehow screwing over the United States, or I think in the clip that you played, Max, that we’re being subsidized — No, that’s called business. I don’t have a trade deficit with the grocery store because when I go to the grocery store, they feed me and I have food in my house.

But again, to this narcissist called Trump, as long as someone else is getting an equal, fair exchange, it’s a ripoff. America should get all the benefits, every benefit should come to America and no benefits should go to anyone else. Everyone should buy America’s goods, but no one should receive any benefits back the other way.

So I think it’s important for people to understand trade not as some zero-sum thing the way that Trump is trying to paint it. But this is the largest, actually, trading partnership in the world. And the idea of doing these punitive tariffs, Europe and the European Union is essentially founded, in part, on the premise that this destroys countries. This makes countries want to go to war with each other. This makes it so much more likely that there’s going to be political strife and instability. So when you start fucking around with tariffs and trade, you’re making other kinds of problems and conflicts — Between your allies, by the way — Far more likely.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’ve got two more clarifying points I want to throw in there, building off what Desmond said. And then Andrea, I want to come to you after that and ask if we could talk a bit more about how this is already reshaping the political landscape in Canada as we head into the federal elections later this year. But two other —

Andrea Houston:  I was just going to jump in on something that both of them were talking about with regard to trade and that these are just taxes. And it’s actually something that the left in Canada, at least, many, many years ago, back when the trade deals were first being crafted, the left in Canada was talking about imposing tariffs on many of these American companies back then. And maybe we would be in a different scenario today if, say, American tech companies had tariffs or taxes imposed on them when they were first rising up. Maybe journalism wouldn’t be on the chopping block the way it is currently. There’s a lot of industries, oil and gas immediately comes to mind, that we’re not taxing them nearly enough — In fact, we give them money, we give them subsidies. We give them billions of dollars in subsidies.

So I think you’d find a lot of people on the left in Canada, and probably in the US as well, would be very much in favor of dramatically raising the taxes and tariffs on some of these industries, lumber and all these other things that we do trade as countries, the more harmful industries.

I just want to make sure that that was put out there, and especially with the Online News Act here in Canada, there’s a lot that’s pro-tariffs that we could be doing that we can’t talk about right now because we’re inundated with terrible Trump news.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Tariffs are a commonly used tool. It could be used for many purposes. The United Auto Workers Union president, Shawn Fain, just came out with a statement this week saying that the UAW is in favor of tariffs that are going to help the auto manufacturing industry. They’re not blanket bad or blanket good one way or the other. But Fain did also say that he explicitly rejects workers in America being used as political ploys in this trade war to demonize immigrants and further Trump’s anti-immigrant, fascist agenda.

So there is more nuance here than what we’re getting in a lot of the news reports, and certainly from them what we’re getting from the White House. So we want to be clear about that too, building off what Andrea was saying.

And we also gotta be clear about one other thing when it comes to tariffs here, because the tariffs are not just Trump’s method of diplomatic strong-arming. They are, in fact, a key policy that makes the rest of his project work, going all the way back to his previous administration.

Let’s not forget that the singular achievement, the biggest achievement from the first Trump administration, was a giant tax cut in 2017 that the Congressional Budget Office estimated, at the time, would cost $1.9 trillion over 10 years. Trump has already vowed to make the 2017 cuts permanent, and to even add on more tax cuts in his new term.

These are tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich and corporations. These are tax cuts that are coming on top of the Bush era tax cuts from 20 years ago. All of this is eroding the tax base that pays for the shit that our government needs or that it is spending money on. And we gotta make up for that loss somehow, especially as the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before that, keeps shelling out money to the military-industrial complex. Trump wants to build his border walls, mobilize law enforcement. All of that costs money, and tariffs are one of Trump’s main answers to the problem of where do we get the money when we’ve been cutting all the taxes of the rich and eroding the American tax base for so long?

That’s where you and I come in. As we’ve said, consumers, people in these countries, working people like you and me, are going to feel the brunt of these tariffs, especially if they’re not offset with increased manufacturing and all that stuff. So if and when those costs are passed on to you and me, it’s not just that we are the ones who are being hurt by the trade war, it’s that the pain that we are feeling in our wallets is paying for these goddamn tax breaks for the rich. That is also another thing to talk about here when we’re talking about tariffs and who they’re actually hurting. That needs to be understood before we move forward.

And also, as Desmond pointed out, and Samira did as well, there is a distraction element here, and Trump already signaled that. He claims that these tariff threats were to fight illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl. And then on Monday when he struck this deal with Sheinbaum and Trudeau, immediately said that we’re going to pause for 30 days until we have this new economic plan with Canada. So it wasn’t about immigrants, and it wasn’t about fentanyl, or it wasn’t just about those, it’s about restructuring the relationship between these countries.

And that may help explain Trump’s childish, joking but deadly serious lines about Canada should become the 51st state. I recognize this line, as I’m sure you guys do, having grown up in the same generation. Let’s not forget, as I’ve said on this stream, I grew up deeply conservative. My conservative friends and I in the early aughts loved punching Canada as the 51st state or America’s hat. These tired, old, conservative jokes are constantly recycled through Trump’s mouth.

