The U.S. net national debt has grown steadily to over $30 trillion, or 112 % of annual GDP. In comparison, Canada’s net debt is 32% of GDP. Part of the U.S. debt problem is the self-imposed military spending of $820 billion, which does as much to inflame military competition as to solve it.
Citizens United is a far-right conservative organization in the United States founded in 1988 that convinced the Reagan administration to eliminate limits on election campaign contributions and opened the door for billionaires and companies to buy their politicians. It was conceived by the Koch brothers, who made a fortune in the fossil fuel industries. The federal government fought that practice in court until in 2010, when the organization won a U.S. Supreme Court case known as Citizens United v. FEC. The Court ruled that corporations and unions could not be prohibited from making independent expenditures in federal elections. It now costs an average of $26 million to elect a U.S. congressman or senator.
As a result, the 813 U.S. billionaires look after themselves very well, but 42 million people (equivalent to the entire population of Canada), or 13% of the people in 21 of 50 US states, are living below the poverty line defined as $26,500 before taxes. Most of those 42 million do not have U.S. employer-paid health insurance that costs an average of $ 23,600 per family per year. Why would Canadians want any part of any of that?
In the 2024 election, Trump promised to continue cutting taxes (for the wealthy) and to improve life for the MAGA class by using tariffs to attract jobs from other countries. However, the benefits of tariffs have been disproven several times in U.S. history, and the trial period is always painful.
Wealthy billionaires and companies continued to buy their Republican politicians, and people close to the poverty line believed Trump would bring them jobs and improve their lives. Republicans won with 1/3rd plus 1.5% of the vote. Democrats got 1/3rd and 1/3rd didn’t vote.
The Trump-Musk strategy is to appoint yes men to key cabinet positions, use Trump’s well-known bullying tactics to disrupt international trade, and use Hitler’s 1939 playbook with a shock and awe blitz of executive orders to disrupt and shrink federal institutions. He issued several daily executive orders to confuse the complex business of international trade and to disrupt the work of 3 million experienced federal employees. He cancelled U.S. participation in the WHO. He says Musk will find billions in waste among the work of 25,000 people working at the Pentagon. Trump, the climate change denier, cancelled U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Accord and plans a mass shutdown of U.S. environmental agencies, even though the southern Republican states are the most vulnerable to the annual billion-dollar extreme weather events.
Will it work? Does he really believe he can conquer the world? This is not Hitler’s 1939. Today, information travels around the world instantly. In just 3 weeks, he has managed to erode the trust and respect of all U.S. allies and international organizations and to embolden U.S. adversaries. His “real estate deal” for Gaza threatens to reignite Middle East conflict and puts U.S. oil supplies from Saudi Arabia at risk. MAGA leader Steve Bannon is already at war with MUSK’s DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency). The U.S. courts have blocked almost every executive order. He is sure to get serious pushback from experienced career diplomats and military commanders.
My daughter’s small business has already slowed down as customers face economic uncertainty. Friends are racing to buy a car before Trump’s tariffs raise the prices. Canadians, Mexicans, Europeans, and Asians are buying more locally and working to establish more reliable trading partners. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal documented the sharp negative impacts of Trump’s first-term tariffs on U.S. companies.
It’s just a matter of time. No juggler can keep that many balls in the air at one time, especially an overweight 79-year-old who is already looking tired, stressed, and speaking incoherently. And when the balls start to fall, they quickly fall to the ground in mass confusion. U.S. adversaries in Russia, China, and Iran will do their best to take advantage of that situation when it comes.
Hugh Holland
Hugh Holland is a retired engineering and manufacturing executive living in Huntsville, Ontario.
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It’s easy to point out the all the problems the US has, and to guess what might happen next under Trump. No one knows though. We do need to be prepared for continuing uncertainty from him.
However, the wakeup call he has delivered to Canada is profound. In some ways it may be the only silver lining for Canada to the chaos he has created. The Canadian economy is not in great shape, by most people’s standards. According to a Food Bank report last year, a quarter of Canadians are experiencing poverty. https://www.ctvnews.ca/atlantic/article/more-canadians-are-living-in-poverty-than-previously-thought-says-report/
This is in stark contrast to the 10% official rate Stats Canada reported.
Also, almost half of Canadians say they are living paycheque-to-paycheque. https://leger360.com/economy-and-finance-september-2024/
As for Canadian productivity, its growth now ranks last in the G7, last in the OECD , and is projected to remain there over the next 40 years. A shame, to say the least. https://economics.td.com/ca-productivity-bad-to-worse
Let’s spend less time criticizing the US and more time focused on how to fix our own problems and get our country back on track.
