Good Sunday Morning! First Sunday of spring! And, yes my prediction from last week’s letter was a direct hit. Prime Minister Mark Carney will visit Rideau Hall (or has already done so earlier this morning depending on when you are reading this) and ask the G-G to dissolve parliament and call the election today. As I write this, the only room left for speculation is whether we vote on April 28 or May 5. I will resist my inevitable temptation to delve into parliamentary trivia to explain the difference between dissolution and prorogation, but you guessed it. We were prorogued January 6th but not dissolved.
Our national Green Campaign, first time ever with co-leaders, is launching from Jonathan Pedneault’s riding of Outremont in Montreal. If you watch the non-stop coverage of the election launch today, the live news feed will switch to us in Montreal after the NDP.
Apologies to SGI Greens with fond memories of launches at Sea Cider and Mary Winspear. I wish we could have a victory party in the airplane hanger we used in 2011. But I take nothing for granted! It is clear the Conservative candidate in SGI, Cathie Ounsted, has Pierre Poilievre’s strong backing and a large bank account. Leaflets are in post boxes already and worryingly Canada 338 calls Saanich-Gulf Islands a “toss-up” between Greens (me) and Conservatives.
Please do help friends and neighbours realize that voting NDP or Liberal here only helps the Conservatives. I do hope to continue as your MP. But the country as a whole is more important than any one MP.
JP and my efforts to maintain a Team Canada spirit–despite a national election campaign–resulted in an offer for a last chance meeting. As I wrote last week, we had asked that we all meet, one last time before the election, to consider such things as a multi-party Cabinet, akin to a “war cabinet” to focus on the deteriorating situation with our once-best trading partner. At more or less the last minute, the Right Honourable Mark Carney responded, calling a teleconference meeting with all other leaders but it had to be postponed for the meeting with all premiers. As I write this I still do not know if the meeting will have happened. Fingers crossed!
We do not think Canada can risk being divided at this critical moment.
As Greens we have proposed the most comprehensive set of policy proposals and immediate measures to protect Canada from the unpredictable and erratic threats from the Trump White House. The whole plan can be found here: Green Party of Canada Unveils Plan to Protect Canadian Sovereignty.
As Greens we see a huge opportunity to reform and modernize our economy to protect ourselves from Trump’s threats. We need to be more self-reliant and self-sufficient–and we can. Greens have been calling for years to get rid of inter-provincial trade barriers, and the balkanization of provinces that result in separate electricity grids, province by province. These lines are oriented to sell electricity from Canada to the US i.e. north/south. To fight the climate crisis and have a 100% renewable source of electricity, we need a smart grid operating coast to coast to coast–north/south and east/west. Then we can use the grid like a battery, storing renewable energy from wind, solar, geothermal and tidal.
As Team Canada, we have agreed with the government plan, supported by all parties and most premiers that we respond to Trump’s illegal tariffs, dollar for dollar, with retaliatory tariffs on US exports to Canada. But that plan only inflicts pain on both countries. Greens want to avoid the pain and protect our economy. That is where our plan for Strategic Reserves comes in. Rather than see Canadian raw resources sold into the US market, the Canadian government can buy our resources and put them in Strategic reserves. Trump boasts the US needs nothing from us, so it is hardly a hostile act to keep our resources for ourselves or for allies who keep their promises and do not try to hurt our economy. The US does not need our lumber or potash or bitumen or aluminum. The only Canadian product currently managed by a government in a strategic reserve is maple syrup, held by a Quebec Crown corporation.
How do we pay for this? In two ways. The easiest is using the same fiscal alchemy former Finance Minister Bill Morneau used to buy the Kinder Morgan pipeline. It was a “non-budgetary transaction”– essentially a paper transaction. An asset swap, taking $5.5 billion asset in cash over on one side of the ledger and converting it to a $5.5 billion asset called a pipeline on the other side. The pipeline asset was and is held by a crown corporation that already existed, the same one that held Ford Motor stock for a while. Hey presto! And we can do the same thing, without a single vote in parliament on creating the asset or the Crown corporation. We then hold our resources in reserve. The producers do not have to lay off workers because they will not be idle. The product will be sold at the asking price, just not into the USA. In the case of raw logs, we should get them to Canadian saw mills and then sell without any profit to Canadian builders building Canadian homes. As we hold resources, like potash, they will climb in value.