And so there is an element there that I think we also need to pay attention to. When Trump makes these proclamations and invokes that outdated bullyish humor, what he is trying to do is, basically, take school-yard dick measuring bully stuff and scale it up to the level of international diplomacy because that’s what he wants out of Canada, for Canada to become the subservient sidekick, held under America’s arm and getting a noogie and giving us whatever we want. And that’s what he needs the relationship between Canada and the US to be for so much of his other policy goals to actually work.

So like Samira said, Canada’s not actually going to become the 51st state, but in invoking that line, Trump is doing this schoolyard bully politics that is going to have real long-term implications that are going to not just affect Canadians and Americans, but are going to ripple across the world.

OK. So with all of that, I want to turn to what this is going to mean for Canada and Canadians in the coming months. We’ve already addressed the fact that this is hitting a bombshell in an already tumultuous time in Canada. I wanted to ask if we could dig into that a little bit more.

And Andrea, I want to come to you, and then Samira, then Desmond. But yeah, guys, give us a little more, tell us a little more about who Pierre Poilievre is, what these elections represent, how the new Trump administration is changing the political dynamic in your country.

Andrea Houston:  Pierre Poilievre is somebody that is a type of leader that Canadians are not used to. This is not a traditional Canadian political leader. He could be described as the most online political leader that we’ve ever seen in how he conducts himself, how he runs his campaign. It is very American to a lot of Canadians.

And with regard to Poilievre and his rise in Canada, again, you can point to our history as the roadmap for this, very similarly to how we can point to American history as the roadmap for Trump. While Canada has certainly done more to look back on our history and the road to reconciliation — We have a truth and reconciliation process that we have gone through, but it’s barely scratched the surface. And there’s a reason why it’s called truth and reconciliation, not truth, reconciliation and accountability.

Many people in Canada, myself included, and people in my circles, I put the blame for where we are right now on the shoulders of both Liberals and NDP — In many ways especially the NDP — For not responding to the moment and not standing up to Poilievre in ways that would have maybe been a clear resistance to this onslaught.

I’m talking back when he first started to really rise up as the leader. Around the trucker protests, there were moments when we could have had a different outcome to the road that we’re currently on. The NDP had numerous opportunities to swing extremely left, doing the kind of policy initiatives that Desmond talked about with housing and climate and populist policies that would’ve really launched a challenge to Poilievre and the populism that he has put forward that is clearly popular in Canada. Especially out West, this loyalty to oil and gas, connecting the oil and gas industry to Canadian patriotism and the dominionism that we do see coming out of the histories of colonialism and white supremacy, it’s all connected.

When you study these systems, it’s not surprising where we are right now in both of our countries. Both countries have undemocratic voting systems and our leaders have done everything to maintain that status quo. Even in Canada, when we had a few elections ago, the Liberals ran on changing the voting system. That was the main point of 2015’s election, saying this will be the last run on first past the post. First thing they did when they were elected is they reversed that policy, like, nope, we’re not going to do that after all. As soon as they figured out that if they did change the voting system, then it would ensure that it wasn’t just a Liberal and Conservative, likely majority, government in power. So all of these moments of opportunism, these missed opportunities from the left have all played into this.

And then, of course, this fragmenting of the left, the populace, has also played into this. We don’t have a solid anti-war movement to stand up against Trump. Where’s the media to really highlight the left in Canada? I don’t think I’ve ever seen really left-wing perspectives on our mainstream media. So we have only ourselves to blame for creating an environment that is fertile for a far-right extremist like Pierre Poilievre.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Samira, Desmond, anything you want to add to that before we talk about what comes next?

Samira Mohyeddin:  Pierre Poilievre is a man for these times, and I firmly agree with Andrea that we created this monster, because I don’t think people responded to him the way they should have. He has really become a figure, he’s almost like the little brother that Trump wouldn’t let in the room when they were growing up together.

Pierre Poilievre recently did this interview with Jordan Peterson, and I think it was like 12 hours long [Cole laughs]. I couldn’t sit through the entire thing. But it was all about wokeism and DEI. And these are the same things that you’re hearing in the US across the administration right now in the United States: Wokeism is the enemy; Diversity, equity, inclusion are the reasons why planes are going down. This is what we’re actually seeing replicated in our country. And a lot of the politicians who know that it’s wrong — And I’m speaking about the Liberals and the NDP — Are not pushing back on it the way they should be.

I know that a lot of the things that Pierre Poilievre says are ridiculous, but they’re also dangerous because they’re not being taken seriously. It’s unfortunate because, in a lot of ways, I like to think that Canada is better than that, but we end up just replicating what our neighbors to the south are doing politically, unfortunately.

Because you have figures — And I don’t know if we’re going to touch on this, but I think it’s really important that Gaza, Palestine, what’s happening over there has really influenced and affected our politics here. A lot of our politicians here in Canada are using what is happening in Gaza as a platform for themselves to try and garner support in the federal election that is coming up. And a lot of them are making some big mistakes in the way they’re responding.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, yeah, say a little more about how.

Samira Mohyeddin:  You’re seeing people, like we have a member of parliament here named Kevin Vuong who runs as an independent in the federal politics. He has really made this his thing. He even traveled to Israel, and we had a whole bunch of our politicians, our prime minister didn’t go, but a whole bunch of these low-level politicians going over to Israel and then chirping all over social media about this person is an antisemite or that person is an antisemite, and they’re getting a lot of support from communities because of that.

