Canada's PM Trudeau: disaster in office, disaster on departure

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he is resigning. Meanwhile, Trump wants to annex Canada and make it the 51st state. Radhika Desai and Dimitri Lascaris discuss his disastrous record.

By Radhika Desai and Dimitri Lascaris

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he is resigning. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump is talking about annexing Canada and making it the 51st state.

In this episode of Geopolitical Economy Hour, host Radhika Desai discusses the political disaster in Canada with Dimitri Lascaris, creator of the independent media outlet Reason2Resist.

Radhika Desai published an article about Trudeau’s fall: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/trudeaus-fall

You can find more episodes of Geopolitical Economy Hour here.

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Intro teaser:

RADHIKA DESAI: From my perspective, Trudeau is getting what he deserved. The problem is that Canadians are not going to get what they deserve because only somebody like Poly ever is going to take over. And the reason for that is that any seriously left-wing alternative is not given any chance.

Dimitri Lascaris: The fundamental problem with the political system in this country is that we don't have a democracy. But we effectively have one party that represents the oligarchy, and it's divided into two factions.

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Full transcript:

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 40th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that brings you the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I'm Radhika Desai, your host, and working behind the scenes to bring you this show every fortnight or more frequently is Paul Graham, our videographer, and Eklavya Jain, our transcriber. And of course, there's also Ben Norton, our co-host on Geopolitical Economy Report.

The world regards Canada as nice and boring—nothing exciting happens there—but over the last couple of months, things have been very different. On the one hand, within a week or two of being elected president-elect, Trump started issuing threats against Canada: threats about tariffs, threats about undertaking all sorts of measures because Canada was not helping reduce illegal immigration into the U.S., and of course, the threat about making Canada the 51st state, which he issued first by calling Prime Minister Trudeau "Governor Trudeau."

On the other hand, we have seen that Prime Minister Trudeau has resigned in the last two weeks. This, of course, has put Canadian politics into a churn. This means that if you thought Canada was boring and nice, you've seen nothing yet, because it's about to get interesting and nasty. Trudeau clung on to the last minute, leaving when he had absolutely no choice and removal by the parliamentary party as well as by his own party membership was practically inevitable.

We have on the other hand, a Trumpist prime minister-in-waiting, Pierre Poilievre, who became the leader of the Conservative Party hot on the heels of the Freedom Convoy, which occupied Ottawa in January 2022 and displaced the previous Conservative Party leader. He seems practically set to win the next election. Moreover, the other really interesting thing from an international point of view is that Trudeau's resignation is essentially the fall of the show boy of the international globalist, Atlanticist so-called Democratic Alliance of leaders, which Biden created in the wake of the 2022 Russian incursion into Ukraine.

This means that he is only the latest globalist to have fallen. As people know, the German government of Olaf Scholz fell within hours of Trump's victory. France’s Barnier government and South Korea's Yoon government, which ironically tried to defend democracy by imposing martial law, followed within the month. And, of course, Trudeau is the latest.

So, what does all this mean? What are we to make of it? What does it mean for Canada? What does it mean for the world? This is what we want to explore today. With me to explore it is Dimitri Lascaris.

Dimitri is one of the most important public figures in Canada. He is a journalist. He is a lawyer—a campaigning lawyer, to boot—and, even more importantly, he is a politician. He is the politician that ran for the first time for the Canadian Parliament in 2015, the year Trudeau was first made Prime Minister. He recalls from that time that people said to him, "Why should he run for the Green Party," which he did, "and not for Trudeau, given how wonderfully progressive Trudeau was?" And Dimitri told them exactly. He essentially predicted what would happen, which is that Trudeau would disappoint on climate change and disappoint on electoral reform, among many other things.

Dimitri also ran for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada on an eco-socialist ticket. And he would have won had it not been for the fact that the establishment of the Green Party attacked him for being “anti-Semitic”, simply because he supported the Palestinian cause.

So, welcome, Dimitri. It's a great pleasure to have you on this show.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Thank you for inviting me, my friend. It's good to talk to you.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great. So let's start with this, Dimitri. Why don't you tell us a little bit about exactly how the media has been covering Trudeau's resignation, what it's been saying, and what's good and bad about it?

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Well, the media's discussion about this issue is studiously avoiding the undisciplined realities about Canadian politics. Without addressing that, the conversation within the media is likely to be nothing. It's not going to solve anything; it's simply going to perpetuate the problems. We have to start by recognizing the underlying causes of the massive discontent that has led to the demise of Trudeau.

The fundamental problem with the political system in this country is that we don't have a democracy. What we have is a uniparty, and this is a phenomenon we see across the West today. It's been the case for decades now. No one in the so-called mainstream media is talking about it, but we effectively have one party that represents the oligarchy, and it's divided into two factions. They agree on the vast majority of issues that matter to Canadians.

For example, they agree that we should have increased military spending. They agree that Canada should be part of NATO. They agree that Canada should pursue these so-called free trade agreements, which ultimately undermine the interests of Canadian workers. They agree that our society should tolerate a situation in which a handful of people control tens of billions of dollars of wealth and hundreds of thousands of people live in the streets. I could go on and on. What they disagree on is relatively unimportant to the vast majority of Canadians and their day-to-day lives.

So, every electoral cycle, what happens is, people build up frustration, the electorate, particularly the working class, builds up frustration about the refusal of the political elite—the governing elite—to address their concerns. And they opt for a change, and they're told, "This is your best option. No one else has a realistic opportunity to win, so if you want change, this is really all you can vote for." And invariably, the vast majority of voters fall for this schtick. And they vote in another faction of the uniparty, and then, several years later, they find out that they actually were not prepared to deliver real change after all. We've been going through this vicious cycle over and over again, and we're witnessing it one more time.

Trudeau came in saying, "Canada's back." He was going to change fundamentally Canadian society. After, I believe, seven years of immense frustration with the extreme right-wing government of Stephen Harper. The fact of the matter is that, although he put a softer touch on some elements of Canadian economic and foreign policy, fundamentally, he didn't change anything. In fact, he even deepened our servitude to the United States.

