Michael de Adder is a Canadian freelance editorial cartoonist who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
His cartoons, while humorous, sarcastic and satirical, also encapsulate in a single drawing the central kernel of any political or social situation.
Over the years he has taken on very controversial topics and everything else in between from local politics to international issues. By turns, he exposes the foolishness, cruelty and stupidity of the central players in the often opportunistically generated predations that they impose on others.
At one point, he was terminated by a media outlet for his anti-Trump cartoons; this particular outlet had connections to U.S. interests that apparently tried to stop the spread of his criticisms.
Yesterday marked Justin Trudeau’s last day as Prime Minister of Canada.
I wasn’t always onboard with him and during the last several years, often found him frustrating and less than helpful as our country’s leader. But over the most recent two months since he announced his resignation, I’ve come to see something in him that I hadn’t particularly noticed before.
And that’s that he does well in a crisis. When he’s backed into a corner, he comes out fighting, he makes good choices and he doesn’t back down. I think that it’s during those times that he has done the best for us.
At other times, particularly in dealing with the more ordinary, mundane work of government – in other words, the times that take most of the time – he always dithered and slithered; he couldn’t seem to focus, couldn’t seem to stay on point. He often seemed to be flummoxed.
Important campaign promises disappeared, ethical questions started appearing more and more frequently, and his responses and answers to these issues were very unsatisfactory, meaningless word salads.
He wound up doing many of the same things for which he had so vociferously criticised his predecessor, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and his “sunny ways” were displaced by an extremely micromanaged and divisive governing style. Over his nine-year tenure, there was a lot for which he could – and should – be castigated.
Nevertheless, in the last two months he has done a better job for us than he had done for much of his entire tenure. He toiled away for Canada right up to the last moment, working with the premiers and international leaders, dishing it out to Trump and taking it on the chin when necessary. And yesterday he bowed out with grace and aplomb, with his poised and well-spoken sixteen-year-old daughter introducing his farewell speech and talking about how she is going to be happy to have her dad back.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and history will have its say as to how well he did, and as it is for most former leaders, I think we will be more able to see – and accept – his strengths and weaknesses.
But now it’s time to send him on his way, with our thanks and good wishes. We hope he finds success in his future endeavours.
I’m sorry to post this, but if you haven’t heard it yet, please listen and then pass it on. This morning, Prime Minister Trudeau directly addressed the American people and Mr. Trump regarding the imposition of tariffs. Here is the short version:
Here is the complete version.
This trade war will gravely and hugely affect both Americans and Canadians alike. No one will win.
In light of the disastrous meeting between President Zelenskyy and President Trump, where both Trump and Vice-President Vance decided that Zelenskyy wasn’t doing his best Oliver Twist imitation and began slinging vitriol at the victim while supporting the aggressor, I think it’s salient to pass on the following opinion piece from Andrew Coyne. This was originally published by the Globe and Mail on February 28, 2025. Many thanks for this idea from Jane at https://robbyrobinsjourney.wordpress.com
Brace yourselves: whatever crazy, awful things Trump may have done to date, it’s only going to get worse
by ANDREW COYNE
Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been. That bit of trite wisdom, attributed to Wayne Gretzky, might usefully be applied in assessing the risks posed by Mr. Gretzky’s political idol, Donald Trump.
Every time we think we have taken the measure of Mr. Trump, every time we think we have understood the depths of his depravity, the absoluteness of his nullity, the scale of the threat he represents – to American democracy, to Canada, to the peace of the world – he defeats us. He does or says something far worse than we had ever thought possible, even of him.
We need to learn from this, fast. Because Mr. Trump is metastasizing, mutating, rapidly worsening. He is on a kind of exponential spiral, his behaviour approaching levels of madness and mayhem that had never previously been imagined, let alone seen.
Our expectations of him are forever playing catchup to the reality. Which means we are forever calibrating our responses, not to where Mr. Trump is going, but to where he has been. That way lies disaster.
We need to understand that however awful Mr. Trump’s behaviour may have been until now – however callous, dictatorial, insane or dangerous, and however it may seem to have defined the limits of what is possible in each regard – it is only going to get worse, and at a rate that will itself defy all expectations.