A few things that should to be pointed out. US military spending is 2/3’s of all NATO spending, it’s been higher in the past. Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO have exposed decades of military underfunding by European countries, and Canada as well. If you add in the large NATO spending on US military gear, US military importance is even higher.
This is a big time wakeup call for Europe, who is on the front line of Russian and other regional threats. They will need to up their military spending by 100’s of billions annually. It won’t be easy, given their other big challenges and competing spending priorities.
As for Canada, we are less directly exposed to Russian agression, but our north is threatened. Given Europe’s big challenges ahead, we certainty can’t count on them to replace US military protection. Our best path forward is to significantly boost our defense spending, and to use US military purchases as a negotiating tool to help get a broader trade agreement. Saying we can meet NATO military spending commitments by buying mostly Canadian military gear is non-sense. We don’t have a large military industrial complex today. That won’t change for a long time.
So let’s move swiftly, but smartly.
Mr. Holland, thank you for your sane commentary. My world feels a bit more balanced.
Mr. Reijnen; DTrump GOP is not to be envied. They will cause much suffering to their own people; however, first they will have to figure out how to govern, how to make things happen.
The Reagan trickledown effect, has only shown that when corporations given tax breaks, the benefits result in buying up stock options and not “trickling down” to the labour at the bottom of the pile -a growing deficit, canyons between the very rich and the poor, wiping out the middle class.
By comparison, Stephen Harper held the Canadian civil servants in contempt. I have 2 relatives whose education well-prepared them for work in the Canadian government (both worked in Stats Canada). Fortunately, my Quebecois sister-in-law retired shortly after SH took governance over a country which he did not like.
“Not content to win power and implement his party’s campaign platform, he was the first Canadian leader whose self-proclaimed long-term plans included the destruction of his principal adversary (the Liberal Party of Canada), and the rebranding of Canada’s political culture. Perhaps most striking of all, Harper was the first federal leader to express his deep-seated distain for the country he was about to govern.” (“Dismantling of Canada: Stephen Harper’s New Conservative Agenda”, Brooke Jeffrey, 2015, McGill-Queen’s University Press). PP will be Stephen Harper 2.0, hence the “Canada is broken” rhetoric.
I can agree with you on one point, my tax payer dollars are meant to fund a public healthcare system and a public education system. When insufficient effort is made in that field by the Ontario Conservative government, I see wasteful spending on beer moved into convenience stores, Spas from foreign governments at Ontario Place, ridiculous tunnels, unaffordable-unsustainable development, and lack of Family Doctors and nurses … Ontario has spoken, they have bought into the notion that Ford is the only politician who can stand up for our interests! He couldn’t resist this political opportunity.
Well, Ontario gets what it voted for. Thanks for reading.
Thank you for this honest and informative piece. Although it’s tempting to stick my head in the sand and pretend that everything is hunky dory – I will not. Knowledge is power. We’re in a mess and things will get worse before they get better. I am hopeful that they get better in my lifetime.
Something positive that has come out of this is that Canadians are uniting. I follow several American fb groups. They too, are uniting. The comments back and forth are honest, but kind. They are encouraging each other. Many are not just idly sitting by. Many are joining forces (e.g. resistance groups). Many are commenting that they would like to move to Canada.
They won’t want to live in a Canada that’s run by a Poilievre version of Trump and Musk.
Mike R., Auditors don’t use chainsaws and sledgehammers. This is the outright destruction of many worthy federal institutions that were put in place to serve the American public. The method DOGE is using to conduct these ‘audits’, won’t leave enough pieces big enough to determine where and if there was any waste at all. At the end of the day the American public will be none the wiser.
Today, the United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Iran and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries Monday against a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for the return of Ukrainian territory. The resolution passed overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly.
Trump also expressed hope for an agreement with Kyiv on what he called “the vital ‘Critical Minerals and Rare-Earths Deal,’” in which he has asked Ukraine to sign over the rights to 50 percent of its mineral wealth to “recoup” U.S. money spent on Ukraine’s defense.
US comments overwhelmingly express outrage and shame over the U.S. decision to vote against the U.N. resolution condemning Russia for its actions in Ukraine. Many US commenters accuse Trump of being a Russian asset and a traitor, suggesting that this decision aligns the U.S. with authoritarian regimes and undermines its global standing.
Canadians should be demanding the same level of transparency and accountability from their own government. I can only imagine what would be uncovered with the same audit being performed on the governing Liberals of the last decade. Not to mention that tariffs are a consistently and widely accepted methodology of balancing out trade deficits and are used the world around.
