The road to trumping Trump:
On May 2, 2025, our Probus Club was treated to a powerful and fact-filled presentation titled Canadian Prosperity and the Great Regression: Trump, Tariffs and the World Economy.
Our speakers were Professor Mark Williams, and student Anna Toderas who in the fall starts graduate school at Yale University. Their ‘tag-team’ presentation peppered the fifty of us crammed into St. Mary’s Church hall with a tsunami of well-researched facts woven into a blanket of sage observations and thoughts.
I have to be honest. This is my third attempt to summarize what they said. I now officially give up! You are just going to have to wait until the end of 2025 when their new book ‘Canada and the Shattering of World Order’ comes off the presses.
I should have known better. On several previous occasions, I had been in awe with Mark’s encyclopedic knowledge, with Anna’s machine-gun delivery. (The phrase “drinking from a firehose” comes to mind!)
It is beyond my capability to explain an IRBO (international rules-based order), or to link an IRBO to healthy liberal democracies. Nor can I draw parallels between the Thirty Years War and the death of fully 1/3 of the German-speaking world, with the current global situation, where only 6.5% of the world’s population lives in a democracy. (Confused? You won’t be! Read the upcoming book!!)
Our speakers structured their talk around John F. Kennedy’s speech to Canada’s House of Commons and Senate in May of 1961.
Geography has made us neighbors.
History has made us friends.
Economics has made us partners.
And necessity has made us allies.
Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.
They then fast-forwarded 64 years to the 2018 meeting of the G-7 at Charlevoix, Quebec. A man named Donald Trump started events that would threaten to pull our historic relationship asunder. The media of the time referred to this conference as the ‘G6 + 1’: six liberal democracies, and an outsider – the strongest superpower in the world.
Our speakers believe the only way Canada can survive the reach of the “new” USA is for Canadian leaders to think strategically. They must convert strategic excellence into actions that benefit not just Canada, but the world. As Anna stated, they must “grasp the big idea”.
Mark pointed to a precedent. After World War II it was Canadian leaders (C.D. Howe and Mackenzie King) who through insightful brokerage, bridged critical differences between the US and UK. Canada’s “big idea” had been adapted from the thinking of John Maynard Keynes. After two world wars and a global economic depression, there was an urgent need for fiscal stability. Fierce nationalistic competition between superpowers had brought the world to the brink. Now was the time, Canada claimed, for “peace through commerce”. Canada had the “big idea” that led the US and the UK – in fact, the world – to Bretton Woods and the beginning of a new world order.
Can our new prime minister be the person who grasps the future and makes our country an indispensable and undisputed leader amongst the world’s superpowers – the man who protects our country from being pulled asunder?
If Mark and Anna have it right, Canada’s very survival depends on it.