Consider Mr. Trump’s performance in just the month or so since he took office. Did even the most alarmist of Mr. Trump’s critics anticipate he would not just undercut Ukraine in its struggle for survival against the Russian invaders, but take the Russian side in every material respect – assigning blame for the invasion not to Russia, but to Ukraine; cutting Ukraine out of the negotiations on its fate, while ruling out NATO membership and the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity in advance; voting with Russia against a UN resolution denouncing the invasion; and demanding Ukraine pay the United States half a trillion dollars in reparations for the offence of having resisted its own annihilation (and decimating the Russian war machine in the process), a figure that is many times the actual amount of American aid it has received?
Did anyone imagine he would not just make similarly extortionary demands of his NATO partners in return for the United States’ “protection,” but effectively signal that no such protection would be provided, should Russia expand its attacks on Europe beyond the multifaceted hybrid-warfare campaign in which it is already engaged? Did even Mr. Trump’s supporters anticipate that he would also telegraph, in the space of the same few fevered days, that he would abandon Taiwan?
Or, closer to home, did anyone imagine that the original Trump threat to Canada – that we would be included in his proposed global tariff of 10 to 20 per cent, notwithstanding our joint membership in a continental free trade area – would suddenly swell into a special 25-per-cent tariff applicable only to ourselves and Mexico, and then into a campaign to forcibly annex the country? Was, likewise, the invasion and seizure of Greenland, or the Panama Canal, ever envisaged?
Did anyone predict, when the pseudo-official Department of Government Efficiency was first announced, what it would become, scant weeks later: a wrecking ball of dubious legal authority, consisting of Elon Musk and his 20-something acolytes, roaming the halls of various government departments firing officials at random and hacking into government payment websites to prevent duly authorized expenditures from being released?
No doubt it was expected that Mr. Trump would pardon some of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. But was it ever suggested he would pardon all of them, 1,500 at one go, no matter how severe their crimes – or that he would harass, prosecute or dismiss the law enforcement officials who brought them to justice?
All of this, as I say, is just in thr last few weeks. Mr. Trump’s ambitions have grown materially wilder in that time, his actions more senseless, his rhetoric more extreme – he has lately taken to quoting Napoleon on the virtues of executive lawlessness and referring to himself as “the King” – than even in the weeks before then, in the demented interval between his election and his inauguration.
Image courtesy of Craiyon
That was the period, recall, when he made a series of nominations for senior government posts that could only be described as perverse. It was as if he had deliberately selected the worst conceivable person for each position, the person most directly hostile to the mandate of the organizations they were nominated to lead. Thus Matt Gaetz, accused of statutory rape, was nominated to fill the job of Attorney-General; the alcoholic weekend television host and civil war prophet Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual abuse, was nominated to Defence; the paranoid conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine crusader Robert Kennedy Jr. to Health and Human Services; the Putin apologist and suspected Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence; the lunatic Kash Patel as director of the FBI.
None of these were suspected, even through the long months that preceded the election, when Mr. Trump campaigned on an increasingly explicit appeal to fascism, while violating one norm after another – questioning his opponent’s racial identity, fabricating stories about immigrants eating pets and promising to round up and imprison 12 million immigrants in camps, prior to deportation.
Mr. Trump’s conduct in that campaign exceeded anything he had said or done since his attempt to overturn the results of the previous election in January, 2021, which was itself far worse than anything he had done in the four long years of escalating insanity that marked his first term in office, which exceeded by a wide margin even the most fearful projections that had preceded it.
The pattern is unmistakable. Mr. Trump’s actions, his statements, his very state of mind, have been growing worse over many years, and not steadily, but at an ever accelerating pace. This is, I suggest, not accidental. It is a function of his malignant narcissism, a narcissism that requires constant demonstrations of his power to dominate others, or at least to outrage them, or at any rate to hold their attention.
But as behaviour that was previously unthinkable comes to be expected, so it becomes harder and harder to sustain the same level of outrage; and as even a constant level of outrage starts to lose its psychological potency – as any drug will, if taken often enough – so Mr. Trump has been forced to increase the dosage of his self-administered narcotic of transgression. The self-destructive lunacy, and the resulting chaos, that would previously have satisfied him is no longer sufficient. He must take things to the next level, and the next, still crazier than the one before – crazier than he has ever previously done, crazier than anyone expects, crazier than anyone could expect.
