The Foreign Interference Federal Election - Week Three

Special Edition: A view from out west, where things are getting weirder by the day

Apr 15, 2025

Yes, this is still the “foreign interference federal election” at three weeks in, and here’s another reason why.

I missed it last week, but Laura Loomer, the Trump advisor who pushed the president to fire a list of members of the National Security Council (which he did) asked a Canadian journalist “what can Americans do and what can President Trump do in these next 3 weeks before your election to make sure the interim Prime Minister, Mark Carney, does not hold another term.”

Loomer invited former reporter for The Province and Vancouver Sun, Sam Cooper, on to her show to discuss “money laundering and fentanyl trafficking out of Canada” and ironically, they talked about how China is interfering in Canadian elections, while directly asking Cooper how the US can interfere.

Sunday, April 6 - Mad men

On Sunday morning, the Ottawa Police released a statement about an emergency lockdown on Parliament Hill that had begun the day before.

A man had entered the East Block and was making threats. The building and surrounding area was evacuated and several packages were discovered. The police brought in their canine and explosives unites. Two bomb disposal units were seen in front of Centre Block.

After several hours, the man was charged with multiple offences and the situation was resolved. The incident barely received any coverage outside of Ottawa.

A mad man threatening to harm Canadians by blowing things up has become all too familiar, it seems.

Warning: The video below may be triggering for some people!

On that note, Will Bunch had a hard-hitting opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer last Sunday:

“They descended on Philadelphia from all over, determined to act against a king and his ‘establishment of absolute tyranny over these states.’ Their long list of grievances included:
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;
For imposing taxes on us without our consent;
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses;
Those could have been signs carried on Saturday by the thousands of protesters who circled Philly’s City Hall on a raw, windy April afternoon — marching up Market Street with a banner proclaiming ‘No King’ as part of a nationwide ‘Hands Off!’ protest that brought at least three million and maybe as many as 5.2 million Americans out into the streets.
But actually, these are quotes from the Thomas Jefferson-penned Declaration of Independence, reminding us of the tragic irony that America under President Donald Trump has, in many ways, become the kind of tyranny citizens on this soil rebelled against in 1776.”

The next nationwide protest is planned for April 19.

Pierre Poilievre was in British Columbia (BC), where he focused on harm reduction strategies like supervised consumption sites. He said he would not approve any new site even though there is proof the facilities save lives.

Given that health care is typically under provincial jurisdiction, Poilievre seems quite keen to get involved, and promised to impose red tape on the operation of the sites, probably designed to make them non-viable. He said he would divert funding from the sites and commit $1 billion to fund addictions care for 50,000 people creating new detox facilities, treatment centres and sweat lodges.

Monday, April 7 - Trump looms large

Wikipedia editors made it official and decided that Trump’s Liberation Day so-called “reciprocal tariffs” will live on in history as the “2025 stock market crash.”

404Media.co reported on the discussion between various Wikipedia editors and being a big Wikipedia fan, I found the back and forth fascinating.

“Just because Wikipedia says something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fact,” wrote Emanuel Maiberg.

It’s a crowdsourced repository that ultimately reflects what Wikipedia editors decide. But it’s also one of the most useful and reliable repositories of information humanity has created, which feeds Google and countless other tools on the internet, and at the very least it reflects a prevailing point of view on what Trump did to the global economy.
Emanual Maiberg

In this latest round, Trump began trading insults with China on Monday and kept escalating tariff threats throughout the week.

Mark Carney was in BC on Monday and promised measures to “help Canadian seniors and retirement savings weather this storm.”

This included reducing the minimum amount that must be withdrawn from a Registered Retirement Income Fund (RRIF) by 25% for one year. They also announced they would Increase the Guaranteed Income Supplement by 5% for one year, providing up to $652 more to low-income seniors, tax-free.

Let’s hope one year is enough.

“President Trump’s tariffs are rupturing the global economy.”
Liberal Party news release

Poilievre also promised to protect seniors by delaying the time by which seniors must withdraw their savings from their RRSPs by two years, and allowing working seniors a larger basic personal amount of income tax.

The Conservative news release said, “After working hard and investing their savings, Canada’s seniors should not have to worry about the effect of Donald Trump’s economic vandalism on their retirement.”