And we’re not seeing our more left-leaning like the NDP party rising up and speaking out against this in the way that they really should be. They are not responding in the way that they should be.

You’re hearing people, say, for instance, recently the reaction to Trump saying that we’re going to own Gaza and we’re going to make a Riviera of the Middle East there, et cetera. Poilievre, for instance, didn’t even respond to it. He had nothing to say, but the Liberals came out and said, we believe in a two-state solution. How can you say you believe in a two-state solution when you don’t even recognize, officially, the other state, meaning Palestine? Canada voted at the United Nations to not recognize it. It didn’t recognize Palestine as a state. So how can you say you believe in a two-state solution when you don’t even recognize one of the states that you say that you believe there’s a solution to?

And the NDP [leader] Jagmeet Singh did come out and say that this is a preposterous thing that Trump is saying. But why are we only reacting when Trump says something? The same NDP is not allowing their member of provincial parliament, Sarah Jama, to come back into the fold.

So there’s a lot of talking out both sides of their mouths here. And I don’t think people are taking what is happening seriously, because a lot of people on the Progressive Conservative side are winning ridings because of their responses to what is happening in Gaza.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to hover on this point for a second. It reveals a lot for the larger conversation that we’re having here. And we’ve got another 30, 40 minutes here on the stream, so I want to zero in on this. Because, as you all have said, there are so many mirror reflections of the political reality in the US that are being reflected in Canada. But there are also many ways in which Canada is not the United States, and so many times, especially here in the US, we just assume what’s happening here and the conditions that we have here are the same as they are up there, and that is not always the case.

For example, the latest statistics just came out showing that the United States is now in single-digit union density numbers, meaning that less than 10% of workers across this country are in a union. Canada has around 30%, which is where we used to be at our height back in the ’50s and early ’60s. So you can’t just talk about the labor movement in the US and Canada as if they’re the same thing.

So the point I’m trying to make here is that when it comes to the role of Gaza, Israel and its genocidal US- and Canada-supported war on Gaza, and the right of Palestinians to exist, I wanted to ask in terms of how that is shaping the political scene in Canada. What factors are the same? Is Israel’s lobbying influence relatively similar in Canada as it is here in the United States? Is the crackdown from universities to the media on pro-Palestinian, antigenocide voices following the same playbook? Is the involvement of big tech — You guys have had Facebook intervening in your news feeds in a way that we haven’t in the past couple years. So I just wanted to, through the question of Gaza, try to answer some of those other questions about how circumstances in Canada are very similar to what they are here, and also how they are not.

Samira Mohyeddin:  In terms of the university campuses, it’s identical. We haven’t gotten to the place where we’re speaking about Zionism as a protected class of people. I think NYU and Harvard both now are seeing Zionists as a protected class like any other race, gender. So we have a political ideology being protected, and that is unheard of. We haven’t done that here yet. However, I can tell you that there are numerous professors, numerous students who have been chided for speaking out against genocide, deans, provosts bringing people in. And the students who were in the University of Toronto encampment were actually taken to court. They were part of an injunction that the university got to have the encampment disbanded.

So we don’t have things here like APAC, but we certainly have CIJA, the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs. They may not be doling out the same amount of money that politicians in the US get, but they’re still getting free trips to Israel, and they’re still getting some funding. So it’s like a little baby replication. We just don’t have that type of funding. But we haven’t gone there yet. The UFT has not adopted IRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism with critiques of Israel, but we certainly had our Canadian Broadcasting Corporation use that term, use that definition when they recently gave a workshop to their journalists. So these things are happening here, just not on such a grand scale.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Desmond, what about you, man? I see you shaking over there. You got a lot to say. It doesn’t have to necessarily be about Gaza, but yeah, hop in here. Are there other aspects that are similar or distinctly different that you want to highlight, or other areas in which this is reshaping the political map in Canada that you want folks to pay attention to?

Andrea Houston:  Sorry, is that for me?

Maximillian Alvarez:  So I was tossing it to Desmond, just because I feel like I skipped Desmond by accident.

Desmond Cole:  No, no, no. That’s OK. I mean, it’s public, so I might as well say it on this stream. I’m one of, I believe just over 100 people in the city of Toronto, anyway, who have been arrested, and I’m still facing charges because I participated in a Palestine solidarity demonstration last January. We are being treated for these acts as though we are not just allegedly breaking the laws of Canada, but that we are also doing something specifically harmful to the Jewish communities in Canada. That’s the allegation.

And I say that specifically because there’s been a lot of conflation, as Samira said, with this idea that if you speak out for Palestinian life and liberation in this moment, it’s because you are an antisemite, because you want something specifically bad to happen, not even around Israel, but to Jews all over the world wherever they happen to be, including in Canada. An absurd claim.

So I’ve been caught up in that. I’ve been reporting on other people who have been caught up on it. Samira has been doing some of the best work in this country around that, and we salute that.

It’s been a really awful climate. Canada’s been an enabler of the United States and of Israel. Canada’s sent weapons to Israel in the last 15 months, but the partnership is decades old. Canada’s policy towards Israel and Israeli aggression inside of Gaza and Palestine, they align pretty, I think, directly. Israel makes the decisions about what’s going to happen in that region and its allies, Canada, United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, they say, what do you need? How can we help you? To the detriment of the Palestinian people.