And so, people are waking up now. They started waking up, I think, in the last election, where, as I recall, Trudeau actually lost the popular vote but nonetheless managed to win more seats. The writing was already on the wall then. The only reason he survived up until now is that the sellouts in the NDP have propped him up. Which they are, by the way, going to pay a price for this in the next coming election, I believe. But he’s managed to prolong his pointless tenure as Prime Minister, where he's really done nothing to address the fundamental problems in this country, by entering into this coalition or marriage of convenience with the NDP. Canadians are now so fed up that they’re going to turf him out of office.

But by all indications, Radhika, they’re going to repeat the same mistake they've been repeating for decades: they're going to opt for the other faction of the uniparty. Sad to say.

We can get into the granularity of it—what specifically is frustrating Canadians—but I think it’s important to begin the conversation there: to look overall at what it is that keeps generating this unaddressed frustration in the Canadian population, which we’re seeing now in quite vivid terms.

RADHIKA DESAI: And you know, since we are talking about the really big picture, it seems to me that even more than Harper, what's now going to come with Pierre Poilievre, who is, at least from present indications, likely to win the next election—what he represents is actually an even more right-wing version of the neoliberal politics that we've seen under Trudeau.

The issue with Trudeau and his ilk—and I'll come back to what that ilk is because there is actually an extensive international alliance, but we'll come back to that—the problem with Trudeau and his ilk is that they think that they can hide their neoliberalism behind a sort of fig leaf, a very tiny fig leaf, of policies that sound progressive but are actually completely tokenistic. So, they propose to do something for women, or for Indigenous people, or for immigrants, or non-white people, etc., by simply appointing a handful of them to prominent positions.

And, of course, that handful is carefully chosen in order to make sure that they are more biased than the Pope as far as neoliberalism is concerned. And then, of course, they claim that they are progressive, they are feminists, they are anti-racist, and they are in favor of Indigenous reconciliation and all of that thing. But they, in fact, don't actually deliver for the vast majority of the members of this group.

But at the same time, what you are now going to see in Canada is an even more unapologetic version of neoliberalism, combined with a kind of really aggressive right-wing politics which we’ll say that, “Well, we don't care about this kind of feminism or anti-racism or whatever because it's just tokenism. And we are going to insist on the rights of Canadians to be who they are—which, in their definition, means a white community, etc., etc. We’re going to clamp down on immigration, blah, blah.” These are the things we are going to see.

So, in a certain sense, from my perspective, Trudeau is getting what he deserved. The problem is that Canadians are not going to get what they deserve because only somebody like Pierre Poilievre is going to take over. And the reason for that is that any seriously left-wing alternative is not given any chance.

Dimitri, you experienced this already when you ran for the leadership of the Green Party in 2020. We've seen, in the last year or so—and full disclosure, Dimitri and I certainly promised to work for Jill Stein, and I did a little bit of work for Jill Stein—but candidates like her were the only serious alternative. But the establishment, the two-party establishment, essentially ensured that she would not even get on the ballot in many states or get on the ballot only in very compromised circumstances. And so there was absolutely no way that an alternative could emerge.

So, this is another difficulty. And your opening position—that this is just a duopoly—reminds me, of course, of the quotation generally attributed to Nyerere. But we don't know whether he actually said it. But Julius Nyerere is supposed to have said, when he was accused of running a one-party state in Tanzania, that “America—meaning the United States—is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” So, there we have it.

So, yeah, this is definitely a serious issue. And you were going to talk about—and I think we should talk a little bit about—how the media is covering it. Because it looks as though the media has essentially decided that Poilievre is going to win, and practically every major mainstream media outlet is talking about how Trudeau is hated. So maybe you can say something about that.

But before that, I simply say, of course, that I forgot to mention earlier that Dimitri, as you see behind him, runs a wonderful new YouTube channel called "Reason to Resist." I'm sure you should all check him out because he doesn't just cover Canada there; he covers a whole range of world issues.

But, Dimitri, why don't you talk about how the media has been covering Trudeau's departure?

RADHIKA DESAI: Well, I think they're making it a lot about personality. So, they're saying, you know, Trudeau is detached. Trudeau comes off as arrogant. You know, the Canadian people—we hear this all the time—they're tired. They want change. But no one ever addresses the underlying concerns. They're making this very much about the carbon tax.

The corporate media, which is so heavily under the influence of the fossil fuels industry in this country, want you to believe that that is a huge part of the reason for discontent, even though the carbon tax has had, from an economic perspective, really very little impact on ordinary Canadians. So, they want the carbon tax—the corporate media—to be ditched. So, they're making it all about that.

And, of course, the Liberal candidates are dutifully complying. Now we're hearing from the two leading candidates in the Liberal Party to replace Trudeau, Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney—the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor—that they are going to scale back dramatically the carbon tax. We're hearing this also from the other Liberal candidate, who has, frankly, little hope of winning, Chandra Arya. He's going to ditch the carbon tax.

It's really not about the carbon tax. There is some level of concern amongst sort of right-leaning Canadians about that. But the broader population, I don't think, is particularly motivated by that. So, what they're avoiding talking about are the things that I think are really generating frustration for people in this country.

First of all, the unaffordability of housing. There has been a dramatic increase in the Canadian population under Trudeau. I checked the Canadian population for reasons unrelated to this broadcast the other day and was surprised to learn it has now hit 40 million. It seemed to hit the nexus of 40 million—I thought it was 38 million. Two million people were added to the population, and Canada's government didn't take steps to increase the stock of affordable housing for the population. These people could have been accommodated if Canada had made the appropriate investments, but it didn't. And so that is something that is of great concern to Canadians: the unaffordability of housing.

Another thing that is really frustrating to Canadians is the degradation of our public health care system. The Trudeau government did virtually nothing to address those concerns, and, in fact, we've seen increasing creeping privatization of the healthcare system in this country—a process which the Poilievre government, should they come to power, will undoubtedly accelerate. So that problem is going to get worse.