Trump was also mentioned in another of the Liberal party’s releases that day, a promise to protect Canada’s nature, biodiversity, and water.

“President Trump wants Canada’s land, water, and resources. He wants to weaken us so America can own us – but we won’t let that happen.”
Conservative Party news release

The plan called for a whole list of things, including 10 new national parks, establishing a new Arctic Indigenous Guardians program, and $100 million for water security technology.

Poilievre’s biggest announcement of the day was his “one and done” approvals, and a promise to accelerate 10 specific resource projects.

Among the projects the Conservatives want to see rushed into reality are the expansion of the Suncor tar sands mine, the Rook 1 uranium mine in Saskatchewan, gold, silver and nickel mines in Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland, and the LNG Canada’s terminal expansion in BC.

There’s no mention of treaty rights or environmental concerns except a statement that “Conservatives will also establish the Canadian Indigenous Opportunities Corporation (CIOC), to offer loan guarantees for local Indigenous-led resource projects.”

Poilievre and the Conservatives want to “handle all regulatory approvals across all levels of government” and promised to “cooperate with provincial governments to get all approvals.” It’s interesting that for all of Alberta’s complaining about provincial autonomy and lawsuits claiming federal overreach, the Conservatives want to centralize everything. I’m having trouble squaring this policy circle.

You may be wondering why I’m not covering much on the NDP campaign. I think this analysis (gift link) in the Toronto Star pretty accurately sums up the unfortunate state of affairs:

“Seat projections are dicey, but some polling aggregators say that if current trends hold, Singh could lose his own seat in the redistributed Burnaby Central. According to the Star’s election predictor, the Signal, NDP support is at 7.8 per cent nationwide right now, giving the party 10 seats in what would be a Liberal majority government. It would be New Democrats’ worst showing since 1993, and leave them without official party status in the House of Commons.”

Tuesday, April 8 - Hair we go again

This week I was reminded of the first time Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015, when he defeated the incumbent Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper. A now infamous Conservative election ad featured a fictional interview panel reviewing Trudeau’s resume concluding he was “just not ready.” The ad wrapped up with the comment “nice hair though.” This kicked off a frenzy of controversy about hair and even Margaret Atwood got involved writing a satirical article about Stephen Harper’s hair in response. It was pulled off the National Post website almost immediately after it was posted. The Liberal response was perfect, if you ask me.

Screen capture from 2015 Liberal election video.

Poilievre brought up Mark Carney’s hair. And his socks, for some reason, this week. It may be because Trudeau was known for wearing brightly coloured socks, a fact that seemed to endlessly annoy right wing voters. Poilievre just can’t seem to stop thinking about Trudeau, but that’s a discussion for another post.

Anyway, at a news conference, he criticized Carney’s involvement with two investment funds registered in Bermuda while he was with Brookfield Asset Management. Poilievre then went on to say that voters shouldn’t think the Liberal leader is different from Trudeau “because he has a banker's haircut and wears a pair of blue socks."

I look forward to the banker’s hair video sequel to the animated hair video the Liberals produced back in 2015. I humbly suggest it be called, “Lead us big daddy!”

In all seriousness though, almost 70% of Canadians told Abacus Data they are “very interested” in this election, up about 20 points from the 2021 campaign. That’s got to be good news.

Tuesday was a very big day for Trump and his Sharpie. He signed four executive orders:

Amendment to Reciprocal Tariffs and Updated Duties as Applied to Low-Value Imports from the People's Republic of China – The White House - a response to China’s tariff response, increasing the tariff on Chinese goods from 34% to 84%
Reinvigorating America's Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241 – The White House - “blast, baby, blast” those mountaintops!
Protecting American Energy From State Overreach – The White House - an attempt at the evisceration of state’s rights to address climate change, environmental, social and governance (ESG), environmental justice, and GHG emissions with regards to domestic energy resources.
Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid - giving the Energy Secretary permission to take whatever action is necessary to keep power flowing into the grid, including preventing energy companies from removing power from the grid (more details on this come in a report in 90 days).