If you think things are bad now, then, brace yourself: it is about to get a whole lot worse. If you are alarmed at the speed with which the Trump administration has set about dismantling every institution of American government and every pillar of the international order, you must understand that this is not just the initial burst of activity, the “shock and awe” phase after which things will settle down: if anything, the pace will continue to accelerate.
It cannot be otherwise. It is dictated not only by Mr. Trump’s insatiable psychological cravings, but by the ambitions and objectives of the fanatical ideologues and criminal opportunists with which he has surrounded himself: for where the destruction of everything that surrounds him is for Mr. Trump an end in itself, for Mr. Musk and his followers they offer the chance to rebuild a techno-fascist utopia out of the rubble, or at any rate to make off with as much as they can, while they can.
This rather alters the stakes, and the resulting challenge: of comprehension, let alone formulating an effective response. We have not just to understand what Mr. Trump and his team are up to now, but what they are capable of in future. That would be difficult enough in a normal, linear progression. But on the exponential curve on which Mr. Trump is now launched, it almost defies the imagination.
Take everything, then, that Mr. Trump has done in the last few weeks, and how much of an escalation this represents over his performance in the previous months or years. Now project that same rate of change forward over the next few weeks, or months or years: to Mr. Trump’s still nascent efforts to weaponize the justice system against his opponents, for example, or to seize the power of the purse from Congress; to his readiness to defy the courts, to suppress dissent at home and stamp his rule on other countries, and generally sow chaos.
Now apply the same rate of change to the rate of change. That is what we are really up against, and while it is almost impossible to plan on that basis, if we are not at least making the attempt we have not begun to appreciate the true dimensions of the threat that confronts us.
I don’t say for one minute that Mr. Trump will succeed in any of these ambitions. Indeed, it is far more likely that his administration will spin out of control and collapse, overwhelmed by its own internal divisions, by popular opposition and by the multiple cyclones of havoc it has heedlessly set in motion. But that presents challenges of its own.
The world has never before been faced with such a threat. The United States has handed the nuclear codes to a madman, a criminal, a would-be dictator and a moron, all in the same person. Whatever the purpose to which he directs these powers – to impress his dictator friends, to further enrich himself and his cronies, to seize absolute power or just to watch the world burn – we must hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
Here is an important post from Jane Fritz at Robby Robin’s Journey. She has reprinted an opinion piece from Andrew Coyne, a columnist for the Globe and Mail. Please click the link above to read the post in its entirety.
The saying “may you live in interesting times” is playing out not only on our collective Canadian doorstep but inside our homes and lives in the most intimate ways, unfortunately. The “interesting times” I’m referring to are, of course, the continuing verbal and threatened financial and annexation attacks against us from our southern neighbour and its leader, Donald Trump.
So here I am again, less than a month later writing about the political developments that have occurred to the south of us over the last few days; I first wrote of this situation here.
Since November, 2024, we have had to listen to falsehood after egregious falsehood cascade from Mr Trump in a constant torrent. Here are some of the more appalling ones, with direct statements from Trump in quotation marks followed by my factual rebuttals.
Falsehood: “The fentanyl coming from Canada is massive.” Reality: in 2024, 19.5 kg (43 lbs) of fentanyl coming from Canada was seized by U.S. border control. In the meantime, 9500 kg (21,100 lbs) was intercepted coming from Mexico.
Falsehood: “Stop the invasion!” Reality: in 2024, 198,929 people who were attempting to cross illegally from Canada to the U.S. were detained by American border officials. Meanwhile, 2.4 million people crossed illegally from Mexico.
Falsehood: “The U.S. is subsidising Canada to the tune of $100 billion” [as time has gone on, Mr Trump has changed this number to $200 billion, $250 billion and $300 billion. As far as I can tell, he just makes up a number and says it]. Fact: the trade deficit is 45 billion, caused by oil and gas shipments to the U.S. as part of the CUSMA free trade agreement that Mr Trump himself insisted on, orchestrated and then proclaimed at the time of signing in 2018 as “a truly extraordinary agreement for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.”
Given that the U.S. carries much larger deficits with a number of other countries, this complaint seems to be another of Mr Trump’s red herrings. Furthermore, and I can’t emphasise this enough, the U.S. is NOT subsidising Canada. In order to push his agenda, Mr Trump deliberately ignores the meaning of the word subsidy, which is a grant or gift of money. A trade deficit is not a subsidy.