I think another source of discontent amongst Canadians—and certainly the corporate media doesn't want to talk about this—is the fact that Canada shipped almost $20 billion to Ukraine at a time when poverty and homelessness in this country are becoming more severe. Whatever the official statistics may show, we're seeing every day more and more people homeless in this country.

A report came out—not a governmental report, a nongovernmental report—that showed that the population of the homeless in Ontario, Canada's most populous province, in 2024, was in the nexus of 80,000 persons. And they predicted that if there is a significant economic downturn, that number will soar to well in excess of 200,000. Well, that's just in Ontario. So, we're probably looking right now at a level of homelessness in this country involving hundreds of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of people, over a year, are at some point or another homeless. The government is doing nothing significant to address that, but at the same time, it is shipping $20 billion to a failed proxy war in Ukraine.

So, I think these are some of the issues. And, of course, inequality—people see that while so many Canadians are struggling with huge amounts of debt, struggling to deal with the cost of living, struggling to deal with their healthcare needs, and so forth, more and more wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a very small number of extremely privileged Canadians who effectively control, you know, the political system in this country and the corporate media.

So, these frustrations are building, and what happens, you know, people end up, as we've seen over and over again in history, scapegoating vulnerable members of the population. And that's happening in Canada just as it's happening in the United States and happening in Europe. Racialized groups are being blamed, at the behest of the political elite, for problems that are really the making of the political elite, that are the fault of the political elite. And the corporate media doesn't want to talk about it at all.

And the other thing I would say briefly, when we talked about, you know, how difficult it is for a truly radical alternative to come to power in this country, we need to understand that the leadership of the two alternatives—the main, the so-called left-wing alternatives in Canada's Parliament—serve a very specific function in Canada's political system. And that function is to act as gatekeepers. You and I experienced this in the 2020 leadership campaign.

Their purpose is to prevent anyone with a radical, transformative agenda from gaining power in their party and offering a real alternative to Canadians. They perpetuate the myth that they are an alternative by placing themselves slightly to the left of the Liberals. That's what the NDP does, and that's what the Greens do.

So, for example, with the NDP and the Greens—they favor a wealth tax, right? But if you look at the actual proposal, it's peanuts. It's not going to fundamentally alter the problem of inequality in this country. We used to have, in Canada, in the 50s and the 60s, a top marginal tax rate that was in excess of 90 percent—90%! That would actually be a real change and a real effort to address the problem of yawning inequality in this country.

You know as well as I do, Radhika that the leadership of the Greens and NDP wouldn't even think about floating that idea for purposes of debate and discussion. That's far too radical for them. So, they come up with this little Band-Aid of a solution. It's no solution at all. This pathetic wealth tax, and that is enough to position themselves as an alternative to the Liberals, as a progressive alternative to the Liberals. But at the end of the day, they are not.

So, this is the game we're playing in, you know, in the public discourse in this country.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. I mean, you know, when you say that Canada had a 90% marginal tax rate at the highest bracket, I mean, people might think, “Oh, the Canadian government must have been heavily, you know, a big taxing government.” It was the norm for Western countries to have those sorts of taxes because the general idea was, and it directly came from the fact that working-class people at that time were very empowered. They had fought, they had helped their governments fight wars, they had come home as heroes. The idea was that this was going to be a society fit for heroes, etcetera, etcetera.

So, you had a very different society, and now, you know, over the last, I would say, 40 plus years, 45 years even, depending on which country you're talking about, all of these arrangements that made our society so much more livable, so much more fair, so much more just... It was not the ultimate; there was still a long way to go, but it was way better than what we have.

But when the crisis of the 1970s occurred, people—one way of looking at it would have been that we can come out of this crisis by deepening the progressive reforms after the Second World War and say, you know, create greater equality, put more money into the pockets of ordinary people so they will have more, create more demand, etc.

But no, the side that said that “No, we should reverse all those reforms and liberate capital from all the social obligations and political obligations it had,” and somehow this would be free capital to undertake investments, and you know, capital will reacquire its mojo and so on. But that is not what has happened, because quite frankly, capital is simply not capable of doing that.

However, as you say, you know, all the major political forces of the country have bought this. They've drunk this Kool-Aid. So, the Mulroney conservatives first moved to the right, but the Liberals and the NDP have followed them there. Now, we have this cross-party consensus on neoliberalism, and therefore, when you said earlier that the coverage is all about how bad… Trudeau is fake and phony, imposing this terrible carbon tax and bringing in more immigrants, and so on. All these people are essentially attacking Trudeau in his sort of soft underbelly.

Why do I call it the soft underbelly? Because of the two sides of this one-party that we're talking about, Trudeau’s side, the so-called Liberal or Bidenite side, if we might call it, essentially wins elections by claiming to be more progressive than they are. And, of course, by attacking them for being progressive from the other side, is the way the other side wins.

So that’s the situation we have right now.

So, the falsity of Trudeau, the fact that he over-promises and under-delivers, is a structural feature of this system. That’s what I wanted to say. But you also point...

Sorry, please go ahead.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: No, no. I am in total agreement with you. I didn't mean to interrupt.

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah. No, no, but exactly. And the stuff about immigration, you know, you said that you looked up some figures. So did I because I recently did a piece on this… I also did a piss on Trudeau, but that's a different matter. But I did a piece on the Sidecar website, and it's about Trudeau's departure, and for that, I did look up the immigration figures.

Essentially what happened is that, of course, the Harper average was about 250,000 a year. Under Trudeau, for most of the time after 2015, it was like 300,000 a year. An increase, but not huge. But essentially what happened, and this is the way in which the Trudeau government relates to the corporate establishment of Canada, essentially what happened is that after the COVID-19 restrictions ended and the service economy took off, there was an enormous increase in demand for unskilled labor.