It’s a little different here, I think, because the Muslim population, the Arab population — Not so much the specifically Palestinian, but the Muslim and Arab population in this country has a fair amount of influence, a growing, I would say, amount of influence in Canada, has people elected in government, has large organizations that have a voice, and is part of a lot of conversations that can put a lot of pressure on the government.

And I think Canada has tried to tread a little more carefully than Joe Biden did in the United States during his time. Canada has tried to portray itself as being more even-handed, even signaling towards the formal end of this conflict, that maybe it was going to start withholding some weapons in some circumstances, that maybe it was going to change its votes at the UN in some circumstances in order to signal to people that it was getting frustrated with Israel’s ongoing siege. But for the most part, I think those things have been similar between the two countries.

I actually wanted to go back to this idea of the trade and the things like this because we were talking about Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal Conservative Party.

So he just recently came out this week with a statement about what he wants to do with fentanyl. He’s trying to appear as though he’s taking Trump’s fake claims about fentanyl very seriously and that he’s going to do something about it if he’s elected prime minister of Canada. So now he has a proposal that says if he becomes prime minister, he’s going to propose a legal change that if you’re caught selling 20 to 40 milligrams of fentanyl, you’ll automatically receive a 15-year sentence — So we are reviving the war on drugs that has existed in this country for decades that we’ve been trying to fight so hard to get rid of — And then he says, if you have 40 milligrams or above, then you get an automatic life sentence. This is his proposal to try and demonstrate how tough he is.

And I bring that up because I want to demonstrate that there are consequences for how people say that they’re going to pursue remedies to this trade war between the United States and Canada that are going to have really, really bad, harmful outcomes. This policy by Poilievre, he’s so stupid. He claims that that policy is to target who he calls “drug kingpins” — A kingpin carrying 20 milligrams of fentanyl. That’s somebody who’s probably got that amount of drugs to feed a habit, to sell a little bit to some people around them and to have some for themselves. That’s what 20 milligrams is. It’s not a kingpin of drugs.

But because of the specter raised by Trump and because conservative forces in this country want to be seen to respond to that, now we have a renewed front on the war on drugs when we should be going the complete opposite direction. So I just want to say that to talk about some of the impacts that it has domestically on us to have to deal with these things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I really, really appreciate those points. And I do, in this last half hour, really want to channel our focus on what this is all going to mean for working people, regular people who are trying to get by in a world that is making it increasingly hard for us to do so, and now we got all this shit piling on top of us.

But for your average viewer, I want us to talk about what we’re facing and how we actually see our fates as necessarily intertwined. And whatever we do to resist this and get out of it is going to need to be done with a cross-border sense of solidarity that allows us to see beyond our own domestic sphere.

So I want us to talk about that in this last half hour. But by way of getting us there, Andrea, I did want to toss it back to you in case you had any other thoughts about how this week’s bombshell is reshaping the political map, how we got the current political map in Canada that we got — Why is Poilievre ascending and so popular? What explains this right-wing drift that maybe we haven’t covered yet? Anything like that that you wanted to get on the table too?

Andrea Houston:  Well, the short answer is white supremacy [laughs]. That is the short answer. Oil and gas, I think, is a big part of this. I think that it binds both of our countries, and we can see that in the groups that have been at the forefront of the Project 2025 document, the Heritage Foundation and the Atlas Foundation, and a lot of these far-right groups that are, some of them started in Canada, some of them started in the US, but they definitely work in both countries, and they’re very much interconnected in the lobbying efforts that they do. So I really think that we have to follow the money like good journalists do, and we follow that money through the groups that are advocating and lobbying and pushing for these wild policies, these crazy policies.

I mentioned American exceptionalism before, but there’s also Canadian exceptionalism. This idea that we as North American white people have more claim to the land, more claim to policy, more claim to direct how things should happen around the world, where the money should flow and who should benefit. And I think that when we really name this, this is not just an American problem, this is a Canadian problem. And again, it’s how both of our intertwined histories have really played out.

I actually do think that Canada could become the 51st state. I actually do think that there is a real possibility that Canada could be annexed. I think our resources, particularly our water and our oil and gas and natural minerals, the minerals that power the EVs and phones and all that other stuff, the green transition, as it’s like to be sold to us, I think, is extremely appealing. Whether Trump is smart enough to understand the wealth that he can glean from Canada, the people who surround him most certainly do.

And I think that that is a plan for him. Whether he knows how to strategically execute that plan, I don’t know. But I do think that that is absolutely on the table is something that could happen, and I don’t know what Canada could really do to stop it, to be honest with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  — Burn down the White House, we’ll burn down the White House again [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  But that is, I think, a really crucial point. Because we are in a new era. Whatever it is, we know it’s not the old one. This is not neoliberalism, this is something new. This is a 21st century where the inviolable discourse that we grew up with is very violable right now, by which I mean the very concept of national sovereignty and a country’s right to exist and not be invaded. We grew up believing that, yeah, we don’t do that anymore. But here we are in 2025, Trump’s talking about taking Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, annexing Canada as the 51st state.

Now, of course, the tragic, comic irony of all this is that Indigenous people here in North America will remind us, like people in the Global South around the world will remind us that we have been violating other countries’ national sovereignty and right to exist in perpetuity. That is what we have been doing through our imperial exploits for decades.

