RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. SUNDAY, APRIL 6, 2025. Nothing captures the bizarre concoction of arrogance and ignorance shown by both President Trump II and so many who work for him as the 10% US tariff they have foisted on two islands near Antarctica, inhabited only by penguins (and some of their friends, the seals).

To ice the cake, one of the president’s over-aggressive and allegedly eminent accomplices has almost at the same time urged a TV audience to just let Donald Trump fix the global economy.

Again and again over the next three years and seven months ??

The obvious first question is what role will the penguins on the Territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands play in the new economic structure? Or, of course, how can anyone of any sense at all trust a US federal administration that puts tariffs on islands of penguins to even fail honourably in such a vast and complex enterprise as restructuring the world economy?

To be altogether fair, it seems that some blame here must be shouldered by World Bank statistics.

Perhaps because “some goods may have been mislabeled as coming from the territory,” the World Bank apparently had the penguins exporting “about $1.4 million worth of … unspecified ‘machinery and electrical’ products to the U.S. in 2022 … while the U.S. exported about $21,600 to the islands in the same year.”

Down on the ground, in fact (and of course again), the penguins do not have any machinery and electrical manufacturing plants on the Heard and McDonald islands. And they might find a few crates of Florida oranges attractive, but do they really know how to peel them properly?

Whatever, President Trump II has been in office only two months and change. Already his aging mind has managed to transfer some of its own vast chaos and anxiety to the wider global village, in ways that even close students of Trump I may not have expected.

The inevitable question is just what’s next? And it may arise again and again over the next three years and seven months.

“If the United States no longer wants to lead, Canada will”

Meanwhile, in Canada (at least to Canadians such as myself, I should no doubt stress), we suddenly seem to be entertaining an increasingly larger future than seemed likely or even possible as little as a few months ago.

The height so far of all the new Canadian patriotism induced by the immediate first-wave antics of President Trump II (in its various Canadian regional, linguistic, cultural, and other varieties) may be Liberal leader (and current Prime Minister) Mark Carney’s recent rhetorical flourish : “If the United States no longer wants to lead, Canada will.”

Like other Canadians (I’m guessing), I took this to finally mean something like if the (government of the) United States can behave in altogether crazy ways and get away with it, then so can (the government of) Canada.

And maybe one good defense against a guy liked Trump who is constantly saying ridiculous things with deep conviction is just to say a few ridiculous things with deep conviction yourself.

Canada and Europe in a new world economy

On a somewhat more serious front, I think there are at least two plausible political arguments at the bottom of Mr. Carney’s flourishing about “If the United States no longer wants to lead, Canada will.”

(From a Canadian point of view at least, to start with in any case.)

First, say Trump wants to take the USA back to the 19th century — when tariffs really were the centrepiece of both US and Canadian economic development policies. In response, as it were, Carney will take Canada back to the 18th century.

Both Canada and (what finally became) the United States began the 18th century as outposts of Europe. By the end of the 18th century the United States had cast itself free of its European origins. Canada, however, had remained an outpost of Europe in (northern) North America.

Today Canada (an Indigenous or First Nations word) similarly remains somewhat more attached to Europe, especially than the United States under the changed Trump II regime. And the first stop on the first trip abroad taken by new PM Mark Carney was not in the UK (where he had once been Governor of the Bank of England), but in the Fifth French Republic, where a Canada-friendly President Macron is giving signs of playing some significant role in a revival of European international leadership in Europe and beyond.

If the United States is withdrawing from Europe, Canada will at least continue to bring some North American perspective to the Trump-inspired reorganization of the European region of the world economy.

Canada and the new Democracy in America

The second plausible political argument about Mark Carney’s leadership flourishing was captured nicely, I think, in a recent Tweet/Xpost from actor Alec Baldwin’s left-leaning brother Billy Baldwin : “What Trump doesn’t realize is that he’s not only fighting against 40 million Canadians … He’s fighting against 40 million Canadians and half of America.”

On this front Prime Minister Carney in Canada bears some relation as well to Governor Gavin Newsom in “Bucking Trump tariffs, California will push to maintain global trade independently, Newsom says.” (At the same time, unlike California of course Canada was a founding member of the United Nations in 1945. Its sheer physical geography is actually somewhat larger than that of the entire United States. And climate change may be working to Canada’s relative long-term advantage as the 21st century unfolds.)

Finally, in various complex ways Mark Carney’s “If the United States no longer wants to lead, Canada will” also reminded me of a quotation from the first Canadian president of the American Economic Association, Harold Innis (1894–1952 : he married an American girl from Wilmette, Illinois too, who he met while doing a PhD in economics at the University of Chicago).

In a late 1940s talk in the United Kingdom Professor Innis, head of the department of political economy at the University of Toronto, complained about Canada’s “infinite capacity for self-congratulation … we remark on the superiority of Canadian institutions, Canadian character, and Canadians generally, over Americans. This, of course, is our common North American heritage.”

In other words, there is something quite American about PM Carney’s declaration that “If the United States no longer wants to lead, Canada will.” As Homer Simpson might see it, America Junior is just saying if America Senior has just (temporarily) grown a little too tired for the job, America Junior is ready to fill in, for the time being (of course).

Or put another way again, if Canada actually was part of the United States and Canadians really did vote in American elections, then Frank Underhill’s old-school quip that Canadians usually vote Democratic in American elections would have nicely twisted the 2024 US election.

And Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump, would without doubt be president of the United States of America today.

(Remember : the actual popular vote was just Trump 49.8%, Harris 48.3%.)

According to current opinion polls, in the upcoming April 28 Canadian federal election Mark Carney’s Liberals just may do what Kamala Harris’s Democrats did not quite manage in the USA this past November.

And if this is what does happen in Canada 22 days from now, President Trump II will be quite accurately and honestly able to claim some credit.