It’s important to watch what Trump does on the energy file because it’s almost guaranteed that Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith, will take her lead from his policies. If she isn’t already doing it (ie. coal). It will be interesting to see how she deals with right wing talking points around centralization of control over energy at the federal level. This is being pushed by both Poilievre and Trump. It doesn’t play well in Alberta, to say the least.

More foreign interference was in the news today as reports circulated that friends of India’s Prime Minister and his political party were financial supporters of Poilievre in his leadership campaign. It’s important to note there were no claims of collusion with the official campaign.

There were also reports the Chinese government was chatting with Chinese Canadians and sending them news (both positive and negative) about Carney. Poilievre’s subsequent statements about the Chinese government’s involvement with the Carney campaign were exaggerated. Rachel Gilmore did some excellent fact-checking on both claims.

A crowd at an all-candidate’s debate in Calgary-Centre this past weekend. Most people had to sit outside in the overflow area, and listen to it through a loudspeaker, but at least it was sunny. And there was beer.

Both Poilievre and Carney headed to Alberta for large rallies on Monday night and so began the inevitable crowd size comparisons on Tuesday. I really dislike the sports fan approach to politics. The people who show up at rallies are fans looking for confirmation of a choice they've already made.

The focus is cheering on your team on instead of getting out there and convincing the undecided people that you have the best policies. Yes, it is important to keep spirits high for your supporters, but for a national candidate it is not newsworthy to have a big crowd. It should be a given.

Some people may base their decision to vote by looking at other people's enthusiasm for a candidate, but this is a small minority.

Finally, having a large turnout for a Conservative in Alberta is less than news. Come to think of it, even Trudeau and the Liberals have been able to pull in big crowds in Alberta for several federal elections now. No big deal.

Wednesday, April 9 - Crashing in

By mid-week, the tariff war had become less of a war and more of nauseating carnival ride. The number of graphs circulating online showing the same thing in dozens of different ways couldn’t be more alienating. After a while, it becomes a blur and means nothing to people.

Almost all of the conversation around tariffs thus far has been about "markets" and the "economy" which are words that create distance between how Trump's "beautiful" taxes impact real people's lives. I hope the media will begin to humanize the story a lot more rather than continue with this abstract, stock ticker approach.

China responded to Trump with an 84% tax on American goods, and it seems like the whole country went on an online speaking tour criticizing the president for his lack of respect, which I have to say, was refreshing after all of the sucking up that has been going on lately.

Trump struck back, bringing China’s tariff rate to 125%. The Chinese commerce ministry accused the U.S. of “blackmail” and vowed to “fight to the end.”

Also on Wednesday, Carney’s countermeasure announcement of 25% tariffs on non-CUSMA compliant fully assembled vehicles and on “non-Canadian and non-Mexican content” in compliant vehicles imported from the U.S. went into effect.

Less than 14 hours after his global reciprocal tariffs went into effect, Trump backtracked and announced an immediate 90-day pause for all countries (except China), resetting the tariff rate to 10% across the board. He then sent out his minions to claim this was the plan all along.

There is no economic team advising Trump on his tariff strategy. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was in the middle of his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee when someone notified him of the 90-day pause.

“If it was a plan, if it was always the plan, how is this not market manipulation?” asked Representative Steven Horsford in frustration.

While in Alberta, Carney and the Liberals announced a plan to “make Canada the world’s leading energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy,” and again Trump was mentioned in the release.

“We are going to aggressively develop projects that are in the national interest in order to protect Canada’s energy security, diversify our trade, and enhance our long-term competitiveness – all while reducing emissions. We can lead the energy transition while ensuring affordable energy at home and building the strongest economy in the G7,” Carney is quoted in the release.

The Conservative party called for an investigation of Carney for his promise to spend $1 billion on heat pumps, which they claim would benefit Brookfield Infrastructure, a company the Liberal leader formerly chaired.

Poilievre made several announcements relating to crime, and in one release headline the party proclaimed, “Poilievre to Crack Down on Liberal Violent Crime Wave with ‘Three-Strikes-And-You’re-Out’ Law.” Now, this is something I’ve never really seen police talk about – a “Liberal violent crime wave.” Is that like when someone roughly grabs their half-sweet, oat milk latte and runs off without paying? I dunno, I just don’t get it.