So, Trudeau did two things, his government expanded the Harper-era temporary workers' program, in which essentially workers are tied to one employer, and he expanded in cahoots with the Canadian, underfunded Canadian universities, the International Student program. So, under these two programs, lots more people came in, and you’re absolutely right, when I looked up the figures, it was essentially about 490,000 and or thereabouts for each of the two years 2022 and 2023. So yes, of course, the country experienced a huge influx of people for which it was not prepared.

You know, the Poilievre side keeps claiming that it's immigrants that are the problem. Immigrants are not the problem. That simple fact, immigrants are not the problem. Unfortunately, or fortunately, they are the solution. They are the solution because Canada’s birth rate is at an all-time low, is very low. There is absolutely no way that Canada can grow in any way and have an adequate labor force that is capable of taking care of those who cannot work, whether they are too elderly or whether they're too young or disabled, or what have you. And so, you need an influx of immigrants.

But the problem is that, yeah, they have, you know, essentially brought in these immigrants without providing the services. This is not just the housing crisis, but there is also a crisis in healthcare services, social services, etc. And so, naturally, the people there are irate. And this irritation is used by the likes of Poilievre to attack Trudeau on migration, etc., etc.

So, this is the kind of situation we have, and we're going to see for the upcoming election campaign, it’s going to be pretty ugly because essentially, you're going to have Trudeau, or whoever succeeds him, whether it's Chrystia Freeland or Mark Carney. I don't think it hardly matters because I don't think either of them is going to win. And whoever—I mean, the fact that they are willing to lead the Liberal Party at this low point must mean that they are simply gluttons for punishment because I don't see them going anywhere.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Well, that's one possible. The other is they have such gigantic egos that they think that they can somehow pull a rabbit out of the hat and transform...

RADHIKA DESAI: I suppose, I mean, you know what? I never even thought about it, but of course, that's absolutely a possibility.

And you know, I just wanted to add one other thing about this whole issue of Trudeau's progressiveness. I mean, I remember when Trudeau was elected in 2015, in the election campaign, and I even remember writing a newspaper column in the Winnipeg Free Press, basically saying that there was, you know, nothing wrong with increasing government spending, particularly given that interest rates were so low at that time and so on so. You know, defending this idea and saying that, you know, it's a good thing that Trudeau and, you know, the Liberals are essentially saying that we don’t have to adhere to this crazy deficit obsession. But so, you know, they sounded, as you said, very progressive.

But the thing is that even after all that noise about, you know, we are going to be progressive, we are going to create investment, we are going to invest in social services, blah, blah, and so on. Their most progressive policy, which everybody agreed—or, you know, or rather, let me put it this way, most people would say that the most progressive thing that the Trudeau government did from 2015 to today—is introduced the National Child Benefit, and it is supposed to have brought about half a million kids out of poverty. But it still left the Canadian child poverty rate at about 17% a few years ago, and two or three years ago, and since then it has gone up by about 5 percentage points.

So, you can see if this is what their most progressive policy has done, you can see how completely disappointing this government has been, and this is part of this whole structural feature that they are necessarily, how can you say, they must necessarily betray. They must necessarily promise the world and deliver neoliberalism. That's what I'm going to say.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Right. You know, and the fact that, so I think that the fact that Carney and Freeland have emerged as by far the two leading candidates to replace Trudeau tells you all you need to know about the orientation of the Liberals.

You know, Mark Carney is a former Goldman Sachs banker. And then he went on to become the head of the Bank of Canada, after which he assumed the position of Governor of the Bank of England, pursuing the neoliberal policies there. This is a man of privilege, a man who sees the world very much through the eyes of the affluent and prioritizes their interests.

And Chrystia Freeland, you know, as I recall, she had an editorial position at the Financial Times. Her specialty was basically glorifying neoliberalism. That’s what her unique talent as a so-called journalist was. And, you know, she’s made very clear in her time as Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister what her economic orthodoxy is and what her geopolitical orientation is. She is a neocon. She’s a neocon who will do the bidding of the military-industrial complex at every turn.

These are the two candidates to replace Trudeau. This is where the Liberals believe that they are going to find the electoral promised land by putting these two people at the head of their party. I mean, it’s just a reaffirmation of the fact that we have a uniparty of big business, of the billionaire class, with two factions. The Liberals have learned nothing, and that’s because they have no interest in learning anything from the imminent demise of their government. They aren’t there to serve the interests of the people at the end of the day.

One of the things I want to mention about, you know, how they convince Canadians that they’re progressives, by the way, the one you mentioned, the childcare benefit. That is, I would say, probably the most significant progressive achievement of their government, although grossly inadequate to address the underlying needs and concerns of the workers of this country.

You know, they made a big deal during their time in office of championing the rights of the LGBTQ community. And something I want to say about that is that it is a cheap way to come off as progressive, because when you’re championing the rights of the LGBTQ community, it doesn’t require you to fundamentally redistribute wealth in the country. It’s kind of a— from the perspective of the wealthy, it’s a cost-free way to look progressive.

OK, so that’s why they do it. That’s why they place so much emphasis upon it, because they can project the image of being progressive without actually changing the underlying structural problems of our social order. So, people, I think in the, are comrades in the LGBT community, should be cognizant of that. Of course, they have every reason to, you know, favor and promote political candidates who are going to respect their rights. But they are also at times being cynically exploited by the neoliberals and even sometimes people on the right, and by the business community. You go to the gay pride parade, see all these floats? The Bank of Montreal, TD Bank. Those people are not the friends of the workers of this country. They’re using the LGBTQ community cynically in order to burnish their progressive credentials.

RADHIKA DESAI: I’ll reinforce your point actually, if you don’t mind my interrupting you.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Sure.

RADHIKA DESAI: You know, what you say is absolutely right, because I remember thinking this back in the—it must have been the mid to late 90s when we had the Eagan and Nesbit case. So, what that showed, so, you know, because already by then, Canada was the champion of the LGBTQ community and blah blah and so on. But when it came to giving money, so the Eagan and Nesbit case was a case where two gay men were married, and then one of them passed away, and the surviving spouse essentially said that he should be entitled to the same pension rights as female spouses of men were. And the Supreme Court granted that, from the point of view of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that the surviving spouse was entitled to this. But then the Supreme Court claimed that it would be too expensive, so it wasn’t going to grant it.

