The Line‘s editors gathered up the first day’s worth of Donald Trump II – The Trumpening and sifted out the bits particularly relevant to the dysfunctional Dominion to the north:

Donald Trump successfully trolled Canada’s hypersensitive political class about Canada becoming the 51st state of the union. The anguished butthurt still pains them.

What is happening right now was absolutely foreseeable. No one can claim with a straight face that U.S. tariffs could not have been foreseen on January 21, 2025, a full eight years to the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time. It’s not 2016, anymore. Nobody was blindsided.

Your Line editors wrote plenty of columns over the past decade noting that even if Donald Trump the man were not re-elected, the protectionist and reactionary currents that pushed him to power were still ascendant in America. The Biden admin was a reprieve, an opportunity for Canada to make necessary internal changes to withstand those currents.

And what did this country do with that time?

Jack all.

We at The Line have been scratching our noggins trying to think of single meaningful Canadian reform or improvement to come out of Trump 1. We did nothing to strengthen ourselves internally by an iota. Not a single lesson was learned.

It’s entirely possible that we were inevitably going to be dinged by some U.S. administration and, perhaps, this was not avoidable. No one can fully mitigate all risks. Granted.

But we can certainly do literally anything to address risks that are highly probable. Instead, we have absolutely degraded both our moral and financial capacity to be resilient in the face of economic threats; and that degradation is the direct result of almost ten years of Liberal party priorities, inactions, or choices ranging on files from crime, to market diversification, to being truly useful to our international allies, to failures on interprovincial trade.

This wasn’t unforeseen. We were willfully blind. That’s different.

We ignored the looming threat in part because our government was distracted by COVID. But also also because Canada’s political culture is too immature to make hard decisions, or to have real debates about trade offs or priorities.

Justin Trudeau is the kind of prime minister who would rather run the kind of country that lets him spout off on Jake Tapper about compassion and $10-day-day daycare and dental programs than NATO spending.

What about the scads of taxpayer cash we’ve squandered on things like “superclusters”? What if we had prioritized strategically crucial projects like Northern Gateway or Energy East, instead of letting them die under the mantra of: “no business case”.

Remember when Germany and Japan came asking after our natural gas supplies in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? What if we had spent oh, say, $13 billion, on fast tracking some kind of natural gas facility to supply our international allies because doing so served a strategic national interest rather than a pure economic one.

We didn’t pull that number from the air, by the way: that’s what Canada subsequently committed to subsidies for EV plants in southern Ontario — something for which there was a scant “business case” before, and virtually none now that Trump has decided to scrap EV subsidies. It’s looking not-great, Bob. Not great at all.

See, that’s the problem with running a low-productivity, highly centralized griftocracy that is more invested in expanding entitlements, symbolic action and emotional gratification than actually doing anything. We are now severely limited in our capacity to respond in the face of serious economic threats. We can talk a good game. We can bluster. We can invest in more symbolic retaliatory action; but we have utterly squandered the internal resilience required to mount a real fight in even a trade war, much less a kinetic one.

And we at The Line can’t help but note the deafening silence from our international allies as well. They think we’ve got it coming, too. Perhaps there’s “no business case” for sticking their necks out on our behalf.

The first time a big new battery plant was subsidized, I thought it was a bad idea. Then it happened again and again. This is exactly why you don’t want your government at any level “picking winners”! Ross McKitrick had a series of tweets discussing this and other noteworthy executive orders issued (thread on Threadreader, but that may not be available for long):

Everyone is focused on the US withdrawal from Paris and the tariff threat, but several other Executive Orders yesterday will have even more radical impacts and will require Canada to rethink all our energy and climate policies in response. /…

Unleashing American Energy – The White House
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-american-energy/

Eliminates the EV mandate. Poof. Canada spent $50b + in subsidies to build unwanted products for a market that just vanished. Unbelievable stupidity on the part of Trudeau, Ford and our other moron leaders.

Hits the jets on project approvals: All agency heads “shall undertake all available efforts to eliminate all delays within their respective permitting processes, including through, but not limited to, the use of general permitting and permit by rule. For any project an agency head deems essential for the Nation’s economy or national security, agencies shall use all possible authorities, including emergency authorities, to expedite the adjudication of Federal permits.” 180 degree opposite to what’s happening in Canada. But the biggest moves are yet to come.

“ensure that the global effects of a rule, regulation, or action shall, whenever evaluated, be reported separately from its domestic costs and benefits, in order to promote sound regulatory decision making and prioritize the interests of the American people;” That wipes out the basis of using global climate change in US rulemaking. They did that previously under Trump 1.0 but Biden had reversed it.

Directs agencies “to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, and to promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries;”. At last a government that sees through the bad economics of so-called energy efficiency regulations. Once they start pulling on this thread a lot of rules will fall apart and consumer prices will fall as a result.

“The Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (IWG), which was established pursuant to Executive Order 13990, is hereby disbanded, and any guidance, instruction, recommendation, or document issued by the IWG is withdrawn” The IWG was relied on not just by the Biden Admin but by Canada and other governments to justify GHG regulations.

Gives the EPA 60 days to address the fact that the Social Cost of Carbon is “marked by logical deficiencies, a poor basis in empirical science, politicization, and the absence of a foundation in legislation.” The EPA must assess repealing all its uses.

Within 30 days submit recommendations regarding repeal of the 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding, which forms the legal basis for all EPA greenhouse gas regulation authority. If this happens they zero out all climate regs.

Rescinds all Green New Deal-type spending and forbids agencies from using climate change considerations in future decision-making. But there’s more yet.

Declaring a National Energy Emergency – The White House
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/declaring-a-national-energy-emergency/

Declares an Energy Emergency and gives all agency heads emergency authorization to override regulatory limits on “identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining, and generation of domestic energy resources, including, but not limited to, on Federal lands.”

“agencies shall identify and use all relevant lawful emergency and other authorities available to them to expedite the completion of all authorized and appropriated infrastructure, energy, environmental, and natural resources projects that are within the identified authority of each of the Secretaries to perform or to advance.”

Putting America First In International Environmental Agreements – The White House
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/putting-america-first-in-international-environmental-agreements/

Not only withdraws from the 2012 Paris Treaty but “from any agreement, pact, accord, or similar commitment made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” This means they are now out of all global climate agreements made since 1992.

Also they have pulled out of any and all international funding commitments made at past COPs. Since most of the recent COPs have been focused on financing handouts to 3rd World countries this means all of them are now null and void.

Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential – The White House
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-alaskas-extraordinary-resource-potential/

All agency heads directed to “prioritize the development of Alaska’s liquified natural gas (LNG) potential, including the sale and transportation of Alaskan LNG to other regions of the United States and allied nations within the Pacific region.” Yet again Canada’s failure to develop LNG export capability leaves us behind.

Taken together these Executive Orders are remarkably detailed and fine-tuned to wipe out all forms of climate regulation and other barriers to US hydrocarbon energy development (including coal). They not only prescribe agency actions but simultaneously undercut the basis of future legal challenges.

The US is positioning itself for a domestic energy boom. This could be a benefit for Canada if we deal with the fentanyl problem, border security and defence spending, thereby heading off the tariff threat. And then emulate the US actions and unleash our own energy sector.

Our current federal and provincial governments may want to pretend this isn’t happening but it just did. We already have trouble attracting foreign investment and the competitiveness gap just opened very very wide. I have no confidence any of the Liberal leadership contenders (especially Carney) are capable of dealing with the situation we now face. …/