A second news release was simply titled, “Conservatives will end Carney’s Crime Wave.” The release pointed the finger at one of Carney’s advisors, who has been critical of police (not a bad thing to be critical of police, by the way).

Poilievre received some criticism around mid-week over his pledge to “end the imposition of woke ideology in the allocation of federal funds for university research.”

If we look south of the border, we can see examples of how the ideological perspectives can become really perverse in different ways. I think when we use this ambiguous language to shape scientific research it opens the door to ideological interference in what should be a rigorously independent system.
Sarah Laframboise, executive director of the science advocacy group Evidence for Democracy (E4D).

Evidence for Democracy recently launched a nonpartisan campaign called Vote Science to try to put science, research, and evidence-informed decision-making at the center of the election campaign.

Thursday, April 10 - Slogans gone wild

Poilievre and the Conservatives announced plans on Thursday to incentivize municipalities to reduce building taxes on new homes. For every dollar the municipality reimburses, they will receive 50 cents from the federal government up to a $50,000 maximum per home.

They also promised to set targets for new home construction, with municipalities penalized by withholding federal funding if the 15% increase is not met. The release goes on to threaten the bonuses and salaries at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation employees if housing applications are not approved in 60 days or less.

“Municipalities will also be required to pre-approve building permits for high-density housing around transit stations, and will not receive federal funding for transit until there are keys-in-doors.”
Conservative Party news release

Carney responded with his party’s plan to fight crime on Thursday, promising to hire thousands of new RCMP officers and border security officers, increase funding to prosecute violent criminal gangs, make bail laws stricter, and offer a gun buyback program for assault-style firearms. There was a lengthy list of ways Carney wants to strengthen law enforcement and the justice system.

The Conservatives issued a seething response to the Liberal plan from Larry Brock, the Conservative candidate for Brantford-Brant South-Six Nations claiming that a Liberal win would guarantee increased “crime and chaos:”

“Mark Carney is trying to trick Canadians.”
“Mark Carney and his Liberal hug-a-thug team are not going to stop the crime after the lost Liberal decade of unleashing a wave of crime and chaos with their catch-and-release policies.”
“We can’t afford a fourth Liberal term under a weak leader like Mark Carney.”

There was a noticeable ramping up of attacks on Carney, probably because the polls were not responding to Poilievre’s renewed fervour after being energized by supporters in Alberta.

Pollster Andre Turcotte of Pollara Insights said “our numbers show that Carney is gaining momentum, while Poilievre’s numbers are continuing to decline.” The NDP, he said, is “underwater.”

While the two parties presented their crimefighting plans, the White House was defending itself in court on many fronts. And arguably, Trump was criming on a scale never seen before.

The Associated Press (Trump’s favourite news organization) reported this warning from former White House ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, “He’s loving this, this control over markets, but he better be careful.” Painter noted that securities law prohibits trading on insider information or helping others do so.

Friday, April 11 - China is out

Carney was not campaigning on Friday, instead he was back in Ottawa to chair a special meeting of the cabinet committee grappling with the U.S.-Canada relations, according to the New York Times.

Things really heated up when China hiked tariffs on US goods to 125% to round out the week.

“Even if the US continues to impose higher tariffs, it will no longer make economic sense, and it will become a joke in the history of the world economy,” Chinese officials said, promising not to raise the stakes any further on their end.

Late in the day, Trump announced exemptions on tariffs for some major Chinese electronics, including smartphones, flat panel TV’s, and semi-conductors. This was just after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had insisted exemptions “were not on our radar.”

The New Republic reported that no tariffs were actually being collected by the US government anyway due to a technical problem with a Customs and Border Protection entry code.

Oh.

The CBC had an interesting report on the impact of Meta’s “news blackout” on Facebook and Instagram users in Canada. A media monitoring organization says it is blocking crucial updates for Canadian voters. According to the organization, we are viewing 11 million fewer news articles per day. It sure doesn’t feel like it to me!

Deep breathing everyone. We’re almost at the end of this. I’ll be producing one more edition of election coverage for April 12 to 19, and then reporting only on major developments throughout the last week before the election. Then, it’ll be all over but the crying.

I’ll leave you with this week with a sketch from This Hour Has 22 Minutes.