It is time for change. Instead of embracing the legitimacy of exposing fraud and waste, and questions their own governments, many Canadians are simply pointing the finger. Personally, I am very envious of what is happening. In Canada our taxes continually increase while our services continually degrade. This is a very dangerous inversion.
There is little to no respect for the taxpayers of this country. Hollow ideologies are used to funnel funds away from the systems people have paid into their entire lives, and frankly everyone I know has had enough.
This article is way off base, and just serves to inflame unnecessary tensions. Stop blaming your neighbour and look at cleaning up your own house before you can point fingers.
Right now I spend my days worried for my son and daughter and their loved ones. I am reasonably well off to weather the storm but I know they are in for something they did not create, we just got through a nightmare and now a leader of a Nation who we called friends & allies is declaring economic war against us. Do the gentleman who defend Trump a couple more so not see what is playing out here? we did not choose to be the poor cousin to the North but we are CANADIANS with all our faults remember that !!! I want to see what people have to say this time next year wont be pretty if Trump continues is Rant that’s all I have to add, except “Whoever” you pray to you had better start
Indeed Doug, you sound boggled.
Thanks Len Holloway and David Wexler for some balance. It is becoming more and more obvious why the phrases “lynch mob” and “mob rule” became so famous in past years. Disappointing how easy people are to manipulate into believing black is white and up is down etc. When is:
-eliminating fraud & waste of our tax dollars considered bad?
-Stopping wars & killing considered selling out to Russia?
-Transparency in government spending evil???
Boggles the mind.
Must be great to live in a world where nothing needs to be changed or examind outside of Trump bashing
Well stated, Mr. Holland. I’m not altogether sure what to call Trump these days – a Russian pawn, a Hitler wanna-be, a dictator, a spoiled brat with too much money and rich friends happily bullying millions upon millions of people?
No matter what we call him (or I call him, I should say, not wanting to offend those Trumpettes out there), the fact is – removing books from libraries, removing data sets the whole world uses to fight climate change & world wide health issues, barring the rights (aka firing, arresting, etc.) of anyone who doesn’t bow, cow tow, call it what you will, to Trump, calling our Prime Minister (no matter WHO it is in the coming months) a “governor of the 51st state is just unacceptable.
True, Dave, we shouldn’t lump all wealthy people in with the slime who support the current US regime – there are a lot of Good, Decent, Wealthy people out there doing great things. But Elon Musk is NOT one of them. Donny Trump is NOT one of them. And at the moment, they are the ones Running this sh!t show – They are the ones scaring us with their global behaviour, belittling our country, threatening us with tariffs, and basically bullying the crap out of Canadians in an attempt to steal our lakes, minerals, forests, our country, and lives.
Canada – we need to STAND TOGETHER.
Stop Buying from the USA
Stop Visiting the USA
Relax the ‘boarders’ between provinces
Buy Canadian
And …buy a Canadian flag and fly it!!
This is another excellent and well-researched piece by Hugh Holland. The information about the elimination of limits on election campaign contributions and how it resulted in billionaires buying their politicians, was particularly illuminating.
I’m hoping that he’s accurate in saying, “He (Trump) is sure to get serious pushback from experienced career diplomats and military commanders.” One can only hope. It LOOKS like no one in the U.S. is doing anything but perhaps behind the scenes there’s an uprising brewing. For the sake of us all, it needs to be sooner rather than later.
Wow, Hugh. You manage to cover quite a bit of territory with your rant. You lump together evil billionaires with Hitler. Quite a feat. How about if we lower the temperature a bit. There are good billionaires out there as well, individuals such as Warren Buffett who pays hundreds of millions in taxes each year and is leaving the bulk of his fortune to charity. There is Bill Gates, who through the Gates foundation, contributes hundreds of millions each year for health-related charitable causes around the world. Let’s not please turn this into class warfare as everyone loses in this scenario.
With respect to Trump, he is a bully. Period. He may not be the smartest person in the room, but he is able to read the room, and by and large, citizens are fed up with incompetent, woke, ever-spending and ever-taxing leftist governments which have resulted in growing debts and ongoing deficits, rising property, income, energy, and other forms of taxation, and increasing unchecked (and often illegal) immigration and increasing crime and lack of effective law enforcement.
Please spend a bit of your column space on explaining how you propose that we deal with these real issues which impact all Canadians and less time on an agenda dedicated to bad-mouthing wealth creation and governments being responsible, both in taxing, and spending?
And please, Hitler? Trump is the only leader who has been strong in dealing with the real Hitlers of the world, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.