So, this shows you that when it comes to spending—actually putting money behind your words, behind your promises—the Canadian establishment, including the Supreme Court, gives you nothing. It doesn’t matter what group you belong to. You can be a woman, you can be LGBTQ, you can be a non-white person. They will promise you everything, so long as it costs nothing.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Right. In other words, so long as it preserves the power and privilege of the wealthy. So, they have no problem being “progressive” as long as you don’t touch their power and privilege.

RADHIKA DESAI: Yes.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: So, you know, and we've—a lot of us have fallen for this, in this country, they fall for this schtick. At the end of the day, if you're not prepared to redistribute wealth massively, you aren't a friend of the working class. Period. End of story. No matter what language you may employ, yes, no matter what policies you may pursue.

And the other thing I want to say, which addresses a point that you made at the outset, you know, you referred to Poilievre as a Trumpist candidate. Now, in many respects, that’s absolutely true. But there's one key respect in which I think that’s not true. And that is Trump, I believe, will pursue, to the exclusion of everything else in his Presidency, what he perceives to be the national interest.

Now, I’m not saying that his perception of the US national interest is correct. I’m not saying that it accords with the interests of the American people. I’m not saying that at all, but he has a certain conception of what is good for America, and he’s going to prioritize that over all else. Poilievre isn’t going to do that. Poilievre is going to do what Trump wants him to. He’s going to be every bit the vassal of Washington that Justin Trudeau was and possibly even worse in that regard. So, in that sense, that’s not Trumpist. He’s not going to be a nationalist. I think what he’s going to be is a servant of Washington.

But he’ll, you know, cloak it up in the language of Canadian patriotism and so forth. He’ll try to exploit patriotic fervor in this country, but he’s not going to change the fundamental orientation of Canadian foreign policy. Canadian foreign policy will continue to accord with the bidding of Washington. Whatever Washington wants, Paul Yoga is going to give them. I have every confidence that that is going to happen. So, in that sense, he’s not really a nationalist. He’s not really a Trumpist.

You know, we in this country are falling into a state of, I mean, I talked about this in a recent program, Reason to Resist, where I think that really this whole discussion around Trump wanting to convert Canada into the 51st state has an air of unreality to it because, in many ways, we already are the 51st state. You know, it's saying that...

RADHIKA DESAI: That's an interesting point, because I was looking at it from a slightly different point of view, but I think our conclusions are very compatible because I thought, OK, so, you know, Trump said he’s going to make, you know, he said Governor Trudeau the 51st state and whatnot. And then, of course, all the major politicians came out and said, oh, this is wrong, this is not going to happen. But it's almost as though, Trump said it to they can claim for public consumption that, you know, this is not going to happen, and we are so patriotic etc. while… so this will impress the public, everybody will think that they are essentially looking after the interests of Canadians, while they will actually then be freer to do what Trump wants them to do.

So, in that sense, you know, you and I came to this very similar conclusion from two different points of view. But certainly, in my view, I would say that certainly by the time we signed the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement back in 1998, that Canadians have essentially, you know, hitched their wagon to the United States rather than doing what so many progressive economists had been saying: diversifying our trading links, you know, exploring, you know, on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of our country, different trade relations and economic relations. And we can still do that, but we are not doing that. And I agree with you, I think this is exactly what these people will do. And of course...

DIMITRI LASCARIS: I crunched the numbers recently. Trade with the United States amounts to, I think, in 2023, about 909 billion dollars, almost a trillion. That constitutes somewhere in the range of 43% of Canada's annual GDP. Yes. The US, even though we are or at or near the top of the US’s biggest trading partners, US trade with Canada accounts for something like 13.6% of American GDP. So, the United States would be affected to a far lesser extent by a total breakdown in trading relations with Canada than Canada would be affected by that breakdown.

Canada has now become extraordinarily vulnerable to adverse trade measures adopted by the US government. They are much less vulnerable to us, and so naturally, this is going to place us in a position of subservience to Washington. We saw this in technicolor when Trump started threatening to slap Canada with 25% tariffs if it didn’t militarize the border, which is essentially what Trudeau agreed to do. How did Trudeau react? He got in a plane and fled to Mar-a-Lago, where he promised Trump everything that he wanted. Then he came back and announced with great fanfare this new Border Protection Initiative, which was suitably monikered with a militaristic-sounding word, he called the Joint Strike Force.

This is exactly the language that Trump wanted to hear. He wants a militarized border, and Trudeau dutifully snapped to attention and said, "Yes, Sir, we’ll give that to you." Even Doug Ford, who I think was kind of reading the tea leaves here, but my sense was that he and Trudeau, who despite their supposed political differences, seemed to get along famously, that he was assigned the task of being the bad cop. So, he went on American and Canadian television saying, "We’re going to retaliate. We’re going to fight back. Maybe we’ll cut off the oil." That was all nonsense because Doug Ford ultimately agreed to step in and also help militarize the border. It was just a show. Then you have Danielle Smith in Alberta, who wasn’t even putting on a show. She says, “Whatever Mr. Trump wants, we’re going to give to him. There’s absolutely no way that we’re going to reduce our shipments of oil to the United States.”

So, I think this whole sorry episode, in a way, Trump did us a favor by threatening because it really highlighted the degree to which the Canadian political elite is subservient to Washington. And I hope that our fellow Canadians got the memo.

RADHIKA DESAI: Well, I hope so, because, you know, when you said Trudeau rushed to Mar-a-Lago, I actually had a very vivid image in my mind. I thought, what is this guy doing? And I refrained from using it in my written piece, but I’m going to say it here. Trudeau essentially ran over to Trump, rolled over on his belly, and asked Trump to rub it. Basically, that’s what happened. I mean, you know, it’s like what dogs do when they’re being very subservient. So, that’s exactly what Trudeau did.

