Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis to discuss his latest column, Diplomatic Decorum & Canadian Defiance: Carney & Ford’s Tag-Team vs Trump, which analyzes Trump’s renewed 51st state threat amid Canada’s recession. I contrast Carney’s soft diplomatic approach with Doug Ford’s combative stance, commend Poilievre’s domestic focus, and warn that Canadian boycotts harm border economies like Windsor and Niagara.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: Jon Liedtke is here — a great voice and a storyteller on the show today. Good morning, Jon. How are you?
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene. Doing great. How about you?
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, good. Okay, we talked about this story yesterday, and you and I were talking about things on the telephone yesterday. You’ve got a pretty good take on everything.
So anyway, what we’re talking about is Donald Trump just revived his threat about making Canada the 51st state right after news broke that Canada is now in a recession. But this X poster’s starting to drive me crazy — actually shared and defended the comment.
Also late-breaking yesterday, reporters buttonholed the ambassador, and he said, “You know, it was the ultimate cop-out.” He goes, “Oh, well, my staff just automatically does that. Not my job, man. Don’t blame me.” Take some responsibility. What do you make of all of this?
Jon Liedtke: You know, Gene, I think we all need to stop collectively clutching pearls about decorum right now. I know that he’s a diplomat and things are supposed to be better than what he’s doing, but look — before modern democracy, political disputes were settled with broadswords and shields.
The Trump administration, right down to these ambassador lackeys, are practically begging for a return to the dark ages. But does this mean diplomatic decorum is dead? I don’t know.
Nationally, we’re gonna keep pretending it’s on life support here because we’re Canadians and we’ve got a pathological addiction to over-politeness and a smug moral superiority that’s baked into us. But we gotta be clear about it: we didn’t break it — Washington did.
They torched and burned the most successful, lucrative bilateral partnership that’s ever been seen in human history. It took generations of trust-building to construct our dynamic — our relatively open, non-militarized border — and Trump managed to smash that from hundreds of years of building it up in five years flat. It won’t be built back overnight. We’re looking at a minimum, I would say, of three generations — seventy-five years — to repair this. The rot is baked into the system now.
Gene Valaitis: So our Prime Minister kinda shrugged this off by saying, “Well, Trump is an exceptionally active social media user.” Yeah, well, hi everybody. And he just right off the bat rejected any calls to expel the ambassador.
So is the Prime Minister playing this too soft, or is he a bit of a sucky baby?
Jon Liedtke: Carney is playing, I would say, a really sophisticated game of softball. He’s not gonna do things hard — he’s going to do things soft and diplomatic, but we gotta look under the hood. This is how we sort of do things up here.
When he dismisses annexation threats as the ramblings of social media users, that is the ultimate display of dry smugness that Canadians have built into us. It’s polite, it’s not rude — unless you know what he’s actually saying. It’s a masterclass in linguistic gymnastics to sidestep what’s actually been done.
We expect Trump to troll. We shouldn’t expect the ambassador to join in the circus. His job is to actually be the diplomat. So I think Carney’s cold, calculated, pragmatic response shows exactly that it’s about the economic line, and by refusing to hand the ambassador his walking papers, he’s sidestepping the game that Trump would want to play.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, a diplomat who doesn’t know how to be diplomatic. But it was interesting though — Premier Doug Ford directly fired back during question period right before Queen’s Park went on a twenty-one week summer vacation, stating, “Canada will never be the 51st state, and Canada isn’t for sale.”
So my question is, who has the better political strategy here: Carney or Dougie Ford?
Jon Liedtke: So we’ve got Doug Ford swinging a rusted iron pipe versus Mark Carney playing the game of softball right now. But I don’t think it’s either/or. One won’t work without the other. This is political good cop, bad cop on a national scale.
But we gotta be honest: the U.S. holds all of the cards and they know it. So we’re dealing with a bully who has the royal flush. We have to play a wild card. Doug Ford, our own self-proclaimed 800-pound gorilla.