Falsehood: “Canada doesn’t even allow U.S. Banks to open or do business there. What’s that all about?” Fact: American banks have been operating in Canada for many years. Citibank, Amexbank and J.P. Morgan Bank are all examples. These banks are required to operate under Canadian banking rules, a system that protected Canadian banks during the 2008-09 financial crisis when 166 American banks failed.
Falsehood: “Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st state.” Fact: Nothing could be further from the truth. Poll after poll shows that Canadians overwhelmingly want their sovereignty.
Falsehood: “If they become the 51st state, the tariffs go away.” Fact: This comment is not only reprehensible blackmail but is also senseless. That nugget may be coming out of Mr Trump’s mouth and showing up in writing, but he would never allow it, even if it were something we would accept. No, his intent, if he can, is to turn us into a voiceless, spineless colony, fit only for what we – and our resources – can do for him and his wealthy cronies. Mr Trump is known for his vengefulness, and he would surely punish us as much as possible.
But in this muddle of Mr Trump’s deceitful pomposity is a bigger worry, and that’s the lies we are telling ourselves. Unlike Trump’s, however, ours are lies of denial, of shock, of fear. 51st state? That’s just a joke. It’s in bad taste, but it’s a joke. The border and tariffs? He’s not serious. It’s just bluster. It’s a negotiating tactic. He’s not going to do tariffs, for sure. He would hurt his own people too much. Besides, we know how to do this. We handled him last time. We got this.
The truth is that we need to grow up and recognise Trump’s behaviour for what it is. This time he’s a very different animal. He’s experienced. He has been planning for four years and has for the most part installed in government a bunch of stooges whose only qualification is unwavering loyalty and an ability to do whatever they’re told; certainly thinking is not a requirement. This time, he has a very definite if peculiar agenda. That’s why he’s repeatedly telling these falsehoods. Say something enough and those around you will start to believe it just through sheer repetition. And through this behaviour he will also create lots of support for whatever action he decides to take against us.
I have heard it said in some quarters that Mr Trump’s tariffs against us – and likely Mexico as well – are enclosed inside a Trojan Horse, and I agree. All of the bombast around how we have to fix the border – we have now spent more than a billion dollars on appeasing him over these so-called issues and there will be more – or face tariffs, is, as I have suspected from the beginning, nothing but a distraction from his real purpose. To me, his clear agenda has always been to try to cripple our economy, to break us, to force us to dance to his tune. To play the puppet master and take enjoyment from our discomfort and fear. To generate lots of breathless attention on his leadership prowess.
To put it bluntly, Mr Trump is likely going to try to force us to our knees by economically corralling us into some sort of terrified acceptance of him as our “leader.”
In the 11th hour, Mr Trump, continuing to enjoy his role as puppet master, paused the tariffs. There was a collective sigh of relief all over the country, but I could also hear the whining and complacency returning: can’t we go back to normal? I just want things the way they were. But there’s another saying that we need to remember: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
We have been explicitly warned. There are certain things we have that Mr Trump wants, and and he will continue to try to get them. So whether or not we have to deal with tariffs, it’s incumbent on us to insist that our elected officials take appropriate actions to protect us from ever having to experience this again.
In other words, it’s high time that we go our own way, disentangling ourselves from the U.S, taking down interprovincial trade barriers, expanding our markets, buying local, and never, never making a so-called free trade agreement with the U.S. ever again.
Remember all those falsehoods I listed? Does any one of us really think that there won’t be more? Lots more? And that like the so-called border problems, they will all have moving targets at their core that depend on Mr Trump’s puppet master whims or whatever deceitful and/or bizarre pronouncements that fall out of his mouth? Let’s not forget, even though Mr Trump constantly presents himself as some sort of genius businessman who thinks “outside the box” he’s probably the only business owner on the face of the planet who has gone bankrupt operating a casino.
And additionally, when we see the underlings such as Howard Lutnick, Mr Trump’s choice for head of the commerce department, who during a press conference shouted that we Canadians need to “respect” the United States, we know without a doubt that we are truly finished with any sort of nation-to-nation relationship.
Many of us have friends and family in the U.S. and those personal relationships shouldn’t change, but as a national entity, the United States is no longer an ally, friend or even an acquaintance. For all practical intents and purposes, we’re adversaries, and should common sense prevail causing Mr Trump to withdraw the financial losses he plans to inflict on us and his own citizens, going forward we should be extremely dubious of any kind of trade agreement. And respect? That’s earned, not bestowed.