And I think that... So, whether Trump did us a favor, did the Canadians a favor, or the elites a favor, because you were saying Trump did us a favor because we should be able to see exactly how subservient the Canadian elites are, the Canadian main party elites, and I’m saying that Trump is giving them cover either way. For some, maybe you could be right.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Yeah. Well, look, it wasn’t an intentional favor.

RADHIKA DESAI: For some Canadian, maybe you’ll be right, and for other Canadians, maybe I'll be right, but you know this is very interesting and you know, I also wanted to go back to the, you know you were talking about Carney and Freeland, as the two most serious candidates. And they, you know, we have known this for a long time.

So, you know Freeland, it's very interesting. If Freeland becomes the leader, I mean, if Carney, let me just say, first of all, if Carney becomes the leader, it will just be more of the same. That is to say that the Liberal Party, will remain in the same mode, and is therefore not surprising, that Trudeau tried to shift aside Chrystia Freeland and appoint Carney as the finance minister, which of course prompted Chrystia Freeland's resignation, but essentially Carney would do more of the same. What do I mean by that?

Carney has been an expert at pursuing neoliberal policies, while sort of, you know, saying his heart bleeds for ordinary people and so on. So, he essentially talks about how, you know, we can pursue progressive climate policies and so on, which are really just window dressing for underlying policies, which are simply, you know, they don't care about the climate except to make a show of things. So that's Carney for you. And Carney, of course, has been, as you say, the governor general of, sorry, the governor of both the Bank of Canada and of the Bank of England, which is also really, it sort of, puts him into that Atlanticist circle of elites where, you know, he is, you know, au fait with all those elites.

Now, Freeland is slightly different material. I would say that as we know, and I don't think I'm stepping out of line in any way by pointing out that Chrystia Freeland is the granddaughter of Ukrainian Nazis, and she has never forsaken this relationship. I mean, I don't blame anybody for who their parents or grandparents were. We can't help it, but at the very least, as a politician who claims to be a progressive, she could have distanced herself from this. Who claims to be fighting for democracy could have distanced herself from this, but she never did that.

And therefore, and of course, as we know, Canada has historically played the role of training and now even assisting in funding a Ukrainian government which is significantly backed by Nazi and Neo-Nazi outfits, military entire military units are created by that, and the Canadian government has contributed to training them in the past even as mainstream sources, this is before the onset of the Russian operations there, even at a time when mainstream western outfits like BBC Newsnight and other such Time magazine and so on, were doing videos about Ukraine's Nazi problem. So, you can see these videos, or at least you could a year or so ago when I first looked at them. So, in that sense, I think that Freeland, will likely bring the Liberal Party even closer to the present, hard-right Conservative party under Pierre Poilievre as a kind of way of winning the war.

And of course, as you know in her resignation letter, she pointed out that she was concerned that Trudeau was spending too much money and not keeping the fiscal powder dry. Now, of course, I admit that the point she was referring to were really cheap tricks that Trudeau was playing by giving people an GST holiday for Christmas. I mean for and $250 check like. What kind of idiocy is that? But nevertheless, that's what Trudeau elected to do. That's what Trudeau is. Certainly Chrystia Freeland is smarter, but smarter in a darker way than you and I would like to see and most Canadians would like to see. So, this is also really quite fascinating.

And a final point, maybe, and maybe I'll just make this a question to you. Really, Trudeau's fall, as I said in my opening remarks, is really something that is happening across the Western world where the side, the globalist Atlanticist so-called democratic Bidenite side is falling and a new, Trumpist side might win. What do you think of that?

DIMITRI LASCARIS: I'm sorry, you broke up there for a moment. Could you please repeat the question?

RADHIKA DESAI: Sorry. Let me repeat that. So, I think that essentially, you know, what the Trudeau's fall in his resignation might be seen as one as the latest of a series of Western, so-called Democratic Atlanticist Bidenite globalist side to fall. Trudeau is the latest of this tribe. Others were Scholz and Macron's, Prime Minister Barnier and Yoon, and so on. But others are also in trouble. So do you see that this is some kind of an internationally coordinated fall of a certain vision and a certain way of doing politics in the West? It was not great. But we are probably looking at something even more right-wing, harder, but whatever. Whatever you may think.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Well, I think there's tremendous overlap for the reasons behind the fall of all of these people. You know, the absolute, if that's what you mean by coordinated, I don't think that there's some sort of, you know, somebody behind the scenes orchestrating all of this necessarily.

But what is happening is that throughout the West, there is a profound discontent with the model of governance and the economic and foreign policies of these Atlanticists, and that is being roundly rejected. The problem that we're experiencing is that people are—and this is because of the manipulation, I think largely because of the manipulation by the corporate media—people are choosing the wrong alternative to replace that. They're misdiagnosing the problem, and we're gonna end up exacerbating the situation and not finding the cure for the sickness.

But other reasons for the demise of the Scholz government, you know, Macron's, uh, the selection for Prime Minister, you know, the Conservatives in Britain, Trudeau and so forth, Biden—are they very similar? Absolutely. There's tremendous similarity. These people are fundamentally serving the interests of the corporate elite. They're serving a hegemonic kind of... And all of this is exacerbating the problems being experienced on a day-to-day basis by ordinary citizens, particularly the poor and working class. And so, at that, they are opting for the wrong alternative, I completely agree.

I do want to say a few things, additional things about Chrystia Freeland. I regard Chrystia Freeland as a very dangerous individual. It's not just that she didn't distance herself from her grandfather, who was clearly a Nazi collaborator. I would say an outright Nazi. That's what the evidence shows. She called him a champion of democracy.

RADHIKA DESAI: Wow.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: It's one thing to say, “I'm not going to renounce my grandfather,” but to positively misrepresent to such an extraordinary degree what he was. To call him a champion of democracy when he was a Nazi or Nazi collaborator is outrageous.

