DAVID MARCUS: Trump's Canada tariffs take toll on would-be Conservative Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre

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The Calgary Petroleum Club is exactly what you would expect: dark wooden walls, fine decor, and rugged-looking wealthy men in jackets with no ties who can probably buy the whole West Virginia town where I live. This is where I met up with Gary Mar, a businessman and former government official, to see how President Donald Trump's tariffs are impacting Canadian politics.

Mar served from 2007-2011 as minister-counselor of the Province of Alberta to the United States of America, and still has a hand in national politics.

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I wanted to know about the surge in support that the Liberal Party, which chose Mark Carney as its new leader this week, has experienced since President Trump began launching tariffs, and how Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre can respond as the Canadian election heats up. 

"There are two ballot issues," Mar said. "First, who is best able to deal with President Trump, and second, who is best able to run the economy?" Obviously, the tariff situation, or as Canada calls it, the trade war, colors both of these issues.

Mar said the key is "to understand Trump's motives for the tariffs," and he offered four possibilities: Increase U.S. manufacturing, generate revenue for tax cuts, balance the trade deficit, and/or create leverage for non-trade issues, in this case fentanyl coming over the Canadian border.

As a former diplomat, Gary found the fourth use of tariffs most objectionable, but what he was really asking was, what does Trump want or need from Canada to make this stop? In the absence of an answer to this question, Poilievre is in a dicey situation.

Ever since Conservative Party leader offered support to the anti-vaccine-mandate trucker protest in Ottawa in 2022, he has been viewed in Canada as aligned with Trump. But today, Trump is public enemy No. 1, and Poilievre's party has bled 20 points in the polls in two months.

Carney and Liberals are already showering the Canadian airwaves with ads tying Poilievre to the U.S. president.

I asked Mar if Poilievre would be better off politically today if Trump were to praise or insult him. He didn't even hesitate, saying "it would be better if Trump insulted him."

Somehow, this Conservative leader and would-be prime minister has to find a way to be frenemies with Trump, like the younger brother who doesn't take any guff from the older, to show he can work with Trump while also defending Canadian honor against a U.S. president threatening his proud nation's sovereignty.

This is because everyone in Calgary, including Mar, has told me that Canadian nationalism, until recently almost an anachronism, is at levels they have never seen before. Trump's constant trolling about making Canada the "51st state" is undoubtedly another factor.

The election, at soonest, will take place sometime in April. If the tariff issue is resolved quickly, it will free Poilievre up to campaign on the issues he wants to focus on, and I ran smack into one of them accidentally in Calgary on Sunday.

As I turned the corner amid a morning constitutional, I saw about 40 or 50 mostly women, with signs demanding Canada no longer allow biological men in women's prisons. There I spoke with Heather Mason, who was incarcerated when the policy allowing men was introduced. 

Mason, and all of the other women there, had a clear message: "It has to stop." Poilievre agrees, and has publicly stated he will ban men from women's prisons. 

These are the kinds of issues that conservatives in Canada, like their cousins to the south, want to focus on. But with tariffs sucking all the news oxygen out of the media, they can't.

To be sure, Trump's job is not to win elections for conservatives in Canada, it is to do what is in the best interest of the American people. But surely, on some level, America's interest is tied to a good, functioning relationship with our closest trading partner to the north.

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The scuttlebutt in the Great White North is that Liberals want a new election ASAP. They feel like they have the mojo, so the sooner, the better. Politically they want this trade war, as they put it, raging as Canadians cast their ballots.

"There are two things that increase Canadian nationalism, war and sports, and we have both," Mar quipped, referring to the "trade war," and the USA vs Canada hockey rivalry's revival.

In that kind of environment, Poilievre may need to punch back at Trump, but in a friendly way, the way brothers do. But that is a very fine line to walk. How he manages that challenge could define U.S. Canadian relations for a very long time to come.

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