HOW CANADA CAN BUILD RESILIENCE IN A NEW GLOBAL ORDER

Jordan Leichnitz

What a difference two months can make. It’s hard to remember the relatively quaint days before Donald Trump took office and unleashed a maelstrom of domestic chaos and attacks on U.S. allies.

Canadians, battered by a major affordability squeeze in recent years —higher rents, rising grocery bills, and growing uncertainty about their jobs – now have to contend with a roller-coaster of on-again, off-again tariff threats that will deal a body blow to our whole economy.

Trump's unjustified trade war has brought Canada’s unsustainable over-reliance on the U.S. as a trade and security partner into sharp and urgent focus. Since January, we’ve seen his direct threats to Canadian livelihoods and to our sovereignty itself scramble our politics and upend our economy.

It’s become clear that Canada’s best defence against Trump’s tariff war isn’t negotiation, placation or retreat—it’s resistance and resilience. That means fighting back, investing in working people, fortifying economic and security partnerships beyond the U.S., and resisting the failed trickle-down economic fixes that some are pushing here at home.

While Canada is uniquely exposed to U.S. instability, we aren’t alone in navigating this enormous shift in the global order. Around the world, financial instability has fueled the rise of the far-right, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Europe.

There, working people have also faced significant economic insecurity in recent years, driven by the aftermath of Covid, Russia’s war in Ukraine, a slowing economy, and now, U.S. volatility that’s reshaping the post-war world order.

And when people feel abandoned, history has shown that uncertainty is not just bad for the economy – it’s also rocket fuel for the far-right. Voters in Europe are increasingly questioning whether mainstream parties can deliver real solutions to the problems that they face, and they’re making this doubt known at the ballot box.

Last summer, far-right parties from twelve countries in the European Parliament formed “Patriots for Europe”, instantly becoming the third-largest delegation of E.U. lawmakers. In September, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria won 29% of the vote in the county’s national elections, their best result since – yes – 1945. And less than a month ago, Germany’s far-right, pro-Russian and virulently anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany won one out of every five votes in the country’s federal elections.

In a time of economic instability, these parties successfully framed immigration as the source of the problem. They capitalized on a broad sense that mainstream political elites live in a bubble, detached from the struggles of ordinary people. Their rise builds on a bedrock of online disinformation, often Russian-backed, that’s poisoning online spaces globally.

For European leaders, the question of economic and security stability without the guarantee of American protection has become an urgent priority, and it’s being asked alongside fundamental questions about the resilience of liberal democracy itself.

It’s a question Canada, too, has been staring down for months. What does the future look like if our closest ally and trading partner is no longer even a friend? How to we secure our sovereignty in the middle of an economic war?

Now is the moment for tough retaliation against tariffs with a serious national discussion about ways that we can strengthen our economy, deepen our other alliances, and take charge of our own security future.

Or at least, that’s what Canadians have a right to expect.

But instead, we’re seeing the usual actors use this crisis to push a longstanding agenda of deregulation, corporate tax cuts, and slashing public spending.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has made it abundantly clear that if elected, he will gut health programs like dental care, pharmacare, and cut housing funds while rolling back a proposed capital gains tax increase that would impact the richest 0.13% of Canadians.

It’s no surprise that he wants to fight on the political terrain of government spending, an area of strength for his party. Yet Prime Minister Mark Carney has taken the bait and framed his economic plans around cutting future government spending, capping the public service, and balancing the operating budget within three years. His proposals so far are long on accounting changes and short on specifics about what would be on the chopping block.

Carney didn’t miss a beat in endorsing Poilievre’s plan to roll back the Liberal government’s modest capital gains tax increase – the same one that just eight months ago then-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told us was essential to tackle inequality that could threaten Canadian democracy itself.

Bay Street might love this debate, but Canada can’t expect to fight an economic war on the cheap. Our federal government needs to be smart about spending, but it’s irresponsible to set up working people to pay the price for an arbitrary timeline to balance the budget in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that demands more, not less, public investment in our common future.

History shows that you can’t cut your way to prosperity. The gutting of program spending delivered by Liberal governments in the 1990s balanced the books but are felt to this day in the erosion of Canada’s health care, skyrocketing housing costs and weak social services that have made life harder and more expensive for working people. In contrast, the most successful economic recoveries in Canadian history, like Canada’s strong rebound after the Covid pandemic, have relied on public investment, not spending reductions.

There are no atheists in a foxhole – and increasingly, no dogmatic fiscal conservatives in one, either. In Germany, a country where fiscal restraint is part of the political DNA, the very first thing that the newly elected centre-right Christian Democrat Chancellor agreed to with their coalition partner Social Democrats is to set aside Germany’s legal debt limits in order to make historic public investments in infrastructure and defence.

They understand that in times of crisis, governments must step up—not step back.

For Canada, stepping up would mean pairing an unrelenting resistance to Trump’s economic attacks with an immediate plan to directly support the Canadian workers caught in the cross-fire. It means investing in technology and infrastructure to support good jobs and build communities, with Canadian steel and aluminum. It means taking on corporate price gouging, not rewarding it with across-the-board tax breaks. And it means rejecting the false choice between economic growth and social investment, because both economic and democratic strength require making life more affordable for working people.

Canada should also look across the Atlantic for a glimpse of a realistic and serious conversation about defence. In Europe, there’s a growing recognition that security decisions that were once a matter for NATO alone are now a matter for Europe and its allies, without the United States. Canada needs to be part of this realignment—not just to defend our democratic allies in Europe against Russian aggression, but to shore up alliances that are now essential for our own national security. A leisurely stroll to meeting NATO’s 2% target is no longer realistic, or in our interest, when we are dependent on an unstable neighbour for so much of our security. 

In this moment of crisis, stepping back into old patterns isn’t an option. Canada needs to rise to the challenge, not with austerity and corporate giveaways, but by doubling down on support for working people and investments to strengthen our economy for the long term. We can work with our European allies who are facing similar challenges on trade, security, and the defence of democracy. And in doing so, we can protect one of Canada’s most important and most finite resources – people’s faith that our democratic system can deliver the help they need.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jordan Leichnitz - Jordan Leichnitz is an Ottawa-based consultant with two decades of experience in progressive political strategy and campaigns at the federal, provincial and municipal level. She spent ten years on Parliament Hill working in senior strategy positions for four Leaders of the New Democratic Party of Canada, including serving as Deputy Chief of Staff, overseeing policy development and handling issues management for the parliamentary caucus. Since 2020, Jordan has served as the Canada Program Manager for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German political foundation. Jordan holds a Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Ottawa, and lives in Ottawa with her partner and two young children.

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