But that also helps explain what’s happening now because folks watching may have heard the refrain that the empire is coming home. It always comes back. And that is, in many ways, what’s so shocking to people right now. We could, 20 years ago, be perfectly fine with compromising and violating the national sovereignty of a country like Iraq, but now when we’re talking about doing it to Canada, suddenly everybody is spooked because it’s so close to home.

But to Andrea’s point, I think it really does behoove us to consider this as not just Trumpian bluster and not just sound and fury — Though it is a lot of that too — But when Trump says he wants to take Greenland, it’s not for nothing. It’s because Greenland has all the goddamn minerals that we want and want to take for our economic future as green technologies become in higher demand, to say nothing of the shipping routes and the military strategic positioning of Greenland as climate change gets worse and as the ice melts and opens up new routes that we want to have control over.

So there is a logic underlying these ridiculous claims about Trump wanting to take Greenland, or even Trump wanting to take Canada, whose biggest export is crude oil, right?

Desmond Cole:  Can I say something though? Because yeah, maybe there’s a certain logic there, but these are allied countries. These are countries that, as Trudeau was trying to remind everyone the other day, have gone to war together and have died alongside each other. These are countries who are part of the Five Eyes. These are countries that are part of NATO. The idea that Canada is the number one threat or conquest in the eyes of the United States right now is pretty fucking stupid, I’m sorry.

At the end of it, we’re not the target. We’re being played with like so many other countries are being played with because I think that there’s a certain strategic chaos that Trump is trying to sow, as has already been said here, because it also helps him domestically. Looking like he’s beating up on all these other countries helps him look strong at home, and it distracts from things that are happening at home. It’s very convenient for him to do that. We just can’t formulate a politics about worrying about whether or not we’re going to be annexed.

Why would you annex your partner when they’re having such nice… Trump was the one that negotiated the USMCA trade agreement just five years ago with Trudeau and with Mexico. The idea that he’s not getting everything that he needs, or that country isn’t, or that they’re going to upend everything. We have to remember some of these things.

When Trump says, I’m going to put troops in Gaza, does the United States actually want to send people there? Does the man who campaigned on saying that all the wars were going to end and all of this nation building was going to stop? Is he really going to be able to turn on a dime and convince people, actually, we just have to start putting boots on the ground in all these other parts of the world? We’re going to be following this little toy on a string for the entire four years if it goes like this. I do think we have to be somewhat careful.

And just to the other point that was being brought up before about leftist or leftish entities in Canada, like the New Democrat Party, the NDP — I’m guilty of what I’m about to say, so I’m speaking as much to myself as I am to anyone out there listening — But the only way that the NDP is ever going to accept a leftist agenda is if there’s essentially a socialist takeover of that party, or if they collapse and there’s a new party that comes up in their place. That’s it. The people who run that party today don’t share the socialist values that maybe some of us do. They just don’t. And they’re not going to take socialist positions out of political opportunism.

I’m saying that knowing people like Sarah Jama, who’s been brought up in this conversation, who are formerly part of the NDP, who really believe this stuff, who are actually trying to shift politics in a more socialist, egalitarian direction. Those people are the minority. And the reason that I still orient a lot of my thinking towards the NDP is I know that there’s people like that in there, and it’s like y’all are trapped because you’re in an entity that wants to bring you along for the ride but is not about to move to the left.

And so when I say this, I’m thinking for Canada, and I’m thinking for Americans who had some hope in Bernie Sanders a little while back and who’ve been looking to the Democrats and being really disappointed that the Democrats don’t stand up to Republicans. We have to stop asking political entities that don’t explicitly have a socialist or leftist agenda to do so out of pragmatism. It’s just not going to happen.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s really, really clearly and powerfully put, brother. I think something that we all need to sit with, and something that folks here in the States are trying to work through too.

Because when we say the left, I don’t know who that means here or what that means. I think a lot of folks are waking up to the reality that we and others have been warning about for years, which is, if Trump comes back, or even if Harris wins and the Democrats prove that they can win without the Bernie wing of the party, then where does the left live? What is the left? Are these terms even useful anymore in the world that we’re living in? That’s a subject for another livestream. But these are the questions that we are asking ourselves right now.

But more than that, and again, sticking with the theme here, we’ve got to be looking and thinking and acting bigger. There is no sizable left in the United States to mobilize that, even if it was mobilized around a united front back in the ’40s, could take on the raid forces that are taking over the government right now. It does not exist.

And so if you want to fight this, and if you want a world that is different from the one we’re careening towards, you need to stop trying to organize the left. You need to start trying to organize the working class. You need to get out there and talk to your neighbors, workers, union, non-union, anyone and everyone that you can to bring us around a shared basis of fact-based reality, like basic human rights and principles, the most essential shit that actually unites us.

But as far as what that means on the institutional left in this country, again, even if we have an answer to that, it’s a combination of DSA, nonprofits, community orgs, all of which are doing invaluable work, but none of which actually have the size and capacity to be a robust bulwark against what’s happening right now. So I think we do need to really have some hard questions.

Samira Mohyeddin:  We need small acts from millions of people, and I firmly believe that that is what needs to happen. I’ll just give you an example, Max. We live in a country here in Canada that has a lot of monopolies in different sectors. So for instance, Desmond brought up the Weston family. This is a family here who owns multiple grocery chains, and they were involved in… What was that bread? [Crosstalk] They were fixing the price of bread?