Will performative fury actually save our economy from targeted tariffs? I have my doubts. Time will tell. But we’re in a street fight, and we need a loud-mouthed scrapper making a scene out front while the quiet technocrat is gonna go into the back room and figure out how to keep the power on.
Gene Valaitis: Well, Pierre Poilievre, who by the way I think is just hitting it out of the park in question period this week, he said Trump’s comments were ridiculous, but he can’t be distracted from domestic policies — the price of food and of course the fact that we’re in a recession now.
Jon Liedtke: From a purely tactical and political standpoint, Poilievre’s pivot is really smart politics. He’s walking such a tightrope here. If he obsesses over Trump, he’s gonna lose across the entire board.
By shifting the spotlight back to the domestic dumpster fire of the economy — that we’re in a recession, full stop — he’s doing the smart politics play. The GDP has been shrinking, families are having a hard time buying groceries. So bring the conversation back to these self-inflicted economic wounds. That’s the only play they’ve got.
Gene Valaitis: Our Trade Minister, Dominique LeBlanc, was in Ottawa… he’s officially sending a letter calling for a 16-year renewal of the free trade pact. I just wonder how much of this Washington trolling is calculated strategy to put us over the barrel before the CUSMA review even begins?
Jon Liedtke: The entire Trump administration exists only to troll. It’s government by grievance… government by trolling. Trump gets better than anyone else that all business, even politics, is show business.
So he puts on the massive spectacle, the administration falls in line. But no one should make the mistake — the brutal, career-ending deals are quietly made behind closed doors when the cameras are distracting us from the main stage.
The real danger is when everyone starts to mistake the theater for the actual policy.
Gene Valaitis: You know, if you take a look at these statistics — Canadians not going into the U.S. and boycotting a lot of American products, no American spirits, wines in the LCBO… When Trump does something like this, how heavily is this organic consumer boycott going to hit border economies like Niagara Falls, New York, and other places right across from Canada?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, this is the risk, right? When we have a wave of performative patriotism driving Canadians to cancel their Florida vacations or target U.S. consumer goods, the immediate economic blowback lands squarely on our doorsteps — and I mean that literally in Niagara and here in Windsor where I’m based.
Any drop in cross-border tourism or commerce harms our communities first, fastest, and hardest. But the irony is, because we bear the brunt of this crossfire the most, and because our regions possess a historically militant, union-dense DNA, it’s our local workers that are far more likely to cheer on the Doug Ford iron-rod mouth rather than Carney’s quiet approach. Our people want fighters.
Gene Valaitis: Given Niagara’s wine tourism, agriculture… what should our local businesses and municipal leaders be doing right now to shield themselves from this political border crossfire?
Jon Liedtke: We need to stop waiting for a savior from Queen’s Park or from Ottawa. They’re not coming for us. What we need to do is formally weaponize the Windsor-Niagara economic corridor. We have to aggressively pivot.
We need to figure out our own market sovereignty and promote our own domestic commerce and Canadian travel directly along the route from Windsor up to Niagara. We can’t operate as isolated economic silos anymore.
We’ve got great greenhouses, heavy auto engineering, automation, an emerging culinary scene, wineries… You guys have world-class wine tourism. We need to put together our municipal and regional councils across both regions, form a joint emergency committee, pool our economic development funds, coordinate our supply chains, launch major aggressive domestic advertising campaigns…
Why are we focusing on trying to bring people in from Europe or Australia or even disaffected Americans? Why not just bring some Canadians in?
Gene Valaitis: Good idea. Hey, one final point — I’m just about out of time. Trump still won’t allow the Gordie Howe Bridge to open. I mean, how long is this gonna drag on, man? Canada paid for everything.
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, this is one of the most frustrating parts of it all… We can look across the border and see the very issues, but in Windsor we can see the bridge that’s worth multi-billions of dollars that still isn’t turned on.
Gene Valaitis: Great take this morning, Jon. Appreciate you, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Jon Liedtke: Looking forward to it.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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