And she accused those who told the truth about her grandfather of being agents of the Russian government. She smeared them, and then she gave two standing ovations to another outright Ukrainian Nazi in Canada's parliament at the time when she was one—she was probably the second most powerful person in the Canadian government. And as the Ottawa Citizen exposed, the Canadian military was training Neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military. And she has, you know, she was at a protest. She was caught holding the scarf, which was associated with the Ukrainian far-right, and she deleted a photograph that she had posted on X of her holding that scarf after the, you know, the anti-imperialist community erupted in fury.

So, this is a person who has a very hard-right political orientation, Chrystia Freeland. All the evidence indicates that, and I fear for what this country would become under Chrystia Freeland. I think from a foreign policy perspective, she's every bit as dangerous as Pierre Poilievre. And she could even be more dangerous than Pierre Poilievre. But at the end of the day, this is no kind of person to appoint to solve the problems of this country.

Mark Carney is, you know, fundamentally the man's a banker, and he's going to pursue policies that are going to be in the interests of the, you know, the financial elite. I think that should be assumed.

And if we're going to get out of this vicious cycle, you know, Radhika, which is leading to increasingly higher levels of anger and frustration in the population, with potentially disastrous consequences down the road for what remains of Canadian democracy, we have to stop replacing, you know, failed prime ministers like Justin Trudeau with people like Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland. This is exactly the opposite of what we need in order to set our democracy on the right path.

RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, just a couple of points there. You know, and we should probably wind down soon because we're kind of coming close to an hour. But let me just—what you said really reminds me of a couple of things, both about Carney, Trudeau, and about Freeland.

So let me just say, on Carney-Trudeau, I mean, the fact is, you know, Trudeau—in 2015—it wasn't that Trudeau was regarded as this great prime ministerial figure and, you know, rose from the ranks to lead the Liberal Party. No. A liberal team got together. The liberal team consisted of the grandees like Ralph Goodale and David Dodge, whoever, and of course, with the addition of young new stars like Chrystia Freeland, who just joined the Liberal Party a few years before. They got together and decided that they were going to make one big push to revive the fortunes of the Liberal Party, which had sunk to an all-time low in the previous election.

And they then, having come up with a set of plans and promises to make to the Canadian public— which, of course, they intended completely to betray—they decided to front themselves with Justin Trudeau. What's nicer than Justin Trudeau? He, you know, Justin Trudeau used to be dismissed as prime ministerial material because he said things like, “I don’t read newspapers. I'm sure something important happened, somebody will tell me.” He would say things like that. So of course, nobody took him seriously. But now that a group of other clever people had put together a clever plan for the betrayal of Canada, what was nicer than to front it with Justin Trudeau? People were reminded of the most iconic prime minister Canada ever had. Of course, he's a bit Marmite, you know, as they say in England—that is to say you either like him a lot or you hate him. But nevertheless, you know, I mean, I mean Pierre Elliott, nevertheless, it worked. So, Trudeau, who's essentially a pretty face for this nasty program, was, you know, essentially that Mark Carney has, you know, got a few more brain cells than Trudeau. And so he will be much more of an actor on his own accord, but that will be the only difference between them.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Yes, yes.

RADHIKA DESAI: As for Freeland, you know, I remember thinking way back when the entire Parliament, consisting of every last, you know, 300-plus members of the Canadian Parliament, stood up and applauded a Nazi. And I mean, the whole country was shocked. Like, did not even one of them supposedly very highly educated people have the temerity to ask, "Well, hang on, if he was fighting against the Russians in the Second World War, which is why we are applauding him, who was he fighting for?" And if they had merely asked that question, they would have known the answer. But nobody did. The entire Parliament, which is no more than a herd of sheep—probably sheep have more independence than they do—they all stood up and applauded.

And I think this is, of course, and I think you're right, Chrystia Freeland is the one who engineered this. We were told that, oh, Anthony Rota, the Speaker of the Canadian Parliament, made a mistake and therefore fell on his sword and resigned. And whatnot. Nothing doing. It wasn't Rota who invited him. Such an invitation would have never gone out without the complicity and probably the initiative of the government.

Chrystia Freeland, in addition to being who she is, which we've already talked about, has a PhD in Russian and Slavic studies—or anyway, a postgraduate degree in Russian and Slavic studies. She knows what she's talking about. She was not trying to, you know, just… like this was not a mistake. She was actively trying to push the envelope of what the Canadian public will accept. If they accept that it was OK to be a Nazi, if you were fighting the Russians, that is another step in favor of making people like her grandfather and, for that matter, herself acceptable to the Canadian public. And I think this is what she was really doing.

And I'm so thankful that they failed because, as you know, I was pilloried in the press for asking a question about this to President Putin at the Valdai Club meetings. And, you know, I got, of course, a lot of hate mail on the social media, but I don't have much of a social media presence, so I also got emails, possible emails, but I have to report. I also got a lot of love mail—people writing to me saying things like, "You know what? My father/grandfather, who fought in the Second World War, must be turning around in his grave to see what happened in the Canadian Parliament," and they would absolutely be right. And people who said, "You did the right thing," and so on.

So, anyway, to come back to this point, I mean, you know, I completely agree with you that Chrystia Freeland is a much more dangerous figure. And maybe, you know, we can end this discussion by bringing it, and yeah, but by bringing it around to the whole, you know, we are calling this group the Atlantis establishment, the so-called Democratic (into heavy quotation marks) establishment, the globalist establishment, because these are all words they use for themselves, and so on.

But exactly what are these people? Because it seems to me that, essentially, what happened is that sometime in the late 90s or mid-to-late 90s, when people like Clinton and Blair came to power, it became a trend to hide the new liberalism behind a veneer of tokenistic progressivism. And this kind of seemed to work for a while, but by the 2010s, it was no longer working. And the sign that it was no longer working was the Boris Johnson successful campaign for Brexit in 2016. And then, in the same year, the election of Donald Trump. And so, we began to see that the hypocrisy of this Atlanticists Democratic Group, this so-called progressive group, was essentially becoming the highway along which a brazen, right-wing force that was advancing, and that's what we are seeing.