Desmond Cole:  …Price fixing, yeah.

Samira Mohyeddin:  OK. That’s a reason to have a revolution if you’re in France. People in Canada need to understand the power that they have. There was a whole movement — The chain is called Loblaws — There was a whole movement to boycott Loblaws. Right now when these tariffs, they were talking about them, there is the Independent Grocers Federation here in Canada, 7,000 independent grocers. I firmly believe that people should just stop shopping at these big grocery stores and support the mom and pop shops on the corner. Trust me, their produce is amazing. They may not have certain things, but you don’t need that right now. I really think that people need to start doing these small acts of being more conscious of where they spend their money, what they do with it, and who they’re giving it to. It makes a difference.

BDS — And I’ll bring this back to Gaza again — BDS makes a difference. Companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s are hurting right now, and they have been upfront that it’s hurting them. So I think people need to realize the power of their own pockets.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a great lead-in to this final turn around, the table. I wanted to ask, A, we did pose the question about the deal that was struck between Canada and the US this week, and it feels like there’s a lot of sound and fury there. There are some additional resources being committed, but a lot of the details of this new economic plan between Canada and the US have yet to be seen. We’re going to find out in the coming weeks.

But I think one of the key questions that’s come out of this discussion is what other concessions will Trump be able to extract out of Canada and Mexico to align them with his own policy priorities to avoid these tariff threats in the future? And so that’s a question that we all need to be asking ourselves moving forward. So if any of you have something to say on that, this last turn would be our time to do it.

But also the soul of the question I wanted to ask, given that we’re all in the media, we all work in independent media, we are all trying to report on the stuff that matters, and we all believe that people with good information are the stewards of democracy. They’re the ones that we’re trying to inform so that they can safeguard the society that we’re trying to build here and take care of themselves and all that good stuff.

Point being is that as media makers, as people in North America facing this shit, and as people who live in countries that so much of what happens in the coming years here in the United States is going to depend on how Canada and the US respond to it and vice versa. So with all that in mind, how do we get ourselves, everyone watching right now, the folks that we do journalism for, how do we get people to see our fates as intertwined and to see these domestic issues through an international lens, and what opportunities does that give us to resist what’s coming?

So there’s a lot there. Please take whichever question you want. Don’t answer all of them, but anything you guys want to say in this final round. Samira, I’ll start again with you, and then Andrea, then Desmond, close us out.

Samira Mohyeddin:  I’m talking too much. Start with Andrea [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, Andrea, we’ll start with you.

Andrea Houston:  OK. I think the left has to start with a new baseline. I think we need to recalibrate what it means to be on the left — Problematic with that term as it is, obviously. But I think the baseline for any movement going forward, for us to collaborate and come together, cross borders, but also globally, we have to agree on democracy and human rights as a baseline, and that has to also be an anticapitalist analysis.

The problem with, as Des was talking about with the NDP and has been a concern for the left in both of our countries, is that the left isn’t anticapitalist. The Democrats in your country are not anticapitalist. They’re very much very pro-capitalist, which is breeding all of these issues.

We can’t all agree on something. Whether we’re talking about Gaza, whether we’re talking about housing, whether we’re talking about corporations and corporate tax rates, whether we’re talking about any of these issues, climate change, the fundamental facts of climate change, we can’t agree on because of capitalism. We have to make concessions to corporations. We have to create these kangaroo courts that corporations can go to and say, well, these climate activists are cutting into my profits, and therefore they can take activists to court. Activists are going to jail because they’re standing up for human dignity, for the possibility of future generations to have a future. God forbid.

I think we need to recalibrate, recalibrate what it means to be a left-wing person, what it means to support democracy and human rights. We’re living in not just tumultuous times politically, but tumultuous times in our world. I don’t have to tell anybody listening or anybody on this panel the reality of the climate crisis, but it’s so much worse than what we’ve been told. So much worse. We are living in a collapse, and I think we need to recalibrate how we talk about the climate crisis.

We are living in an era of collapse, and everything that we’re seeing, from the rise of dictators, from the shift to far-right politics all around the world, to the rise of antigay laws, an increase in antigay laws in places like Uganda, to everything that we’re seeing right now can really be traced back to we’re living through an era of collapse. Metacrisis is actually what it’s called by climate scientists. So a lot of what I’m seeing is filtered through this lens.

And I agree with Samira. Small acts, we need much more people to come out and do those small acts. Take to the streets, join us in protest, stand up locally, get to know your neighbors, mutual aid, all of those things. But we also need big acts. I’m reading How to Blow Up a Pipeline right now, and I know I’m late to the game, but I want big acts, I want to see people take big swings. I want people to really put their bodies on the line, their lives on the line. That’s what it’s going to take.

I wouldn’t ask anybody to put themselves in danger, but I think that we are going to all face that in our life at some point over the next five to 10 years. Whether we actually see the collapse of our democracy, I think that’s possible. I think that’s on the table. Whether we’re seeing collapses of economies all around the world, we’ve already seen that. More displaced people, more refugees, more economies in disarray.