This brings me to the other way we pay for our strategic reserves. In stead of Canadian Savings Bonds, we issue Saving Canada Bonds. Individual Canadians will be able to make a tidy profit in the turn around on our strategic reserves. We have crunched the numbers on this, so wait for our platform!
Other ways to protect Canada’s economy- BUY Canadian. Vacation in Canada. Support small business in Canada. To make sure Canadians can BUY Canadian products we have to help Canadian producers, reducing their costs wherever we can. Canadian made boats should not be subject to a so-called “luxury tax” at point of sale. We can also make sure Canadian pension dollars are being invested in Canada. This is a no-brainer, but ever since the early 1980s the management of our Canada Pension Plan dollars has been controlled by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. By law its only criterion for investment is to get the highest rate of return. NOTHING in the Act allows the investment board to even consider if our CPP investments help Canada or Canadian well-being. And the board certainly does not consider climate. So much fun work ahead fixing unnecessarily restrictive laws designed around maximizing profit instead of maximizing well being.
We also need to give youth jobs that are meaningful in the Youth Climate Corps, and expand its initial mandate beyond climate for civil defence, taking care of the vulnerable in extreme weather events and in case of civil unrest fomented by hostile moves from foreign governments. This we can do!
On the Trump front, I am sharing this article which I found fascinating. It seems to me this set of speeches by Trump insider Russell Vought is the game plan for what we are now seeing. Best to know how deliberate this all is, the infliction of trauma on the US federal civil service. “Put them in trauma’: The October story that outlined exactly what Trump would do.”
In late October 2024, ProPublica published one of its most prophetic stories in our history. You can be forgiven if you missed it at the time. There was a lot going on in the days before the election, and the headlines were dominated by seemingly consequential issues like the racist humor of a comedian who addressed Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.
But if you weren’t among the several hundred thousand people who read our story, “‘Put Them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda,” in real time, you may have seen it referenced since Trump took office in January.
The story drew on private recordings of a series of speeches given in 2023 and 2024 by Russell Vought obtained by our colleagues at Documented, a news site with a remarkable knack for uncovering information powerful interests would prefer remained secret.
Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term, was known for his provocative public pronouncements. But he went even further in private, envisaging a Trump presidency in which regulatory agencies would be shut down and career civil servants would be too depressed to get out of bed.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in one recording. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought spoke openly about the ongoing planning to defund independent federal agencies and demonize government scientists. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”
It is chilling to read and clearly should have gotten more attention when first published well before the election. The authors point out that some aspects of Vought’s placement in the MAGA world led to many discounting his influence. “…there was at least one data point that perhaps prevented readers from viewing his speeches as predictive as they turned out to be. As our story made clear, Vought despises the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a core Republican ally in bringing conservative voices into the judiciary and federal law enforcement. We quoted him as asserting that “the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges” were serving as a “Praetorian Guard” for the Democrats.
That view would seem to make him something of a fringe thinker in MAGA world, which relied on the Federalist Society to pick the judges who make up the conservative supermajority on the high court.
Things look different today. Seen against the backdrop of recent events, Vought’s disdain for the rule-of-law scruples of Federalist Society legal thinkers seems entirely in line with Trump’s recent post suggesting a federal judge shouldn’t have authority over his administration.
Just a few weeks ago, Danielle Sassoon, one of the Federalist Society’s bright lights, a Yale Law graduate who had clerked for conservative icon Antonio Scalia, resigned as acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York rather than carry out orders from the Trump Justice Department. In refusing to drop the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, Sassoon wrote that she understood her duty as a prosecutor to mean “enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless of whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or those that appointed me.”
Back to Canada, we have all the resources and moral fibre we need to get through this dystopian drama. US Democracy does not. It is that society and its declining and corrupt empire that are unlikely to survive. Or at least unlikely to survive as a democracy.
Canada must do all we can to protect ourselves, hope for the best, prepare for the worst and find ways to provide support and safe haven to the oppressed, forming stronger alliances with other countries sharing the values of respect for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. Only Greens, in Canada and in the Global green family will always stand for compassion and love within the human family living in right relationship with the only planet that sustains life.
PLEASE join me at my first Campaign 2025 sign wave at 4:30pm tomorrow, Monday, at the corner of McKenzie and Quadra! In case the time shifts slightly due to my travel schedule, please go here to register.
With that I send you all my thanks.
As Bette Davis famously said in “All About Eve” “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”I make the modification, it is going to be a bumpy six weeks!
Love,
Elizabeth