For the most part, we Canadians are easy-going, live-and-let-live people, probably too much so. But threaten our sovereignty and we will get our backs up. In short, Mr Trump has mistaken our kindness for weakness, thereby exposing what he really thinks of us. Not all relationships, even exceptional ones, have an indefinite shelf life, and it’s clear to me that that is what has now transpired. When you declare economic war on your so-called “best friend and ally,” then it’s time to move on.
This isn’t at all a political blog and I’ve certainly never wanted it to be controversial, either, but in light of recent developments around the possibility of being “economically forced” into becoming “the 51st state,” I feel that I have to stand up for my country. I know that many Americans do not agree with president-elect Trump’s pronouncements about annexing Canada; nevertheless, here we are. Such a threat requires a response.
First of all, we Canadians are not grateful for the “offer” of statehood as a number of U.S. politicians, pundits, show hosts and various others have said that we should be. We are, in fact, very insulted by the notion, just as Americans would be if another country decided that they should be forced into some sort of unwanted union.
To support this view, Mr. Trump has asserted on his social media platform that “many people in Canada LOVE [Trump’s emphasis] being the 51st state” worded as if we had already joined the U.S. That is simply and factually very inaccurate. The vast majority of Canadians like, value and want our independence, sovereignty, and self-determination.
Supposedly, the U.S. is “subsidising” Canada through an “unfair” trade imbalance and if we want to continue this position, we should become a state. Again, this is factually inaccurate. The trade balances completely once our oil and gas shipments are taken into account, which Mr. Trump is neglecting to include. It’s particularly worth noting that Mr. Trump specifically signed off on this trade agreement during his last tenure.
The U.S. is categorically not “subsidising” Canada. And that extends to our military, as well. There are no U.S. troops stationed on Canadian soil in order to defend us. We are more than capable of defending ourselves, and we do have that history.
There seems to be some astonishment that we don’t want this “union.” The people who feel that way should stop to consider. We are a sovereign, independent nation with a long history of doing things our way and of defending our right to do things our way. We like and want that. Internally, we may disagree; we may argue and face division. But in the end we have a precious commodity: our right to disagree and argue and face division and through that process, to come around to our own path, a path that represents us, our culture and our values.
We are not perfect, and Mr Trump has flagged issues that he feels we need to address such as illegal border crossings. The U.S. is not perfect either, and we have issues such as the flow of illegal guns into our country. There is no reason why these issues can’t be solved cooperatively; why would there be a need for threats of annexation? Or is that the whole point?
Being forced into becoming a part of the U.S. fundamentally flies in the face of the American philosophy of self-determination. The fact that those who are advocating this approach are also failing to see this discrepancy is incredibly disturbing. Self-determination is okay as long as we do what the United States tells us to do? Or otherwise we’ll be forced?
Canada will never voluntarily join the U.S. With all due respect, we don’t want to be American. It’s that simple. And on that note, and since Mr. Trump was elected on a platform of addressing issues such as inflation and a number of other internal matters, I suggest that he turn his attention to those, and leave us to deal with ours.
In the past, we two nations have cooperated extremely well. One sobering example is 9/11. There were all those Americans on all those aircraft who were required to land here and were looked after as sisters and brothers in need who had been horribly attacked.
More recently, we are providing help to the state of California as it battles those terrible fires. The governor asked that we send our military firefighting units and they, as well as many civilian firefighters have either arrived or will be shortly.
These are the things you do for a good neighbour and we do them gladly. We shouldn’t lose sight of all this goodwill and respect, built up over generations, that our two nations have worked hard to achieve. It’s a precious thing that’s far easier to destroy than to build.
I enjoyed reading this piece from Barb Taub; she reminds us that kindness comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Please click the link above to read the rest of her post.
In Canada, today is a holiday. Officially, it’s Thanksgiving, but many people celebrate its spirit on Saturday, Sunday or today. It depends on how you want to arrange it and the availability of friends and family. I think that most people like to have the Monday to just be, though.
If that’s the case, it’s an excellent day for gentle walking and enjoyment of the autumn weather.
Wherever you are, I hope that you have had the opportunity to be together with friends, family, or to enjoy the weekend in whatever way suits you best.
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