And so it’s really important that we recalibrate how we talk about these issues, and we stop being a slave to capitalism, and we stand up and say unapologetically what this means and what is coming down the pipe. Don’t be afraid to be that annoying person at parties. I know I have been for many, many years, so I think it’s totally fine. But I do think that building the big tent of workers of different movements, LGBTQ people, women, civil rights movements all around the world, we all have to come together under a uniform to help humanity and human rights and democracy. That has to be the baseline.

Samira Mohyeddin:  And not be cynical about those two words too, because we’ve allowed the right to take those two words and ruin them where you see human… The entire rules-based order and all of these things. I mean, the West went and died in Gaza. So these terms that we’re using, we have to breed life into them again because they’ve been killed in such an abhorrent way. And I’m all for big acts, big acts, but I’m just one person.

What I can say though, before I let Desmond come in here, is to support your independent local media, support the people who are talking about these things, who are covering these things. You have to pay for journalism. It’s not free. We do this work. It’s exhausting. Sometimes there’s only one or two of us. It may look like there’s a lot of us on a team, but sometimes there’s only one or two people, and we’re trying to bring these stories to you. They’re important. And when we do, don’t call us alarmist. Shit’s crumbling, and we’re just sounding the alarm. So don’t shoot the messenger.

Desmond Cole:  A couple of things. So when it comes to what’s going to happen now with the relationship between the two countries, I don’t want to make too much of a big prediction here, but I do feel like Trump has played a lot of his hand when it comes to Canada and the United States. I don’t think he’s going to be dangling the tariffs Sword of Damocles over our heads every month for the next 18 months or something. He went for it. He got some disruption. He got some really weak concessions — Because remember, Trudeau already said he was going to do a bunch of things at the border before this threat, and when he announced the fentanyl czar and all these things, he just re-announced all the things that he had already promised he was going to do.

So I don’t know that Canada’s going to be reaching back into the bag to find all of these new concessions for Trump going forward. I think he’s gotten a lot of what he’s going to get already. Like I said, I don’t think harassing Canada for the next four years is his plan. This is good for him for now. He’s getting what he needs right now. We’re in week four of this man’s administration — I don’t even think we’re four weeks in. It’s just felt that way. So I think we’ve seen a lot of what we’re going to see on this, and things will hopefully start to recalibrate.

I do agree with Samira that there are opportunities now, that this conversation has sparked a weird kind of nationalism. It takes a lot to get Canadians fired up about living in their own country, but somehow this conversation has managed to do that. And if we’re able to take that energy… The Breach just had an interesting podcast conversation last week with Stuart Trew, who’s at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, and he was talking about [how] this really feels like Green New Deal conversations again, where we’re looking at, for example, we say Canada’s not for sale, and then we say, please buy our oil. Please keep buying our oil. Don’t mess with oil. You know what I mean? It’s very, very silly.

But if we weren’t so oil reliant as a country between our relationship with Canada and the United States, that might make us a little secure in the future, that this wouldn’t be able to happen again in the same way, we wouldn’t be able to be threatened again. So there are opportunities to do things like that.

There are opportunities not simply to buy local — And by the way, there was this really funny list out there telling people to go and for example, don’t shop at Starbucks because it’s American, shop at Tim Horton’s, a good Canadian brand, which has been owned by a Brazilian company for several years now [Alvarez laughs], right? So we gotta brush up on our nationalism because there’s a lot of phony shit going on out there right now. People don’t actually know as individuals what to do. Nor should they, because it’s not your individual responsibility to stop Trump and tariffs.

But you might want to try and use this opportunity to start thinking about how do we support people to have decent jobs in Canada, not just buy some products that have a Canadian flag on them, but actually support better labor in this country? Because what corporate interests want to do in this moment is they want to be like, you know how we should fight back against these tariffs? We should lower taxes. We should get rid of all of the regulations. We should do all of the things that the corporate agenda always wants us to do, and that’ll help.

But I think we need to actually be pushing backwards in the other direction and being like, wouldn’t it be great if Canada was a place where we were providing better jobs? Wouldn’t it be great, with all of these threats of deporting people in the United States, if Canada was thinking how we could support people, how are we going to support queer people, particularly trans people, who are so under assault in the United States? A lot of them are going to try and leave America, and no one can blame them for doing that because of all of the legal crackdowns that are happening. I know people in this country who have been making plans before Trump got elected. How are we going to support trans people coming here and starting a new life because it’s not going to be safe for them to exist as themselves in the United States any [longer]?

These are things that we can do as we continue our work and try to continue taking advantage of this moment and what this moment is revealing to us about some of the problems of how we live.

But yes, I agree also with this idea that small acts can mean a lot. Working in our communities locally can mean a lot. It can mean a lot more than people sometimes give it credit for. We talk about a lot of big issues on conversations like this, and it might feel alienating to people, but there’s always something happening in your local community, whether that be around housing or rents that are really expensive to pay and tenant organizations getting together to support one another, or whether that be about local food issues. There’s always something happening in your neighborhood where you can begin or continue planting these seeds, meeting people, having conversations and organizing. So it’s not all bad news and it’s not all bleak, and we wouldn’t be able to continue doing this work if we didn’t have some hope that something could change in the future.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. I think that’s a beautiful point to end on. We are coming up on our time here. Before we wrap up formally, one more time, I really want to thank our incredible guests, Andrea Houston of Ricochet Media, Desmond Cole from The Breach, and Samira Mohyeddin of On The Line Media. And I want to personally urge all of y’all out there to please support their work and support their outlets because we need them now more than ever, but our work cannot continue without your support.