And, of course, then in the context of the conflict in Ukraine after February 2022, what began to happen is that, you know, I want to go back to this whole idea of, you know, what is the international connection? And I'm open, like, I'm just speculating here and you also gave some thoughts, but maybe we'll end with this and your thoughts on this, that essentially, with the onset of this conflict in Ukraine, military conflict in Ukraine in 2022, what you began to see is that Biden made a great effort to essentially rally the Allies. You know, everybody step in line. We are all going to work as one. We are going to create the greatest unity that the Western world has ever had. NATO has ever had, etc., etc.

And of course, it was kind of lucky for Biden that all the major governments in all the major countries of the Western alliance were essentially people who were willing to play along with Biden, probably having been through various, you know, global leadership schools run by the American government and so on. They were products of all that, so they were happy to go along with that. And we are now also—and they were definitely coordinated. They talk to one another. They act as an international alliance.

But of course, the Trumpists are also increasingly acting as an international alliance, funnily enough, so that, you know, Trump, or Musk can say, "You know, the AFD will save Germany," or in the case of Britain, Trump and Musk and others can take a side in favor of the Reform Party, which is led by Nigel Farage. Or they don't like Nigel Farage. Whatever. So talk about international interference in politics. But, you know, maybe we can end, Dimitri, with some thoughts from you about these things.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Well, there’s no question that there’s international coordination going on at this level of this so-called, in this film, populist movement of the right. So, for example, we’ve seen Elon Musk, who is, you know, gave massive amounts of money to the Trump campaign, is now a part of the Trump team, openly promoting the far-right, racist, fanatical Zionist Tommy Robinson to replace Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage is too moderate for Elon Musk, and he’s openly interfering in British politics to promote this odious character, Tommy Robinson, who’s actually done jail time, OK. And he’s now, you know, as we all know, he has been promoting openly and explicitly and aggressively the AfD in Germany. There is absolutely no question that there’s coordination going on internationally, and that’s dangerously effective. I think they’re strengthening each other’s movements in these various countries.

One thing I will say about this movement, however, although I am implacably opposed to it for a whole host of reasons which we’ve been discussing, there are indications—including the fact that Trump apparently shut down the assault on Gaza simply by sending his envoy, Steve Witkoff, to browbeat Netanyahu—and some of the talk we’re hearing from the Trump administration about ending the Ukraine war—that there is within elements of this movement a recognition of the limits of their power. And maybe they are more... we'll see. We'll see, but they may be more prepared to accommodate the era of multipolarity than the neoliberal elite is. They are not prepared to accommodate it at all.

Now, it’s not because, you know, people like Trump or Musk or the leader of the AfD are humanitarians. It’s not for that reason. It’s not because they’re Democrats. Or none of those things. Certainly, they’re not progressive. The reason is simply that there is an element, perhaps hopefully, of realism in terms of the reach of the power of Western governments.

So maybe something good will emerge from it relative to what we've been experiencing for most of our adult lives, but Radhika at the end of the day, you know, if we don't address and don't put into power people who are going to address the structural inequities of our society, our situation is only going to get worse. Our politics are going to get worse; instability is going to get worse, and popular discontent is going to get worse.

RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: So, the last thing I want to say just to, because I think it's an anecdote that really sheds a lot of light on the reality of what we're dealing with here in Canada. You know, you talked about how Trudeau was this vacuous character who didn't have a lot of substance but ultimately presented well. And that's why they empowered him. As a matter of fact, I used to work closely with somebody who served as the President of the Liberal Party. I won’t name the person, but we talked enough and worked enough together that I sometimes got insights into this person's views about Liberal Party politics. And back in the months leading up to Justin Trudeau's decision to run to be the leader of the Liberal Party—so this would have been back around 2012 or 2013—we had an enlightening conversation, and I asked him, “What do you think about this young Trudeau, you know, and do you think he's the right man for the job?” And he said to me, “Dimitri, I have two words for you: empty suit.”

And I'm here to tell you that Pierre Poilievre, you could just as aptly describe him in that way. He is the conservative version of an empty suit. The man has absolutely no substance. He has a certain presentation, a certain appearance, which is deemed by the real elite, the real power within the Conservative Party, to secure the Prime Minister ship for the Conservative Party, to secure power for the Conservative Party. But this is a person with absolutely no intellectual depth whatsoever. Not only is he morally bankrupt, but he has the intellectual substance of an empty suit. So hopefully, you know, enough Canadians will realize that between now and the election day to affect real change in this country. I don’t have...

RADHIKA DESAI: But I would like to... I was going to give you the last word until you said, well, I've been, you know, at the point where you said "empty suit" about Trudeau. But I would say, I suspect, I wish you were right about Poilievre, but I think that he does have some smarts. I’m not saying that he's really, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, if you are as nasty as Pierre Poilievre is, there must be something wrong with you. So in that sense, you know... but I think he has a certain level of shrewdness, and that is going to be, I think, a lot more dangerous than Trudeau. Not that Trudeau has not been dangerous for us. He has put us in a lot of danger on a number of counts—for example, arresting Meng Wanzhou and destroying our relationship with China, which is, in many ways, a very important country that we must relate to.

But anyway, there are so many things that you raised about the limitations of American power. By God, we could have another whole conversation about it. I hope you'll come back, Dimitri, to discuss this or, for that matter, the many other things that you cover on your wonderful YouTube channel, Reason to Resist, including, of course, Israel, Gaza, Palestine, the Middle East, etc., which you do so well, particularly given that we are told—and we hope it’s true—that there will be a ceasefire beginning in Gaza tomorrow. So let's hope for that. Let’s wish for that. And thank you so much. We hope to have you back very soon. Goodbye.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: My pleasure. Happy to be back. Take care, Radhika.

RADHIKA DESAI: Great.