And that is certainly true for us here at The Real News as well. We need you to become a Real News member today. Your membership and your support directly translates to more journalism, more livestreams like this, more interviews with frontline workers and people brutalized by the police, Indigenous land defenders, more documentaries from Gaza, India, Canada, the US, and beyond. We’ve been publishing this stuff year after year, but we can’t keep doing it without you.

So don’t forget to subscribe to our channel. Hit the bell icon so you never miss one of our new reports. And remember, we do not get YouTube advertising money or accept corporate funds. Our survival depends on you. You keep us going, and together we can keep covering the stories that matter, the stories that others won’t cover.

As we close out today’s livestream, I got one more thing I want to say on the topic of independent media and the importance of journalism that still believes in truth and showing the truth and taking together everything that we’ve been talking about tonight and everything that’s going on around us right now.

These Trump trade wars, the mass deportations, the emboldened fascists and outright Nazis who are mobilizing online and offline right now, Trump’s horrifying and publicly stated plans for Gaza. These Musk-led technofascists and Silicon Valley broligarchs carrying out a coup on what’s left of our democracy, taking over and shutting down whole government offices, accessing and potentially exposing basically all of our sensitive data and our bank accounts. And when you add onto this the fracturing of the digital media ecosystem that we had when Trump was last elected eight years ago with top-down decisions from big tech about injecting AI slop and misinformation into our feeds, or removing news on Canadian Facebook feeds, with people fleeing platforms like X and Facebook that they feel are compromised, and with pages and accounts on those platforms getting banned left and right, and with all these pieces falling into place, setting up a free speech-smashing McCarthyist witch hunt on pro-Palestine antigenocide voices, protests, media outlets, nonprofits.

I honestly can’t tell you I know what’s going to happen in the coming months and years. None of us can. But I want to close with what I do know. After interviewing workers for years, I know and have seen the indelible truth upon which the entire labor movement is based, that none of us has the power to take on the bosses alone, but we do have the power to take them on together. As individual subjects, as individual media outlets, none of us can fight what’s happening and what’s coming on our own. We are simply outmatched and outgunned, and that is a fact.

And that is why every move these oligarchs make, every message they send through their right-wing propaganda machine is specifically designed to put us in the powerless position of atomized, isolated, angry, anxious, distrustful, and fearful individuals. They need working people to be divided for all of this to work. They need us to not give a shit about Canadian or Mexican workers so that we cheer on these tariffs that are going to hurt them and us. They need us to not give a shit about immigrants or to actively see them as our enemy for these fascist immigration raids to continue and these concentration camps to be constructed, all while the billionaires, bosses, corporations, tech firms, and Wall Street vampires are robbing us blind. They need us to not give a shit about union workers and the value that unions have for all of us so that we remain indifferent to the fact that Trump is doing corporate America’s bidding right now by smashing the National Labor Relations Board and effectively rendering most of labor law and workers’ rights null and void in this country.

You want to resist this? Start by resisting every urge that you have, every urge you’ve been conditioned to feel, resist every tempting command you get from people like Trump and Musk and Poilievre to see your fellow workers as your enemy. Canadian workers and their families, Mexican workers, Americans, immigrant workers, trans and queer workers, union and non-union workers, workers who live in red states and who live in blue states. They want us to focus on what makes us different so we don’t realize how much more we all have in common with each other than we do with fucking billionaires and zealots who are smashing everything and refashioning our government right now and our economy in order to keep empowering and enriching themselves at our expense.

But we need to do more than resist right now on the individual level. We need to build a real and durable infrastructure that will enable us to survive and resist long-term as a collective, an infrastructure that is welded together by solidarity and tangible commitment. We journalists and media makers across the US, Canada, and Mexico need to form a North American Free Press Alliance with the explicit goal of not only defending journalism, free speech, and the people’s right to the truth, but to create a common ground where working people across our countries can find informational stability, where we can find each other and work together on a shared plane of fact-based reality and commitment to basic-ass human rights.

We need to harness our existing tools and assets to build the infrastructure for a network that will connect us across borders, languages, and algorithmic echo chambers, provide collective protection against censorship, and provide working people in North America with news, stories, context, and analysis that helps us understand what’s happening in our own countries and across the continent through an internationalist lens and with an unwavering commitment to truth, class solidarity, and humanity, and a livable planet.

And that network must not and cannot be existentially dependent on these oligarch-controlled social media platforms. Doing this, I would argue, is not only necessary as an emergency measure to ensure our survival, but it is necessary for all of us to fulfill our duty to the public as journalists, and to carry out our missions as media-making outlets that exist to inform the public with the truth, and to empower people to be the change that they’re waiting for.

But we won’t do any of this if we just sit and wait. I know that much. I know that competition between journalists and media outlets right now will be a death sentence. Solidarity and collaboration will be our salvation, if we choose it. If we don’t stand together, if we just focus on protecting our individual organizations and our subscriber lists and followers, it will be that much easier to pick us off one by one. And for your own sake and for all of ours, don’t let them. Take action now. Get off the sidelines and get into the fight before it’s too late.

For The Real News Network and for the whole crew here who has made this livestream happen, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Please take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

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